♀Marie Jeanne Rabalais

Marie Jeanne Rabalais (1733 – 30 December 1772) was a colonist’s daughter of Pointe Coupée, in French Louisiana, who was already a widow when, if the family’s birth year of 1733 is right, at eighteen or nineteen, she married Joseph Joffrion, a widower from Canada twenty-five years her senior. A newspaper genealogy column of 1980 adds that she died on the day a daughter, Jeanne, was born; the baptismal abstracts date that daughter’s birth to 29 December 1772, the day before the burial of “Jeanne, spouse of Geoffrion.” She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Joffrion (born 1770).

Early life

The family record gives her birth as 1733 at Pointe Coupée, a settlement on the Mississippi above New Orleans, but no baptism has been found. She was the daughter of Jean Baptiste Rabalais and Marguerite Belanger. A lineage compilation calls her father “Rabalais dit Matelot”, the by-name meaning “sailor”, and records that her parents had married at New Orleans in January 1733, the year the family record gives for her birth. The same compilation makes her mother a widow at that marriage, whose first husband had been killed in the Natchez uprising of 1729^W, and says she had come to Louisiana in 1721 on the ship La Baleine, which carried young women from the Salpêtrière hospital^W in Paris to be married in the colony. According to the compilation, the household at Pointe Coupée in the census of 1745 held two children, six enslaved people and 28 arpents^W of cultivated land. Her father died in 1759.

Marriages

On 28 August 1748, at Pointe Coupée, at about fifteen by the family’s reckoning, she married François Laserre, called “LaJeunesse”, a soldier and a native of the parish of Saint-Nizier in Lyon, son of Julien Laserre and Marguerite Viar. A “François de la Serre” had signed as a witness at a Pointe Coupée wedding the summer before. The marriage lasted less than two years: a soldier François Laserre, “of the Province of Lyon”, was buried at Pointe Coupée on 9 April 1750, the day he died. The burial gives him a different by-name, “Leonnois”, meaning “the man from Lyon”, but no other Laserre appears in the parish, and when she married again the register called her his widow.

On 1 May 1752, at Pointe Coupée, she married Joseph Joffrion, born at Varennes, near Montreal, in 1708. The register describes him as a native of Sainte-Anne of Varennes in the diocese of Quebec and as the widower of Geneviève Anne Guiot; a Varennes register of 1728 has him marrying Marie-Anne Larocq, and how the two wives fit together has not been established. The family record names six children of the marriage, born between 1753 and 1767, among them two sons who were both christened Joseph: the elder, born in 1753, and Joseph Jason, born on 26 February 1759. The Pointe Coupée baptismal abstracts add a third Joseph, born on 28 December 1770 and baptized on 31 March 1771, through whom the family line runs, and the daughter Jeanne, so the registers show at least eight children. Joseph Jason’s marriage register of 1789 names her as his mother, and the baptisms of his children in 1802 and 1810 name her as their grandmother, the last as “Juana Rably”.

Death

The burial abstract for “Jeanne, spouse of Geoffrion” is dated 30 December 1772 at Pointe Coupée, and the family record gives the same day for her death, at about thirty-nine by its reckoning. The 1980 column gives 29 December, which the register’s date of birth for her daughter supports; a burial on 30 December fixes the death only as on or before that day. Her husband outlived her by at least nineteen years: the same 1980 column records him living with their elder son at Avoyelles Post in 1791, aged eighty-three.

Notes

The 1980 column, published in a Marksville newspaper, dates her death to 29 December 1772 and her second marriage to 10 May 1752; the family record has 30 December and 1 May. The daughter Jeanne whose birth the column ties to her death, and the son Joseph, do appear in Volume 2 of the Diocese of Baton Rouge abstracts, which give their parents as Joseph and Jeanne Rabalais: Jeanne was born on 29 December 1772 and baptized on 7 February 1773, with Simon Bouchard and Susanne Geoffreon as sponsors, and Joseph was born on 28 December 1770 and baptized on 31 March 1771. Neither child is yet in the family record, which lists six children where family compilations give eight or nine. The column gives her birth as about 1732 and a descendant’s family history gives 1734; the family record’s 1733 rests on neither.

Some online indexes attach to her the 1728 Varennes marriage of her husband’s first wife, Marie-Anne Larocq. That marriage took place five years before she was born and is not hers.