♀Juliana Guerin

Juliana Guerin (18 July 1767 – 1840) was a woman of Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, whose paternal grandfather was a native of Provins in France and whose mother had a sister recorded as a native of Arkansas. She married Joseph Jason Joffrion in 1789 and had nine children, and two of her daughters married two Gremillon brothers on consecutive days in May 1811, and a third married another Gremillon ten years later.

Early life

Julie Guerin, as the registers call her, was born on 18 July 1767 at Pointe Coupée and baptized there on 9 August. Her parents were Guillaume Guerin, known as St. Aubin, and Marie Anne Olivo, who had married at Pointe Coupée on 7 February 1758. Her father’s marriage entry names his own father, Michel Guerin, as a native of Provins en Brie, in the diocese of Sens in France. A sister of Marie Anne’s, Catherine, marrying in 1744, was recorded as a native of Arkansas; at her marriage in 1747 the register adds the diocese of Quebec. The family was at Pointe Coupée by June 1739. One of Julie’s godparents was Pierre Oliveau, who bore the name of her mother’s father. The family had lived at Natchez in the early 1760s, where an elder sister was born in 1760, before Julie’s birth at Pointe Coupée; she was one of at least eight children.

Marriage and family

On 26 November 1789, at Pointe Coupée, she married a Joseph Joffrion, son of Joseph Joffrion and Jeanne Rabalais, with Simon Croiset and Etienne Major as witnesses; the entry does not say which of the brothers named Joseph he was, and a 1980 column in the Avoyelles Journal identifies him as Joseph Jason Joffrion (1759–1840); the entry names her parents as Guillaume Guerin and Marie Anne Olivo. The couple had nine children, born between 1790 and 1810, and her parents are named again as the maternal grandparents at the baptisms of two of them, in 1802 and 1810. Her own family stood at the font for them: the godparents of her son Joseph in 1796 were both Guerins, a Guillaume and a Brigitte, the names of her father and of her younger sister. A daughter, Celeste, was born on 25 August 1799 and baptized on 11 May 1800, with Paulin and Helene Joffrion, the couple’s two eldest children, as sponsors; nothing further is known of her.

At the baptism of her daughter Hypolite in 1794 the register names the mother as “Julie St. Aubin”, taking her father’s by-name rather than his surname. Hypolite, who was also called Pauline, married Cyprien Gremillon on 8 May 1811, the day after her elder sister Helene married his brother Maximilien Gremillon; in 1821 a younger daughter, Eriphile, married Trenee Gremillon, a son of Charles Gremillon by a different wife, with Cyprien and Maximilien among the witnesses.

In the Pointe Coupée census of 1809 her husband was listed as the holder of two tracts of land and fifteen enslaved people, with their eldest son Paulin, then nineteen, listed immediately after him.

Death

She was buried at Pointe Coupée on 7 August 1840, recorded as “Julie … widow of Joseph Joffrion”, so her husband had died before her.

Notes

The Pointe Coupée register records the daughter Celeste as a child of Joseph Joffrion and Julie Guerin (spelled “Gerais” in the published abstract). An earlier version of the family record took her to be the Celeste Aimee Joffrion who married Augustin Marcotte at Avoyelles on 19 September 1816, and carried that marriage’s descendants as this couple’s. That was a mistake. The three civil instruments of the 1816 marriage call the bride “Céleste Joffrion jeune”, daughter of “Joseph Joffrion junr.” and of his wife, born Magdelaine Bizet, and both parents consented in person. The bride of 1816 was therefore a cousin of the same name, a daughter of another Joseph Joffrion and Magdelaine Bizet, and not a daughter of Julie Guerin. Nothing further is known of the Celeste born in 1799.

Her burial gave her age as 77; her baptism shows she was 73.