FGB Free Clinic - Case no. 9 - Marie Fouyol, Parisian wife of Thomas Mansell, part 6 - Community Context

Context remains our focus, Dear Readers. We have looked at the historical context in which we found Thomas Mansell and Marie Fouyol and at the most complicated geographical context of Paris after the Revolution and during the First Empire. In the previous post, in looking at the prisoner of war file of Thomas Mansell, we also looked at the political context in how the wars affected him. In this post, we shall look at the few friends and co-workers we have been able to discover, their community, and its context.

Our only sources for acquaintances of Thomas Mansell and his wife, Marie Fouyol, are the baptism register entries for their three children and the prisoner of war file. Researching each of the employers or work acquaintances of Thomas Mansell mentioned in his prisoner of war file brought, as expected, no mention of Marie Fouyol.

• John Glasin, Mansell's employer in Paris at rue Menilmontant number 2, apparently spent some time in Bordeaux. There, he and his wife had a stillborn son. The child's death registration, dated the 23rd of July 1802, names the parents ass John Glasin and his wife, Kitty O'Connor, and that they lived at rue Doidé number 14 in Section Two. In January of 1808, he was looking for work, having placed an advertisement in the edition of the 4th of January of the Affiches, annonces et avis divers "To Manufacturers of hemp and linen - An Englishman and his two sons, knowing how to construct machines and knowing very well spinning technology, desire employment. Contact Mr. John Glasin at rue d'Arbalète, number 26."
• Burdin and Caret, the company, located in rue de Charenton, went bankrupt in 1811. The first names of the individuals could not be found online.
• Daniel Heilmann, whose cloth Louis Bergeron said was of poor quality, may not have been a manufacturer. In 1813, he and his wife, Adelaide Le Blanc, had a son, Ferdinand Daniel. The birth document gives his address as in rue de Charenton and his profession as a professor at the Imperial Institute for the Blind (Institut Impérial des Aveugles)

Recall that Thomas Mansell wrote to the Minister of War that he had worked to help set up a spinning factory for the blind, Aveugles. This was most likely the Institute where Daniel Heilmann worked and it may have been connected to Burdin and Caret as both were in rue de Charenton.

Looking at the godparents of the Mansell children:

• Josephine Thomassin, the wife of Cartier, living in rue du Petit Lion Saint Sauveur, was the godmother on the 1814 baptism. She married Jean Baptiste Joseph Cartier in Paris in 1802. They probably met in Paris, as he was from the department of Nord, possibly from the city of Valenciennes; she was from a large family in the department of Haute-Saône. They had at least two children in Paris. In 1810, a daughter, Geneviève Françoise Cartier, was baptized in the church of Saint Eustache. The baby died a year and a half later at the home of a wet-nurse in the department of Oise. In December of 1812, the couple had another daughter, Louisine Françoise Cartier. Josephine Thomassin's birth register entry was not found, but the 1782 entry for the death of her mother, Louise Ronot, was found. Thus, Josephine Thomassin was born before that death, making her the same age as or slightly older than Marie Fouyol. Her husband, Jean Baptiste Joseph Cartier, was a bit older, as his mother died before his father, a charcoal maker, remarried in Valenciennes in 1777, making him about the same age as Thomas Mansell.
• Jean François Varrinier, who ran a boarding house in rue du Cloître Saint Benoît number 17, was from the town of Dunières in Haute-Loire, where his brother, Joseph, and his sister, Marie, remained. On the 12th of March 1796, in Paris, Varrinier married a divorcée from Belfort, Marie Thérèse Metrot. Her first husband was Jean Pierre Erhard, whom she had married before 1785, when their son, Pierre Antoine Erhard, was born in Belfort. Thus, the wife of the godfather, Jean François Varrinier, Marie Thérèse Metrot, born by at least 1770 and probably earlier, was old enough to have been Marie Fouyol's mother. Varrinier's brother was born in 1768 and his sister in 1774; if he were about twenty-five when he married, he would have been born in about 1771, betweeen his siblings, making him slightly older than Thomas Mansell. No documents for children of this couple were found.
• After struggling with the handwriting in the 1816 baptism, we now think that the person we initially identified as Marguerite Cocq... had the surname of Coigner, possibly spelt Coignet or Coigné. In all cases, the name is so common and the details so few that nothing about this specific person could be found with any certainty.
• The same commonality of name and lack of detail applies to the godfather in the 1816 baptism, Pierre Rey. Numerous men of the same name in Paris were researched, with the goal of finding a document with a signature that would match the bold one in the baptism register, but none was found. The name, Rey, seems to have originated in Franche-Comté.
• Thomassine Lorguilleux, the godmother in the 1818 baptism who lived at rue des Bourguignons number 6, was from a family of textile printers in the town of Corbeil in the department of Essonne, where she was born in about 1793, making her about ten years younger than Marie Fouyol. In 1819, four years into the Restoration, Thomassine Ursule Lorguilleux married an English textile machinist named James Wilson in the British Embassy Chapel in Paris.  That same year, their son, Auguste Achille, was baptized in the church of Saint Jacques du Haut Pas. They left Paris for a while for, in 1824, in Charenton-le-Pont, in the department that is now Val-de-Marne but was then Seine, they had a second son, Henry Victor Amedé Wilson. Thomassine Lorguilleux lived a long life, long enough to appear in the 1872 census, which shows her as aged seventy-nine, the widow Wilson, living with her second son in the town of Saint Pierre du Perray in the department of Essonne, about four kilometers from Corbeil, where she was born.
• James Wilson's prisoner of war file shows that he was held at the prison camp at Valenciennes from at least 1808. He was released, with thirteen others, to work for a French textile manufacturer, Samuel Joly in the town of Saint Quentin in 1809. Joly posted security bonds for them all.

The names of neither Marie Fouyol nor Thomas Mansell appear in any of the documents related to the research into the people above. They were not godparents to the children; they were not witnesses to the marriages. Recall that the Paris records were lost and many of the recreations are not full copies so, the names we seek may have been in the original records that were lost.

More importantly, not a single person in the Mansell-Fouyol community was a native Parisian. They came from Haute-Loire, Nord, Haute-Saône, Essonne, Belfort and England. They were working class people who lived in small accommodation in Paris, part of the great influx of people from the provinces to the capital that began even before the Revolution. This community of provincials in Paris poses the question: was Marie Fouyol also from the provinces? 

©2021 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy