♀Marie Barbe Colin

Marie Barbe Colin was a native of Brittany who married at New Orleans in 1730, followed her first husband to Fort de Chartres^W in the Illinois Country^W, and was married there twice more after his death. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Francoise Eloi. On 4 January 1742 three acts were drawn up together at Fort de Chartres: the inventory of François Eloy’s estate, the marriage contract of his widow and François Paboeuf, and the naming of guardians for his children. Under the Custom of Paris^W, the law of the colony, the inventory closed out the property a couple had held in common, so that the children’s inheritance from their father was settled before their mother married again.

New Orleans

Her parents were Jean Colin and Jeanne Vanneret. On 30 October 1730 François Eloy, a native of Versailles, married Marie Barbe Colin, a native of the diocese of Cornouaille in Brittany, in the parish church of St. Louis at New Orleans; their witnesses were a corporal and three soldiers. The couple had two daughters, Marie Barbe, baptized at New Orleans on 13 May 1731, and Francoise. The family later moved up the Mississippi to the Illinois Country.

Fort de Chartres

François Eloy, known as St. François, was dead by 4 January 1742. On 6 January Barbe appeared as “Barbe Colin, of Fort de Chartres, widow of the late Francois Eloy dit St. Francois”, two days after the inventory of his estate and her contract with François Paboeuf, known as St. Laurent. Her gift of property to her new husband under that contract was registered at Kaskaskia on 23 February 1742.

Paboeuf died before 1755. On 23 April 1755 Barbe signed a third marriage contract, with Giovanni Battista Giacomini, at New Chartres, the village beside the fort, before the notary Barrois; it named her as the widow first of François Eloy dit St. François and then of François Paboeuf dit St. Laurent, and its mutual gift of property was registered on 15 July.

The historian Winstanley Briggs took her as an example in writing of the women of the French Illinois Country. He called her first husband “the solid habitant Francois Eloy ‘St. Francois,’” and her second “the equally respectable Francois Paboeuf ‘St. Laurent’”; a habitant was a settler who held land. Giacomini, “husband number three”, was in his view “almost certainly a garrison soldier”.

Notes

Her origin

Her marriage entry of 1730, as printed in Earl C. Woods and Charles E. Nolan’s Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, gives her as “Barbe (Jean and Jeanne VANNERET), native of the Diocese of Cornouaille”. Cornouaille was the diocese of Quimper, in the west of Brittany; the entry names no parish.

The acts of 1742 and 1755

The inventory, the Paboeuf contract, the guardianship “for the minors of Francois Eloy”, her statement of 6 January and the registration of her gift to “her husband Francois Pasboeuf” are entries of 1742 in Lawrie Cena Dean’s digest of the Kaskaskia Manuscripts (1981). The same digest, for 1755, records “the marriage contract made on April 23, 1755 of Joanni Baptista Gacoming and Barbe Colin, widow in her first marriage of Francois Eloy dit St. Francois, and in her second marriage of Francois Paboeuf dit St. Laurent”, executed at New Chartres.

The link to Francoise Eloi

Francoise’s marriage to Pierre Lambremont, in the register of Ste. Anne at Fort de Chartres, names her as “Marie francoise Eloy fille de francois Eloy et de Marie Barbe Colin legitimes epoux”, already a widow. The head of the leaf is torn away with its date; the entry stands between an act of August 1764 and one of 27 May 1765.

Briggs

Winstanley Briggs’s account of her three marriages comes from an essay in The Quiet Heritage (1987), page 67, which cites her contract for the third marriage among the Kaskaskia Manuscripts.