♀Louise Baudet

Louise Baudet was a woman of New France who, with her husband Jacques Marcotte, is named in the record of their son’s marriage at Cap-Santé, on the St. Lawrence above Québec, in 1725. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Jean Baptiste Marcotte.

Family

On 8 November 1725 their son Jean Baptiste Marcotte married Marie Marguerite Hardy dit Chatillon in the parish of Sainte-Famille at Cap-Santé. The priest entered the groom as the son of Jacques Marcot and Louise Beaudet, as he wrote their names, and gave bride and groom as both of that parish. It is the only known record that names the couple.

She died on 7 February 1760. On 8 February the priest at Cap-Santé buried a Marie Louise Baudet of that parish, aged eighty-four and provided with the sacraments. The witnesses were Adrien Laroche and Pierre Piché, and the entry names no husband. The identification is therefore probable rather than proved: she is the only Louise Baudet in the Cap-Santé register, where she appears as the mother of the Marcotte children. The age given at her burial is a few years too high: she was born about 1679.

Everything else about the family comes from Cyprien Tanguay’s^W genealogical dictionary of French-Canadian families, which gives her husband as born at Trois-Rivières in 1673 and credits the couple with eleven children, the eldest born in 1692, several of them baptized at Cap-Santé. Two of the sons, Jean Baptiste and Henri, married into the Hardy family. Tanguay records her husband’s burial at Cap-Santé on 21 March 1737.

Notes

The 1725 marriage entry spells the names Marcot and Beaudet; an earlier index of the register had spelled her surname Beaudel. Tanguay’s volumes disagree about the marriage: the first gives her as Louise Baudet and the year as 1698, while the fifth calls her Marie Baudet, puts the marriage in 1692 and lists a son born that year. The 1725 entry names her Louise. A family history written by a descendant also gives Jacques Marcotte and Louise Baudet as the parents of Jean Baptiste. The family tree identifies their son with the father of the Jean Baptiste Marcotte who settled in Louisiana; that identification rests on compiled genealogies, as the son’s biography explains.

Parentage

No act names her parents. A compiled genealogy gives them as Jean Baudet, born about 1650, and Marie Grandin, born about 1651, who married at Québec on 23 September 1670. Their marriage entry calls the groom a native of the parish of Blanzais in the diocese of Poitiers, names his parents as Sébastien Baudet and Marie Baudonier, and names the bride’s as the late Michel Grandin and Marie Lejeune, of Saint-Euverte in Orléans. The 1681 census of Lotbinière lists that household with a daughter Louise, aged two, which would make her born about 1679.

The couple had two daughters of that name. The elder, Marie-Louise, baptized at Sillery on 14 September 1671, married Jacques Houde. Louise was the younger: she appears, aged two, in her parents’ household in the 1681 census of Lotbinière, and René Jetté’s dictionary of Québec families gives her as born about 1679 and married to Jacques Marcotte before 1698. Tanguay’s dictionary had married this Louise to Jean-Baptiste Bisson in 1699, but Jetté gives that marriage to her sister Jeanne-Françoise, born in 1681.