♀Marguerite Chapart

Marguerite Chapart (7 October 1748 – 1772) was a daughter of the French post at Vincennes, on the Wabash River, born at Détroit and brought to Vincennes as an infant, who at about thirteen stood godmother to a baby boy whose brother would one day marry her own daughter. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marguerite Godere (born 1768).

Early life

Her parents, Nicholas Schappert and Marie Claire Stockschleger, were German Catholics who married at Goshenhoppen, in Pennsylvania, on 17 April 1746. In the printed register of the mission the bride’s father and Wendel Helffer are the witnesses. By the middle of 1747 the couple had gone west to Détroit, where Tanguay’s dictionary of Canadian families, a compilation, gives the baptism of a daughter, Marie Josephe, on 1 July 1747 and of Marguerite on 7 October 1748. Her own baptismal entry at Détroit is known only from Tanguay’s dictionary. Her father was a German-born settler whose name the French clerks wrote as Chapart, Chapaud, Chappert and Schabart.

The family’s records at Vincennes begin in the summer of 1749, and she grew up there as one of eight known children; a baby brother was buried in the parish cemetery in December 1750. Her younger sisters Magdeleine, Barbe and Marie Claire were baptized at St. Francis Xavier between 1755 and 1761. Several of the sisters married within the post’s small circle. Marie Josephe married Guillaume Page there in February 1770, and Barbe was the wife of Toussaint Codere by 1775, according to a typescript translation of the register. A marriage index gives Marie Françoise as the wife of André Roy in 1775, and her brother Nicolas and sister Marie Claire as marrying at Vincennes in 1784 and 1785.

In 1762 she twice stood godmother at St. Francis Xavier. On 4 June she held Marguerite, the daughter of Antoine Drouet, with Étienne Philibert as godfather. On 13 September she was godmother to Charles, the newborn son of Jean Baptiste Renault and Therese Mallet. Charles’s elder brother, Louis Renaud dit Deslauriers, would later marry her daughter Marguerite, so her godson’s brother became her son-in-law, a match she did not live to see.

Marriage and family

At about eighteen she married François Godere, a native of the French post of Ouiatenon higher up the Wabash. Their marriage contract, executed at Vincennes and known from a notary’s copy, calls her eighteen and a native of Detroit. The groom came accompanied by Louis Boyer and his wife and by Pierre, René and Louis Codere and their wives; the copy carries the names of Louise Delille, Jean Louis De Noyon, Jean Chabot and Philibert, the notary of the post. The marriage itself is dated 3 June 1767 at Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi.

Their daughter Marguerite was born at Vincennes on 20 March 1768 and baptized there by Philibert, a layman, as the post then had no priest; her godfather was Marguerite’s father, written Nicolas Chapaut in the register, and her godmother Agnes Boyer. No other child of the marriage is known.

Marguerite died at Vincennes in 1772, aged about twenty-three, leaving her daughter about four years old. Her husband married Marie Therese Compagnotte early the following year. When her daughter’s own marriage was ratified at Vincennes in 1784, the register named the bride as the daughter of “the late” François Godere and “the deceased” Marguerite Chapard.

Notes

The abstract of her marriage contract names her parents as Nicolas Chapaud and Marie Le Cler. The Vincennes register names Nicolas’s wife five times between 1755 and 1770 as Marie Claire, with a surname written Moquereley, Hocheler, Stocheler and Stoephen, forms of the Stockschleger of his 1746 marriage at Goshenhoppen, where the register writes the bride’s name as Mary Clara Stockschleger and does not name her father; “Marie Le Cler” is taken as “Marie Claire” with the surname lost. Tanguay’s dictionary writes her mother’s name as Claire Chalochheire. The dictionary is the only source for her baptism, and a Détroit entry would settle it. Only the year of her death is known.