♀Marie Claire Stockschleger

Marie Claire Stockschleger (recorded 1755–1770) was the wife of Nicholas Schappert, a settler of the French post at Vincennes, on the Wabash River, who in 1759 stood godmother to the baby who would grow up to marry her granddaughter. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marguerite Chapart (1748–1772).

No record of her parents has been found, and nothing is known of her birth. The parish register of St. Francis Xavier at Vincennes names her as the mother of children baptised there in 1755, 1758 and 1761, and as the mother of the bride when her daughter Josephe married Guillaume Page in February 1770. The French clerks kept her given name, Marie Claire, each time, but could make little of her German surname, writing it Moquereley, Hocheler, Stocheler and Stoephen. On 15 May 1759 she stood godmother to Louis Renault, born the day before to Jean Baptiste Renault and Therese Mallet, with “Mr. St. Ange Commandant at this post”^W as godfather; she made her mark in the register rather than signing. The child was Louis Renaud dit Deslauriers, who later married her granddaughter Marguerite Godere, so the infant she held at the font became her granddaughter’s husband. Three years later her daughter Marguerite stood godmother to Louis’s younger brother Charles.

Notes

The surname in the Vincennes register is read as Stockschleger. According to a marriage index, Nicholas Schappert married in Pennsylvania in 1746, at the German Catholic mission of Goshenhoppen, and the bride is named there as Mary Clara Stockschleger; her daughter Marguerite’s marriage contract calls Marguerite a native of Detroit. The same contract, known from an abstract, names Marguerite’s mother as “Marie Le Cler”. That was once taken to mean a different woman, Marie Leclerc, but it is read here as “Marie Claire” with the surname lost, since the Vincennes register calls Nicholas’s wife Marie Claire in 1755, 1758, 1761 and 1770. Marguerite’s baptism at Detroit, which would settle the question, has not yet been read. A register entry of January 1768 names a godmother “Marie Chein, wife of Nicholas Chapau”; whether that is a garbled form of her name or the wife of another Nicolas is not clear. No record of her death has been found.