♀Marie-Anne You de la Couverte

Marie-Anne You de la Couverte (c. 1694 – after 1766) was a Métis woman of New France, the daughter of a French officer and fur trader and a Miami woman, who married a French blacksmith at Montreal and returned with him to live at the Ouiatenon post on the Wabash, and lived long enough to stand godmother to her own great-granddaughter. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Agnes Richard Dit Lafleur (1719–1778).

Early life

Her mother, recorded only as Elisabeth, was a Miami woman; the Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls her “an Indian woman of the Miami tribe”, and the register of her daughter’s marriage gives her origin as “sauvagesse Miami”. Family trees place her in the Wea band of the Miami, but no record confirms the band. Her father, Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte, a companion of La Salle in the 1680s, took her as his wife at Chicago in April 1693, according to the same biography. Cyprien Tanguay’s dictionary of French-Canadian families and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography both name Marie-Anne as the only child of that union.

Marie-Anne was born about 1694, and no record gives the place of her birth. Her father was in Montreal by 1697, where he married a Frenchwoman on 19 April, the register describing him as single because the Church did not recognize his union with her mother. No record states where Marie-Anne lived as a child or where her mother was afterwards.

Marriage

Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur (1682–1731), a blacksmith and interpreter, came to the Wabash in 1717 with the party that built the French post at Ouiatenon, at the tribe’s request. A baptism at Detroit on 22 May 1710 of a fifteen-year-old Native girl described as his slave, under the name Marie-Jeanne, may or may not record her; it cannot be proved. Enslaved Native people, most of them captives taken in wars between western nations and sold to the French, were common in New France at the time, and a French trader’s Native partner could appear in a register under that description. By 1718 the two were living as husband and wife with an infant daughter, and on 15 August 1718 they were married at Montreal, where the child was baptized the same day with Marie-Anne’s half-brother Philippe You de La Découverte as godfather. Her father died within a fortnight and was buried at the same church.

Return to the Wabash

Two more children were born by the end of 1721, but she was “continually ill” on the St Lawrence and wished to return to Ouiatenon. When the post needed an interpreter her husband asked the governor’s leave to take his family with him, and it was granted on 3 September 1722. The couple, three small children, three hired paddlers and their supplies then traveled by canoe from Montreal to the post at Ouiatenon on the Wabash. They lived at Ouiatenon for the next two decades.

Her husband died some time between 1731 and 1759. She and her daughters afterwards appear in the registers of Vincennes, where she was still living when the post passed to the British; her last known record is as godmother to her great-granddaughter Françoise-Agnès Godere on 4 November 1766, when she was past seventy; standing sponsor to a child three generations below her was rare at a time when few people lived to see their great-grandchildren. She died some time after 4 November 1766.

Notes

The family record gives her death as 1779 at Montreal, which no known record supports. No record gives the date or place of her death, which must have come after 4 November 1766.