♀Marianne Damien

Marianne Damien is known from the 1758 marriage of her son, Guillaume Guerin, in the registers of Pointe Coupée in French Louisiana, which names Michel Guerin and Marianne Damien as the groom’s parents. The marriage took place on 7 February 1758, when Guillaume married Marie Anne Olivo; in the published abstract’s entry for the same marriage under the bride’s surname, Olivo, the groom’s mother appears as Marie Anne Damien. The abstract gives a place of origin, Provins en Brie in the diocese of Sens, but attaches it to Michel Guerin, not to her, and it states no origin for her. The marriage contract drawn up that day names the groom’s mother as the late Marianne Damien, so she was already dead by then. No date of birth is known for her, and it is not known whether she ever came to Louisiana. No record of her parents has been found.

A widow at Provins

A widow of the same pair of names appears in the parish register of Sainte-Croix at Provins. On 3 June 1737 Jean Patin, a master hosier and widower of Catherine Richer, married Marie Anne Damiens, widow of the late Michel Guerin, a merchant fripier (a dealer in second-hand clothes), after three banns^W. No parents are named for her, and she could not sign. The curé of Moret-sur-Loing certified that she had lived four years in his parish; the register’s word for her own parish is not certain. The published table of Provins marriages renders the groom’s surname as “Datin”, a misreading of Patin. This widow is probably the Marianne Damien of the 1758 entry, since the names match and the abstract calls Michel a native of Provins, but nothing in either record states the link. If so, Michel Guerin was dead before June 1737. The contract’s details, a merchant of Provins as the groom’s father and a wife already dead, fit this couple. No Guerin–Damien marriage appears in the Provins marriage tables for all four parishes from 1717 to June 1737, and no burial of Michel Guerin and no baptism of a son Guillaume is known in the Moret-sur-Loing registers (1732 to August 1737) or at Provins (Sainte-Croix 1729 to 1736, Saint-Ayoul 1733 to 1736).