FGB Free Clinic - Case no. 10 - What to Believe? The Tale or the Tombstone? Part 6

There are quite a lot of scanned documents about the Guerne de Tavane family to be found online, enough to do a genealogy tree going back five or six generations from the sisters who married in Versailles whom we discussed in Part Five. However, our goal is not (at least not yet) to research earlier generations of this family but to determine whether or not the Marie Adelaide Guerne de Tavane who died in Louisiana is a member of this family, possibly the same person as the Madeleine Adelaide Guerne de Tavane who married in Versailles. For this reason, we will focus only on that woman, her parents, Jean David Guerne de Tavane and Anne Fauché, and her sister, Anne Charlotte Guerne de Tavane.

The volunteers contributing to Geneanet have been steadily working their way through transcribing the répertoires, (the chronological records of a notaire's work; learn more about notaires here), of the Parisian notaires. These show that Jean David Guerne de Taverne [the volunteer has misread the name] and Anne Fauché signed a marriage contract with the notaire André Guillaume Deshayes, on the 10th of June 1752. 

The employees at Filae.com have been indexing the "reconstituted" parish and civil register entries of Paris. These reveal that Anne Fauché (here spelt Fauchet), wife of Jean David Guerne de Tavanne, died on the 31st of March 1759, at the age of thirty-six. Thus, both of her daughters were born before that date. If her daughter, Madeleine Adelaide Guerne de Tavane, who married Jacques Augustin Gautier in Versailles, is the same woman as the Marie Adelaide Guerne de Tavane who died in Louisiana, then the age given for her on the tombstone was wrong; she would have been between the ages of about sixty to sixty-seven, born between 1752, when her parents married and 1759, when her mother died. 

The website of the Departmental Archives of Yvelines has the digitized parish registers of Versailles, which may be viewed freely (though those outside of France may have difficulty doing so, as we explained here). These show that Jacques Augustin Gautier and his wife, Madeleine Adelaide Guerne de Tavane, had at least three children, all baptized in the church of Notre Dame.

• Adelaide Charlotte Gautier was baptized in 1778; her godparents were her aunt and uncle, Anne Charlotte Guerne ditte Tavanne [as the priest wrote it] and François Deschaines
• Charles Augustin Gautier was baptized in 1780; his godparents were Augustin Duval and his daughter, Marie Elisabeth Augustine Duval.
• Anne Victoire Gautier was baptized in 1781; her godfather was Pierre Fontenay and her godmother was Anne Saradin, the wife of Jean Jacques Antoine Jannin.

In the first of the above, the mother was named as  Marie Adelaide Guerne ditte Tavanne; in the second and third, she was named as Marie Madeleine/Madelaine Adelaide Guerne. This makes it clear that the wife of Jacques Augustin Gautier was known sometimes as Marie, sometimes as Madelaine, and sometimes as Marie Madelaine.

The online "reconstituted" parish register entries of Paris on the Archives de Paris website show that Jean David Guerne de Tavane died in Paris in 1790. His son-in-law, Jacques Augustin Gautier, merchant in Paris, signed the declaration. 

On the same website, the succession records show that Anne Charlotte Guerne, a glovemaker, the widow of a Deschennes, died in Paris in late 1812, aged fifty-four. She died at the hospital, Hôtel-Dieu. (More on this hospital and its records in the next post.)

No record of a death in France has yet been found for Jacques Augustin Gautier, his wife Marie Madelaine Adelaide Guerne de Tavane or for any of their three children. 

From the above discoveries, we can conclude that the disparity between the name of the bride in the 1777 Versailles Gautier-Guerne de Tavane marriage and the woman buried in Louisiana is less of a concern. The bride, who became the mother of at least three Gautier children, was, at times, known by the same name as the woman buried in Louisiana. However, the age disparity between the two remains.

That no trace of the five members of the Gautier family could be found after Jacques Augustin's declaration of his father-in-law's death in 1790 may be a slight indication that they all emigrated from France together after that date. Unfortunately, negative evidence cannot be taken as proof of much of anything, especially when dealing with people who lived in Paris.

©2024 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy