♀Julia Adelia Lovellette

Julia Adelia Lovellette (12 March 1846 – 22 June 1908) was a woman of Coffee Precinct, Wabash County, Illinois, born into the French settler family of Rochester on the Wabash, who married George Marshall Legier and lived in Wabash County. She was a younger sister of Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898), the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

She was born at Rochester, Wabash County, on 12 March 1846, one of the ten children of Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866) and Julia Adele Laplante (1811–1861), and shared her mother’s first name. Her father’s family, the Tougas dit Laviolette of Vincennes, Indiana, had been among the first French families to settle near Rochester about 1800, and her brothers and sisters appear in the records as Lovellette, Lavanlette and Tougas. The census of 1850 finds the family in Wabash County, and that of 1860 at Mount Carmel. Her brother Hyacinth died in 1860, and her mother died in August 1861, when Julia was fifteen. Her father married again in 1864 and died in January 1866.

Marriage and family

On 18 December 1866, eleven months after her father’s death, she married George Marshall Legier (1835–1917), eleven years her senior. The couple made their home in Coffee Precinct: indexes of the censuses of 1870, 1880 and 1900 place her there, the 1870 index reading her as Adelia Legien. They had five children who are known by name: John T., Laura, Fred, Naomi Blanche and Angeline. The Mount Carmel Register reported that on 25 April 1899 Laura was married to James C. Stansfield, a salesman in his brother’s store at Mount Carmel, “at the residence of the bride’s parents, near Keensburg”, by the elder of the Mount Carmel Christian church.

Death

She died at Keensburg on 22 June 1908, aged 62. Four of her children and one sister survived her. A FamilySearch burial index places her burial at Rochester, and her parents were buried in the family burying ground near old Rochester. A compiled local-history article on the Historic Old Rochester Cemetery is headed “Lovellette/LeGier cemetery”. Her husband outlived her by nine years.

Notes

Her death

The Mount Carmel Register of Monday 22 June 1908, page 1, carried her obituary under the headline “Death of Good Woman”. The obituary names four surviving children, Dr. J. T. Legier of Carmi, Mrs. Laura Stansfield, Miss Naomi Blanche Legier and Fred Legier, and does not name Angeline among them. The obituary gives her middle name as Cordelia; the censuses of 1850 and 1860 call her Adelia and Adila.