♂Michel Guerin

Michel Guerin is known from the 1758 marriage of his son, Guillaume Guerin, in the registers of Pointe Coupée in French Louisiana. The church entry names the groom’s parents as Michel Guerin and Marianne Damien, and gives Michel as a native of Provins en Brie, in the diocese of Sens, a town east of Paris now in the department of Seine-et-Marne. The marriage contract drawn up for the same marriage, on 7 February 1758, settles where that origin belongs: it describes the groom’s father as a merchant of the town of Provins, and says that he was already dead. The contract calls him Guillaume Guerin, where the church entry and a Provins act of 1737 give Michel. This page keeps the name Michel, with Guillaume as an alternate name. No date of birth or marriage is known for him, and it is not known whether he ever came to Louisiana. His parents are not known.

A fripier at Provins

A Michel Guerin, merchant fripier (a dealer in second-hand clothes), is named in the parish register of Sainte-Croix at Provins on 3 June 1737, when his widow, Marie Anne Damiens, married Jean Patin, a master hosier, after three banns^W. The act names no parents for her, and the curé of Moret-sur-Loing certified that she had lived four years in his parish. This couple are probably the Michel Guerin and Marianne Damien of the 1758 entry, since the names match and the abstract calls Michel a native of Provins, but nothing in either record states the link. If so, he was dead before June 1737. The contract’s details, a merchant of Provins and a wife already dead, fit this couple. Searches found no Guerin–Damien marriage in the Provins marriage tables for all four parishes from 1717 to June 1737, and no burial of Michel Guerin and no baptism of a son Guillaume in the Moret-sur-Loing registers (1732 to August 1737) or at Provins (Sainte-Croix 1729 to 1736, Saint-Ayoul 1733 to 1736). Family trees have given him a baptism at Rennes in 1700 and a marriage in 1704, but the record behind them concerns another man of the name, and the two dates together would have him married at four.