I know it may seem like my research is all over the place. You will not find any “research plans” in my documents. Most of the time when I sit down and look at Wikitree or whatever, I don’t know what I am going to research today until I start doing it. I admit being an extremely disorganized researcher. 😂 If it weren’t for Wikitree & this site, I would probably just keep learning the same stuff over and over again, having lost it and forgotten since the last time.

HOWEVER, I do think that my style lends itself well to learning new things and making connections not previously made. And that is more rewarding to me than answering any one specific question, honestly.

I’m just making excuses for going on a tangent real quick, a semi-break from my Thibodaux-hounding. Because I found myself going in a pretty neat little circle and I want to talk about it. 😅

I found a source, shared in my last post, that mentioned Thibodaux being featured a lot in a couple sets of papers held by universities. These were collections donated by certain public figures’ families and usually contain letters, records, financial documents, all kinds of stuff. There’s no collection for Thibodaux himself, however.

After learning that Thibodaux was allied with Edward Livingston for his gubernatorial bid, it occurred to me that perhaps Edward Livingston’s papers are available somewhere. So I searched, and not only are they in existence, Princeton University has digitized them. I can access them at any time. And there are quite a few from Thibodaux in that collection, as well as one from his widow, Brigitte Belanger. These are certainly interesting, and I will get into them in a future post. Some are in English, some in French. I’m still working on understanding the French ones.

Y’all, Edward Livingston knew everybody, apparently. I scrolled through the (very long) list of correspondents and lots of names popped out at me, and not just the obvious ones (presidents and such).

Back in January, I wrote a several posts primarily about a group of families that fled Saint-Domingue around the time of the Haitian Revolution and settled eventually in New Orleans. I had started out researching a certain Pierre Gautier who owned property in Plaquemines Parish in the late 1790s, early 1800s. I wanted to know who he was and if he is connected to my Gautier family. This was the layout of Gautier’s neighborhood on the Mississippi:

Edward Livingston, Daniel Clark, Pierre Gautier, all in a row. The jump from Gautier came from looking into the background of the man he appointed his estate administrator in his will, a guy named Francis O’Duhigg who had fled Saint-Domingue with his family. From him I found other connections to different “Gaultiers” who had traveled with the O’Duhiggs and ended up living right in this same area. I never did connect them definitively to the original Pierre Gautier I was looking at, but I did find enough to make me strongly suspect there are connections.

Anyways, Francis O’Duhigg was Edward Livingston’s overseer at this plantation he had in Plaquemines. Pierre Gautier was O’Duhigg’s neighbor, too, then. There are no letters from Pierre Gautier in the Livingston papers, but there are many from Francis O’Duhigg. His writing style is kind of funny, you get the feeling reading his letters that he was one of those people who can never talk fast enough to get what he wants to say out. Always a postscript and a post-postscript tacked on because he thought of something after ending the original letter. Always writing all up in the margins going sideways. I can relate. 😂 Example, after a long, rambling wall of text of a letter:

He just had to add on a P.S. about how much he thought Livingston needed to give his plantation a name. He suggests “the Cottage”. His next letter starts like this:

😂Not sure if the name ever really caught on, but Francis kept using it for awhile, at least. Most of the letters involve pretty mundane plantation operation updates. There are many references to the slaves Francis was responsible for managing and his various troubles with them and with other landowners in the area. I also found a couple references to Pierre Gautier.

After Gautier’s death, Francis asked Livingston to assist him with handling the administration of the estate.

I think by “low neighbor” he meant downriver, but I’m not entirely certain. Just a few weeks before that, Francis described an incident that had occurred as he tried to catch a raft of goods floating down the river.

The ropes kept breaking and the raft nearly got away, but the Gautiers jumped in to help out. I love finding random stories like that. 😊I do wonder if Pierre himself was one of the participants here, as he died a couple weeks later. He had time to write a will, so he may have been sick already.

Okay, so back to Livingston’s letters. I noticed that there were other familiar names in the list of correspondents from my research into this group of people. There are some from Jean Joseph Coiron, who was married to two different Saint-Domingue Gaultiers, and who introduced ribbon cane to Louisiana. These seem to be related to business, involving other Livingstons as well. I have not read them closely.

There are also letters in French from two different Allards, another family that intermarried with the Gaultiers. All of these families came from Saint-Domingue → Charleston/Savannah → New Orleans.

So then I remembered, Livingston married a woman who was from Saint-Domingue! I went to go look for information about her and recognized her uncommon surname as one that is frequently mentioned in Thibodaux’s letters to Livingston: Davezac or D’avezac. The letters refer often to her brother, Auguste, who was also a politician and who was naturally another ally of Livingston.

So I started building out the D’avezac tree. I was able to find them in the Saint-Domingue records easily enough. As I was looking at those, I noticed Francis O’Duhigg’s parents in there and realized that they all lived in the same area. So that probably explains how O’Duhigg came to work for Edward Livingston.

An aunt of Livingston’s wife named Marie Robertine married a dude who was apparently the duke of Sorrentino (somewhere in Italy). The records relating to her inheritance from the Haitian indemnity fund mentioned she was the “veuve duc du Sorrentino”. As I was trying to figure out who that duke was, I landed on an Ancestry tree with them in it. This tree is for a person whose whole family looks to be in England from back then until now, for the most part. One line goes back to an Elizabeth Duke, whose parents are recorded as “Joseph Chacon, Duke of Sorrentino” and “Marie Robertine Tiby” and almost no information about her. I didn’t find any trees with further information about her. Just her 1798 marriage in London to Chacon. It would not be easy to figure out Marie Robertine’s identity coming at it from that angle, but from the angle I happened to come at it from, she jumps out. As it turns out, Marie Robertine was previously married to a man named Tiby. Assuming that Duke jump has a logical basis, their descendants could find a lot more information than they currently have! I sent it along to the person whose tree I found them in, because I would love it if someone did the same for me.

I love researching this group of people, this is not the first time I have been able to break other people’s brick walls because nobody ever assumes their mystery ancestor was from Saint-Domingue, but there are apparently quite a lot of genealogical trails that go cold precisely around the time of the Haitian Revolution because the family fled Saint-Domingue. Families went all over the world from there, and many of their descendants have no knowledge of that background. It’s really fun to make those connections. The O’Duhigg family was another one of these, actually.

Livingston’s wife was also a first cousin of the woman who married Jacques Pitot, the second American mayor of New Orleans.

Also, this is Livingston’s marriage record abstract:

Edward (Robert and Marguerite BECKMAN), native of Clermont in the state of New York, resident of this city, widower of Marie MC[I?]VERS, m. Louise [@Marie Louise Magdeleine Valentine] DAVEZAC [@DAVEZAC CASTRA], Jun. 3, 1805, w. Marie Valentine TALARY DE MALAGON, Widow CASTRA, bride's mother, Daniel CLARK, Philip L. JONES, Etienne BARRAS [@DE BARRAS], Jean BARTHAUT, Gilberto GUILLEMARD, Rev. DE L'ESPINASSE, Joseph MONTEGUT, J.C. WAILLETTE, [0] NEURISSE (SMΝΟ, M1, 8)

Daniel Clark’s presence is no shocker. I am curious about that Etienne Barras, though. Was he a relative of Leufroy Barras, the early Terrebonne Parish judge who married Thibodaux’s daughter, Brigitte?

Connections on connections on connections. This is why I don’t ever feel like the work I’m doing is unrelated to my “main” work, whatever that is. The tangents inevitably lead me back to a better understanding of previous work and an expansion of what I already learned. For some reason this is really addicting for me. 😂 I thought I was taking a detour from my own family to go research the shit out of H. S. Thibodaux and ended up back on people I spent a ton of time on a few months ago trying to figure out my Gautiers (and haven’t finished with) in spite of myself, then left the detour with more leads to follow on Thibodaux. There is no separation of concerns, it’s all connected. One ginormous puzzle.

P. S. (O’Duhigg’s style may have rubbed off on me a tad.) One of my dad’s close Y matches that I have previously tried and failed to contact emailed me yesterday wanting to figure out our connection. Clearly he doesn’t use the same email anymore and never saw my original messages. This is a very exciting development potentially, if I have managed not to scare him away. Wish me luck. 😂