♀Marguerite Belanger

Marguerite Belanger (died 1761) was a Frenchwoman from Sèvres, near Paris, who came to Louisiana in the early years of the colony. She married twice in the colony, and her first husband, Joseph Ducro, died at Natchez. She settled at Pointe Coupée on the Mississippi and was buried there in 1761. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Jeanne Rabalais (1733–1772).

Origins and first marriage

A published abstract of the New Orleans parish registers gives her parents as Jacques Belanger and Catherine Garboise. The same abstracts record her second marriage, in 1733, where she is called a native of Sèvres, in the archdiocese of Paris. Another published abstract of that entry reads the town name as “Suire”, with a query mark. A descendant’s family history places the family instead at Sceaux, another town south of Paris; the register’s reading is preferred here.

Family compilations say she came to Louisiana on the ship La Baleine, which landed at Biloxi in January 1721 with a party of young women sent from France to marry colonists. A list of those women is said to give her age as twenty-six, which would place her birth in the mid-1690s. On 6 May 1721, at Old Biloxi^W, she married Joseph Ducros. Her 1733 marriage entry calls her the widow of Joseph Ducro, “who died at Natchez”, and gives no cause. A lineage narrative places his death in the Natchez uprising of 1729^W, when the Natchez rose against the French post of Fort Rosalie^W in November and killed more than two hundred settlers; that link rests on the compiled account and not on a record of his death.

Pointe Coupée

On 12 January 1733, at New Orleans, she married Jean Baptiste Rabalais, called “Matelot”, a colonist already living at Pointe Coupée, and the family record gives their daughter Marie Jeanne’s birth there the same year; no baptism entry has been found. From January 1739 until the summer of 1760 the Pointe Coupée register names her again and again as a godmother, to the children of neighbors, to her own grandchildren and to enslaved people. In December 1739 she and the parish priest, Father Anselme de Langres, stood together as godparents to a group of adults enslaved by Louis Riche, among them men named Pierre, Louis and François and a woman named Marguerite. A lineage compilation records the Rabalais household in the census of 1745 holding six enslaved people on 28 arpents^W of cultivated land; its account does not name them. The register does name one, Magdelaine, an infant enslaved by the family, whom she sponsored at baptism in November 1752.

Her husband died in February 1759. She was buried at Pointe Coupée on 30 June 1761, recorded in the register as the widow of Jean Baptiste Rabalais.

Notes

The Pointe Coupée register records her first husband in 1739 as “Joseph Ducroc, native of Seves near Paris”. The 1744 Pointe Coupée marriage entry of Catherine Ducro, in the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s published abstracts, calls Joseph Ducro a native of Toulon, in the parish of St. Pierre, so the 1739 entry may have taken her origin for his. That 1744 entry, of the marriage of Catherine, “native of Natchez”, to François Desmarets on 28 May 1744, names her parents as Joseph Ducro and Marguerite “Berange”, and lists Jean Baptiste Rabalais among the witnesses. Read as a variant of Belanger, the mother’s name makes Catherine Marguerite’s daughter by her first marriage, born at Natchez. Marguerite was godmother to two of that couple’s children, in 1748 and 1759, which agrees with it. The entry spells the mother’s surname differently from the other records, so the identification rests on the name, the husband and the godmother’s role together.