♀Julia Adele Laplante

Julia Adele Laplante (15 May 1811 – 31 August 1861) was a woman of the French community of Vincennes, Indiana, who married into the Tougas dit Laviolette family and spent her married life across the Wabash River in Wabash County, Illinois. A biography written by one of her granddaughters records that at fourteen, in 1826, she worked a sampler at her convent school that was still kept, framed, by her youngest daughter. She was the third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898).

Early life

She was born at Vincennes on 15 May 1811 and baptized there on 3 September 1811, the daughter of Jean Baptiste La Plante and Mary Dorcus O’Connell/Colne(y), whose surname the Vincennes clerks wrote as Colne or Colla. She was the youngest of their children; her brothers Joseph Narcissus and Hyacinthe had been born at Vincennes in 1805 and 1808, and older children had been born before the family came to Vincennes from the River Raisin settlement near Detroit.

Her granddaughter’s biography, quoted in a family narrative, says that her father died when she was very young and that her brothers “were very devoted and gave her every advantage that was theirs to give.” She was educated at the convent of St. Claire, which the narrative notes was called St. Rose by 1904. The sampler she made there reads:

Mother of the light Take pity on the blind From error’s fatal night Free their deluded mind.

Marriage and family

She married Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866) on 4 January 1830 at St. Francis Xavier church in Vincennes, according to an index of the marriage that names her parents as Jean Baptist and Marie. Five months later, in the same church, her brother Hyacinthe married Marieanne Compagnotte; in 1837 Joseph Narcissus married Marieanne’s sister Marellite. The granddaughter’s account adds that her mother and brothers wanted her to marry another of her admirers, “but she married the man of her own choice.”

The couple settled in Wabash County, Illinois, near Rochester, where her husband’s family had been among the first French settlers. A family narrative describes him as a merchant at Mount Carmel, St. Francisville and Rochester, a farmer and a pork packer who owned boats that carried his goods down the rivers to New Orleans. The family were Catholic, and their first children were baptised across the river at Vincennes. The couple had ten children, born between 1830 and 1850; a daughter, Mildred, died in infancy, and a son, Hyacinth, who bore her brother’s name, died in 1860, the year before her, at eighteen or nineteen. The census of 1850 finds the family in Wabash County, and the census of 1860 finds it at Mount Carmel.

Death

The granddaughter’s biography records that she insisted on serving dinner to her grandchildren herself, and that at the meal “she was stricken with paralysis from which she never recovered.” She died on 31 August 1861, aged 50 according to her gravestone. The death is recorded at Mount Carmel, although the family narrative places it at her home near Rochester. She was carried to the Catholic church across the street from her home, where mass was said, and then buried in the family burying ground near old Rochester. A Find a Grave index gives the burial ground as the Le Gier-Lovellette Cemetery at Rochester.

Notes

The family narrative dates her marriage 4 February 1830 and places it at Rochester, Illinois; the index of the Vincennes church entry gives 4 January 1830 at St. Francis Xavier. The family record places her death at Mount Carmel, while the narrative places it at her home in Coffee Precinct, near Rochester. A death notice in the Weekly Vincennes Western Sun of 7 September 1861 places the death at Mount Carmel on the first of the month, that is 1 September, and gives her age as about fifty-one; the date kept here, 31 August, is the one Find a Grave gives.