The Other Joseph
Gaspard · a brother’s baptism, 1798
Jos. Fréd. · Dispard · Company accounts, 1821–34
Joseph Despard · marriage M5, 1839
Joseph Frederic · published index
The Challenge
Marriage entry M5 of 21 January 1839 records Joseph Despard, “of Saint-Hyacinthe,” marrying Lisette Tchinouke, a Chinook woman, and legitimizing four children. That much is plain. Who he was is not, because the compiled record splits and crosses him.
The published register files the Despard family under two headings — Joseph, husband of the Chinook Lisette, and Joseph Frederic, 1788–1875, a long-serving Company man — inviting the reading that there were two Josephs.
A widely used compilation of Oregon’s French-Canadian pioneers gives him a birth in 1797, son of Alexandre Frédéric/Despard and Marie-Anastasie Jambard. The Company’s own ages put his birth in 1793.
Merged with the other groom of the same day, he is attached in public trees to Lisette Souchouabe — Joseph Delard’s Shuswap wife — the same conflation that gives her a Chinook chief’s ancestry.
Were the Company’s “Joseph Frederick Despard of Yamaska,” the M5 groom “of Saint-Hyacinthe,” and the index’s “Joseph Frederic” one man or several — and whose son was he?
| Outfit | Name | Age | Parish | Yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1821 | Jos. Fréd. | — | — | — |
| 1824 | Jos. | 31 | Yamaska | 9 |
| 1826 | Joseph Fréd. | 33 | Yamaska | 11 |
The Breakthrough
Joseph Toussaint Despar was born 5 May and baptized 6 May 1793 at Rivière-Ouelle, son of Jean-Félix Frédéric Despar and Marie Judith Jambard, the father absent. He is the only Joseph among their children, and the Québec record never mentions him again — no marriage, no burial.
By 1801 the family had settled at Saint-Hyacinthe, on the Yamaska River, where a brother married as “Théophile Frédéric” and the father was buried in 1843; the mother was buried at nearby Saint-Dominique in 1861.
The compiled genealogy’s 1797 birth belongs to another branch: two Despard brothers married two Jambard women, in 1787 and 1793, and the compilation crossed them. The 1793 baptism is the one the Company’s ages require.
A Joseph Despard is paid on the Lake Nipissing outfit in 1814. By 1820 he is in the English River department, outfitted at Fort William and wintering at Green Lake; his opening balance in the equipment book, 192 livres 12 sols, is carried to the sol into the servants’ accounts. At the 1821 merger he is a middleman at 400 livres, and the first Hudson’s Bay Company abstract writes him “Jos. Fréd.” at Île-à-la-Crosse.
By 1824 he is in the Columbia, aged 31, of Yamaska, a middleman with nine years’ service — on the line directly below Joseph Deslard of Sorel. Two years later he is “Joseph Fréd.,” 33, eleven years’ service. Age 31 in 1824 is the 1793 baptism exactly.
In his 1852 donation land claim, Joseph Despard swore he had lived on and farmed his French Prairie land since December 1831, and that his wife Lisette had died in April 1851. The claim was certified in 1868 with the south half to “the heirs at law of Lisette Despard his late wife, deceased,” and patented in 1873.
The published register records the Chinook Lisette, wife of Joseph Despard, dying at St. Paul on 27 April 1851.
The Result
The 1850 census finds Joseph Despard, 58, with Lizette, 40, and the M5 children Joseph and Marguerite, with two younger daughters. The 1870 census finds “Jos. Despard,” 81, living with Mary A. McKay, 38 — the M5 daughter Marie Anne — and her children by three marriages. The Company’s Joseph Frederick of Yamaska, the M5 groom of Saint-Hyacinthe, and the land claimant are one man, and the published index’s two headings are two names for him.
Despar at the font, Gaspard in a brother’s baptism, Frédéric in the Company’s books, Despard in the mission register: the variants are the ordinary spelling drift of a family surnamed Despard dit Frédéric, whose immigrant grandfather is recorded as born in Hungary. None of them is a second man.
The Chinook Lisette was this Joseph’s wife — by the marriage register, by her death entry, and by a land claim that names her heirs. Whatever connection her family may have had to the Chinook head chief belongs here. It never belonged to Lisette Souchouabe, who married Joseph Delard the same day.
He was baptized in 1793. The Company recorded his age exactly. In Oregon the ages ran ahead of him — 58 in 1850, 72 in 1860, 81 in 1870, born “1790” by his own oath — and the published index’s 1788 is the end of that drift. Joseph Delard’s ages drifted the same way.
The document-by-document reasoning — the baptism and family reconstitution, the reconciled ledger accounts, the servants’ abstracts, the land-claim file and the censuses — is set out in the full methodology.
Full Methodology Two Families the Trees Merged The Steersman’s Ledger