Two Families the Trees Merged

The Challenge

On January 21, 1839, Father François Norbert Blanchet performed a long sequence of baptisms and marriages at the Willamette mission — regularizing, in a single day, the country unions of the French-Canadian and Métis families of French Prairie. Two of those marriages have been mistaken for one ever since.

In marriage entry M15, Joseph Delard, of Sorel, married Lisette Souchouabe — a Shuswap woman. In a separate entry, M5, Joseph Despard, of Saint-Hyacinthe, married Lisette Tchinouke — a Chinook woman. Two grooms, two brides, two nations, two sets of children, two origin parishes — recorded on the same day by the same priest, before the same two witnesses.

The consequence is not cosmetic. It erases the documented Shuswap identity of a real woman and replaces it with a borrowed Chinook one — and it grafts a prestige bloodline, Comcomly’s, onto a family it never touched. Every descendant who relies on these trees inherits the wrong nation, the wrong mother-in-law, and the wrong children.

Nothing in the 1839 register supports the conflation. The merge exists because two families who married on the same day, sharing a groom’s given name and a bride’s given name, were copied together from tree to tree without anyone returning to the record that had kept them apart all along.

The Breakthrough

Different origin parishes. Different children. Different bride’s nation. Each bride was baptized that same day in her own entry, Lisette Souchouabe as B38 and Lisette Tchinouke as B27. The next morning the children followed, each entry naming both parents: Marie Anne (3), Basile (6), and Antoine (9 months) Delard as B53–B55, children of Joseph Delard and Lisette Souchouabe — their ages exactly those of the M15 clause — and Marie Anne (5) and Rose (3) Despard as B57–B58, children of Joseph Despard and Lisette Tchinouk. And the published index to the register keeps “Delard” and “Despard” as separate surname blocks — its editor never merged them.

Two women, two nations, two deaths a decade apart. The Chinook identity — and any connection to Comcomly — belongs to the woman who died in 1851, not to the Shuswap woman who died in 1841. Her baptism (B38) records her nation and her age and names no father and no mother.

With the couple correctly identified, Joseph Delard’s own ancestry runs, generation by generation, from the Willamette Valley back to a single parish in France — each step resting on a record in hand.

The Québec record falls silent on Joseph after his 1792 baptism — no marriage, no burial there — exactly what one expects of a man who married and died in Oregon. The two records meet with no overlap and no contradiction: a clean handoff from Sorel to the Columbia.

On the immigrant’s wife’s side, the line carries seventeenth-century Québec depth through the Therrien, Jahan Laviolette, and Trépanier families (PRDH-IGD #12544, #5760), reaching the founding-era marriages of the Île d’Orléans parishes.

The Result

Joseph Delard was baptized at Sorel in 1792 and went west with the North West Company — engaged at Montreal in January 1817 — and died at St. Louis, Marion County, in 1869. His first wife, Lisette Souchouabe, was a Shuswap woman: her nation named in her own baptism, her six children named in the 1839 legitimation, her death at St. Paul in February 1841. In January 1843 he married a second time, to Marie Toussaint Poirier — and that entry names him the widower of “Elizabeth Shoushwab,” her nation stated once more in a record written two years after her death. The two marriages and their two sets of children are kept distinct in the record; only the trees confuse them.

Joseph and Lisette’s son Augustin Delard — indexed by the Oregon State Archives under the alias “Delore, Quinn” — married Zoé Quintal at St. Louis Church in Marion County on August 25, 1857. The marriage record names both parent-couples in a single entry: Augustin as the legal son of Joseph Delard and the late Lisette, and Zoé as the daughter of Laurent Quintal and Marie Anne Nipissing. In one document, two documented fur-trade families are joined — and this couple links directly to the Quintal–Nipissing line traced elsewhere in these pages.

What the record gives for Lisette is considerable: her nation (Shuswap), her approximate birth (about 1805–07 — aged 32 at her baptism, 36 at her burial), her 1839 baptism and marriage, her 1841 death, and the six children who survived her. What it does not give is the names of her own parents — her baptism records her as born of non-Christian parents of the Shuswap nation, without naming them, as was typical for an Indigenous woman entering the sacramental record as an adult. Her ancestry reaches an honest limit there. It does not reach Comcomly; that was always a different woman’s family.

The conflation corrected here is a textbook example of how Métis and fur-trade genealogies go wrong: a shared given name, a shared community, a single ceremony, and a record read in fragments rather than in full. The uncorrected version does more than misfile two couples. It strips a Shuswap woman of her documented nation and hands her a Chinook chief’s lineage that belonged to her namesake at the same wedding. The register kept them apart. The correction only required reading it.