♀Marie Anne Olivo

Marie Anne Olivo (about 1740 – before 6 January 1790) was a colonial settler of French Louisiana who married Guillaume Guerin, known as St. Aubin, at Pointe Coupée in 1758, lived with him at the Natchez post^W in the first years of the marriage, and spent the rest of her life at Pointe Coupée. Her family was at Pointe Coupée by June 1739, and an elder sister of hers, Catherine, was recorded as a native of Arkansas.

Family and origins

Marie Anne Olivo was the daughter of Pierre Olivo and Magdelaine Cable. The registers spell the surname in several ways, Olivo, Olivot and Oliveau among them, and treat them as one name. No record of her own birth or baptism has been found; her age at burial places her birth about 1740.

What is known of the family’s origin comes from her elder sister, Marie Catherine Olivo. At Catherine’s marriage to Pierre Joly at Pointe Coupée on 9 January 1744, the published abstract of the register describes her as a native of Arkansas and no more. At her second marriage, to Pierre Bahout, a surgeon at Natchez, on 30 January 1747, she is a native of Arkansas in the diocese of Quebec^W, and at her third, to René Legue, on 4 May 1761, she is again a native of Arkansas and the widow of Bahout. The Arkansas Post^W, a small French station on the Arkansas River well up the Mississippi from Pointe Coupée, lay then within the vast diocese of Quebec, which took in the whole of French Louisiana. The family was already at Pointe Coupée in June 1739, when a son, Pierre, was baptized there, and Marie Cable, her mother, stood as a witness at the 1744 wedding. The records do not say when the Olivos left Arkansas, and no record states where Marie Anne herself was born.

Marriage and Natchez

On 7 February 1758, at Pointe Coupée, she married Guillaume Guerin, the son of Michel Guerin and Marianne Damien; the marriage entry names Michel Guerin as a native of Provins en Brie, in France. Pierre Ducote, who had also witnessed her sister’s wedding fourteen years earlier and was by then her stepfather, married to her mother, Magdelaine Cable, since at least 1753, stood as a witness with Crozat, Duval and Dumas. She was about 18; her husband was about 39.

For the first years of the marriage the couple lived at Natchez, upriver from Pointe Coupée, and brought their children down to Pointe Coupée for the register. A son baptized at home died as an infant and was buried in April 1759, when his father was entered as “of Natchez”; a daughter, Marie Magdeleine, was born at Natchez on 15 September 1760, and a son, George, was born on 17 December 1762 and baptized in November 1763, when his parents were recorded as residents of Natchez. From 1765 the children were baptized at Pointe Coupée with no other residence stated, and the family remained there. Natchez passed from French to British rule under the peace treaty of 1763^W; the records do not say why the family moved.

The couple had at least eight children: six were baptized or buried at Pointe Coupée by 1769, and two more followed, Henriette in 1775 and a son, Guillaume, who married in 1793. Their daughter Julie was born at Pointe Coupée on 18 July 1767, with Pierre Oliveau, who bore her mother’s father’s name, as her godfather; in her baptism entry the mother is written “Marianne Oliveau”. Julie married Joseph Joffrion, son of Joseph Joffrion and Jeanne Rabalais, on 26 November 1789, and the marriage entry names her parents as Guillaume Guerin and Marie Anne Olivo, as do the baptisms of two of her children in 1802 and 1810.

Death

Marie Anne Olivo was buried at Pointe Coupée on 6 January 1790, aged about 50, six weeks after her daughter’s wedding. The burial entry leaves out her own name and records her only as the wife of “dit St. Aubin”, her husband’s by-name; the entry is taken as hers because that by-name is his in several other entries of the same registers and the date and age fit. A burial at Pointe Coupée on 17 February 1795, of “Guillaume, dit St. Aubin”, is taken as her husband’s.