I’ve been continuing to work on the saga of the Cap Tiburon, Saint-Domingue Gaultier family. My main goal is still to figure out who the patriarch of that family was, but as always I’m collecting all tidbits of information I can find about anyone connected to this family because who knows where the clues I need are hiding?

To recap: Pierre Gaultier was born in Louisbourg (Acadie) according to his 1774 burial record. He was buried in Cap Tiburon. His first known child with his wife, Elisabeth Cobert, was baptized in Saint-Louis-du-Sud, Saint-Domingue, in 1723. I have not found a marriage record for Gaultier and Cobert, but I know that Elisabeth Cobert was born in Saint-Domingue, as I have found a baptism record for her, so they probably got together after Pierre’s arrival on the island.

One tantalizing clue about Pierre’s identity (maybe) is this: His daughter, Marie Louise Gaultier, first married Charles Cesar Petit de Livilliers in 1755 in Les Anses, Saint-Domingue. Charles was born in New Orleans, and his paternal grandmother was a sister of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de la Vérendrye, famous for his North American explorations, and more importantly for my purposes, a Gaultier. He could be a cousin of the Pierre I’m focused on.

I found some abstracts of old New Orleans records in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly archives a few weeks ago that were related to Charles’s succession. His sisters still lived in New Orleans, and after he passed away in Saint-Domingue they took steps to secure their inheritance from him.

I didn’t initially find the actual documents that were abstracted, but yesterday I did find them, on the Louisiana Colonial Documents website. This site has all of the records from the Spanish Cabildo and the French Superior Council available for your perusal, and this collection includes the records related to Charles’s estate.

This is the abstract I was interested in learning more about:

Garic, Notary of the Cabildo: Paul Augustin Le Pelletier: Chevalier de La Houssaye, and his wife, Magdeleine Victoire Petit de Livillier, and Etienne Vaugine, and his wife, Pelagie Petit de Livillier de Vaugine, make a declaration to the effect that they have never understood that the marriage of (their brother) Charles Cezar Petit de Livillier and Marie Louise Gauthier was ever authorized or approved either civilly or otherwise.

Now, Charles and Marie Louise definitely did marry, in April 1755. This is a portion of their marriage record that contains the signatures of witnesses.

So why did Charles’s sisters not recognize their brother’s marriage?

Let’s talk about timing here a bit. Charles married in 1755, but Marie Louise married a second time in November 1763, which probably means that Charles died before that date. His sisters’ filings related to his estate were made in 1769-1770, several years after Charles must have died. It’s unclear at what point they became aware of his death or his marriage, so it’s possible they learned of both around the same time. However, it seems more plausible to me that it did not take years to learn of news from Saint-Domingue and that that is just when they started making legal moves.

By reading over the actual documents, I learned the reasoning given by Charles’s sisters for their refusal to recognize his marriage. The reasons boiled down to:

1. Charles was a minor when he married, and therefore he required the proper authorization from his legal guardian to be able to legally marry. He did not have this authorization.

2. The marriage “banns” were not published in Charles’s home parish. This meant that no one who knew Charles back home had an opportunity to object to the marriage because they wouldn’t have known it was happening until it was too late.

3. Charles had intermarried “with a family tainted and infamous by capital and infamous condemnations against the named Cobert, maternal uncle of Marie Louise Gaultier.”

First of all, Charles was baptized in New Orleans in 1731. This makes him around 24 years old at the time of his marriage. It seems unlikely to me that he should have been considered a minor based on his age. His marriage record to Marie Louise doesn’t specify that either of them was a minor at the time.

The third point of contention is the most interesting. Marie Louise Gaultier’s mother had a brother named Jean Louis Cobert. Some time ago I found documents in ANOM that are related to the petition of Elisabeth Cobert (and her husband) along with Elisabeth’s niece, Mrs. Fongravier, to clear Elisabeth’s brother’s name. He was convicted of a murder in 1735 and was sentenced to the galleys, where he died shortly after. This petition to clear his name was made in 1777, more than 40 years after the fact.

One of the reasons given for that petition was that Pierre Gaultier had had issues related to his military position and advancement due to concerns regarding the conviction of Jean Louis Cobert. Apparently if your wife’s brother murdered a dude 40 years ago, that was potentially an issue for your credibility as a military officer.

Finding the documents related to Charles’s succession has shed light on another very real consequence of Jean Louis’s conviction for the Gaultier family. Charles’s siblings were requesting that the marriage be annulled, based largely on the fact that his wife’s uncle was a criminal. This would mean that Marie Louise was entitled to none of Charles’s estate.

My impression is that the conviction was just a convenient excuse to give in order for Charles’s siblings to get at whatever property Charles left behind. It feels like grasping at straws. But one question that I have is, how did Charles’s siblings even know about this ancient history that happened decades earlier in a land far away? Is it because they knew they were cousins of this Gaultier branch and had heard the family gossip? That’s unclear, but seems at least plausible.

The filings by Charles’s siblings also provide confirmation of a few other details related to these families that I’d already established with other evidence. It’s nice to have that validation that I’m on the right track.

• There are mentions of someone going to Cap Tiburon to deal with the legal proceedings.

• “Mr. Dulong” is mentioned as being Charles’s estate administrator in St. Domingue. Fabien Dulong was Marie Louise Gaultier’s second husband. He was probably acting as his wife’s legal representative, with her being Charles’s heir.

• There’s also an account of one of Charles’s sisters’ husbands going to St. Domingue to fetch Charles’s slaves and bring them back to Louisiana. That was a problem because it wasn’t legal to just import slaves like that (Louisiana was Spain at this time, so a different country from French St. Domingue). He made a petition arguing that they were “good” slaves and would not cause any problems in the colony, etc. This seems to have happened before all the filings that mention Charles’s marriage to Marie Louise Gaultier.

It’s not clear to me yet what the outcome of all these legal maneuvers was. I think that the outcome may be somewhere in the records of Saint-Domingue, since that is where Charles died, and someone seemed to be going from New Orleans to Cap Tiburon to handle the rest of this case. Most of the documents I found in the Cabildo records are related to the sisters giving powers of attorney for others to handle this matter on their behalf.

Open questions:

• How’d they know about Jean Louis Cobert’s conviction?

• How likely is it that people actually cared about that conviction? Is this all posturing for financial gain, or was that really something that would hold enough weight to prevent a marriage 40 years later?

• Was the marriage annulled in the end? It may be worth noting that on Marie Louise’s marriage record to Fabien Dulong, she’s not noted as being a widow. But that was long before Charles’s sisters made these filings, the marriage had definitely not been annulled at that point or they’d not have been asking for it years later.

• Is Pierre Gaultier of Cap Tiburon a close relative of the Pierre Gaultier who’s famous for exploration in North America or is Charles Petit de Livillier’s grandma being a Gaultier and his sister just a red herring? The frequency of close cousin marriages in this group makes this even more intriguing. The attempt to paint Pierre’s family as not suitable for marrying into is odd if the people making that claim were his close family. But them being family seems the most logical explanation for them even being aware of the Coberts and their old drama.

• The claim that Charles was a minor at the time of his marriage when he was definitely at least 23-24 years old is suspicious. Did his sisters know the exact date he was married at all? Was there ever a time when a 23-year-old man was considered a minor in need of permission to marry?

So much of this work involves getting familiar enough with a time and place and the people in it and the various actions they often took to be able to notice things that are odd or different from the norm. This is sort of an extension of the FAN club principle, but perhaps more generalized.

If you aren’t researching people other than the specific people you are interested in, you can never gain that broader understanding of what was normal in a given context. That can only come through seeing the same sorts of documents over and over again, applied to different people and in different situations over a period of time. It’s only through that practice that you can really start to get a deep enough understanding to be able to tell when something is important or unusual.

Another example to illustrate this concept: I suspect my ancestor, Aaron King, never legally married the mother of his children, Eloise Bergeron. No marriage record has been found, and in fact she was not able to legally marry without it being considered bigamy, as her first husband left her but did not die until many decades later. Legally, Eloise was married to Thomas Rhodes, and people in her community were aware of that fact. Another marriage would have been bigamous.

Another researcher once told me that they must have been married, because the baptismal records of Aaron’s children name him as the father and do not mention the children being “natural” or illegitimate.

However, without knowing what the “norm” is in that entire record set (preferably the actual source documents, not the abstracts!), Aaron’s name being on that record and the lack of language related to legitimacy do not really tell us a whole lot. In isolation, we don’t know if the priest recording at that time generally included language about legitimacy or if he never did. In fact, there are no entries in Hebert’s books for Lafourche/Terrebonne that mention legitimacy, period. (If there are, they are very few, and I know that from spending so much time looking at those books. I haven’t seen any.) Some children are baptized with only the mother’s name recorded, which does generally indicate that the child’s father did not recognize the child as his, and that can be taken to mean that the parents were not married. But there’s a third option—the child’s parents were not married, but the father acknowledged the child as his own, regardless. On these cases, Hebert (and perhaps, the source documents themselves, although I only have a few of these to compare) are silent.

Without knowing how things worked in general for a specific set of records in a specific time and place, our attempts to make logical deductions are severely crippled. It’s only by studying broadly that we can confidently feel like we understand what is going on without making assumptions that are based on a flawed understanding of the context.

Was it weird that Charles’s sisters didn’t recognize his marriage, or was it an expected outcome? How common was it for families to try to get at a relative’s inheritance this way, and what were the usual reasons for doing so vs. not doing so? How likely is it that Charles’s family was aware of his marriage at the time it happened and shortly after? Did people in New Orleans typically closely follow happenings in Saint-Domingue via newspapers or family communications? How much did people at this time actually care about the criminal convictions of relatives of a given person when judging that person’s “quality”? Were 24-year-old men ever expected to obtain family permission to marry? All of these questions matter for my analysis, and only a broad study of the historical context can shed light on the answers and allow me to make an actually educated guess.