One Wedding, Two Lisettes
One Wedding, Two Lisettes
How fur-trade families get merged — and the records that keep them apart. Two men named Joseph, two women named Lisette, and one mission wedding, 21 January 1839.
On a single winter day in 1839, at a log mission on French Prairie, two men named Joseph each married a woman named Lisette. For generations, the family trees have treated them as one couple. The register never did.
When Father François Norbert Blanchet came to the Willamette in January 1839, he found a settlement of retired fur-trade men — most of them French Canadians, most of them married for years à la façon du pays to Indigenous women, with households of children no priest had ever baptized. Over a few days he regularized as many of those families as he could. He baptized the wives, married the couples, and in each marriage entry he recorded the children the parents now “recognized as their legitimate children,” with their ages.
It was efficient, it was crowded, and it produced a register in which the same handful of names repeat entry after entry: Joseph, Pierre, Marie Anne, Lisette. The same two men witnessed one marriage after another. The same godfather stood at baptism after baptism. For a genealogist, a day like that is both a gift and a trap.
Two couples, one day
Two of the marriages Blanchet recorded on 21 January 1839 are the subject of this post. Set side by side, they share almost everything a hurried reader looks at — and almost nothing that identifies a family.
& Lisette Tchinouke
- Groom fromSaint-Hyacinthe, District of Montreal
- Bride’s nationChinook
- ChildrenJoseph 12, Marie Anne 5, Rose 3, Marguerite nearly 1
& Lisette Souchouabe
- Groom fromSorel, in Canada
- Bride’s nationShuswap
- ChildrenCatherine 17, Pierre 15, Augustin 12, Basile 6, Marie Anne 3, Antoine 9 months
Two grooms named Joseph, with surnames a careless eye reads as one. Two brides named Lisette. Two eldest sons aged twelve or more, two daughters named Marie Anne. The same two witnesses, Jean Baptiste Dupati and Pierre Stanislas Jacquet, stood at both — and, like the couples, could sign neither.
How the trees merged them
Open the public trees for Joseph Delard and you will often find a single couple where the register has two. “Despard” is treated as a spelling of “Delard,” the two Josephs become one man, and the two Lisettes become one woman. Then the merged Lisette acquires the more visible of the two identities. Because one bride was Chinook, Joseph Delard’s wife is made Chinook too — and in some trees, a daughter of the great Chinook head chief Comcomly.
That is how a conflation does its damage. It doesn’t just misfile two couples. It takes a Shuswap woman, removes the nation her own baptism names, and hands her a Chinook chief’s ancestry that belonged, at most, to her namesake at the same wedding. Every descendant who trusts the tree inherits the wrong nation, the wrong grandparents, and in some versions the wrong brothers and sisters.
None of it rests on a document. The merge was never made in the record; it was made by copying, from tree to tree, by people who never went back to the entries that kept the two families apart.
What kept them apart
Going back to the record is not one lookup. It is a sequence of entries, each of which, read in full, keeps the two families distinct:
Each Lisette was baptized that same day in her own entry: B27 for the Chinook bride, B38 for the Shuswap bride — Lisette, aged 32, born of “Indians of Souchoabe.” Her baptism names her nation and no parents at all.
M5 and M15, as above: two origin parishes, two nations, two sets of children.
The next day the younger children were baptized one by one, each entry naming both parents. Marie Anne Delard, 3, and Basile, 6, and Antoine, 9 months — children of Joseph Delard and Lisette Souchouabe, their ages exactly those of the marriage entry. Four entries later, Marie Anne Despard, 5, and Rose, 3 — children of Joseph Despard and Lisette Tchinouk. Two little girls named Marie Anne, baptized the same day, each tied to her own father and her own mother.
Lisette Souchouabe died on 19 February 1841 and was buried at St. Paul the next day as the wife of Joseph Delard. The six children named at the 1839 wedding survived her.
When Joseph Delard remarried, the entry called him the widower of “Elizabeth Shoushwab” — Lisette’s Shuswap nation, written into the record again two years after her death.
Lisette, a Chinook woman named in the entry as the wife of Joseph Despard, died at St. Paul, “aged 43 years.” Ten years after the Shuswap Lisette. A different nation, a different husband, a different death.
Even the published edition’s own index agrees: Delard and Despard are separate surname blocks, each with its own children, cross-referenced to its own marriage. Whoever merged these families did not get the idea from the register or from the scholar who edited it.
The two grooms can even be found side by side outside Oregon. In the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1824 abstract of servants’ accounts, “Deslard, Jos.” of Sorel, a steersman aged 27, stands on one line; directly beneath him is a Joseph Dispard of Yamaska, a middleman aged 31 — Joseph Frédéric dit Despard, the other groom of 1839, whose story is told in The Other Joseph. Each has his own age, his own parish, his own years of service — and in the 1834 abstract the Sorel man and the Yamaska man are still two lines apart, each exactly ten years older. Joseph Delard’s fur-trade career, read from those account books, is the subject of The Steersman’s Ledger.
- Read the whole entry, not the index line. The parish of origin, the nation, the children’s names and ages are all in the body of the record. The index gives you only the name that caused the problem.
- Read the neighbouring entries. A mass regularization like January 1839 puts look-alike families a few lines apart. The entry next to yours may be the other family.
- Follow the children. Children’s baptisms name both parents. Two sets of children with their own entries are two families, however alike the parents’ names.
- Find both deaths. Two people who die ten years apart, with different husbands named, cannot be one person.
- Treat a different surname as a different family until a record says otherwise. “Despard” is not a variant of “Delard” just because a tree says so; a variant has to be shown, not assumed.
What the record gives Lisette — and what it doesn’t
Pulled back out of the merged couple, Lisette Souchouabe has a life of her own in the record: her nation, named at her baptism and again at her widower’s remarriage; her age, about 32 in 1839 and given as 36 at her burial; her six children, named at her wedding and listed as surviving her; and her death at St. Paul in February 1841.
What the record does not give is the names of her parents. Like most Indigenous women entering the sacramental record as adults, she was baptized as the daughter of unnamed, unbaptized parents. Her ancestry reaches an honest limit there. It does not reach Comcomly. That was always another woman’s family.
Lisette’s son Augustin Delard married Zoé Quintal at St. Louis, Marion County, in August 1857 — and the marriage record names both sets of parents in one entry, joining this family to Laurent Quintal and Marie Anne Nipissing, whose own story is told in The Free Man of the Prairies.
The full evidence — every entry transcribed, the Québec line traced back to a parish in the diocese of Cahors, France, and the questions still open — is in the case study, Two Families the Trees Merged, and its methodology.
Is there a merged family in your tree?
Fur-trade and Métis lines are full of shared names. Storyline Genealogy works from the original registers and account books to separate what the trees have joined — with every conclusion cited and every open question stated.
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