52 Ancestors - Week 16

 SHOULD BE A MOVIE

There are dozens of stories in my family tree that should be made into movies...including the story about gunslinger Joel Collins that I posted in Week 11. Some of these stories I have already written about in my Belle's Letters blog.  There are also a lot of stories from my mother's Begue family that I have written about in my book Mama's Family: The Mostly True Story of the Begue Family of Louisiana and Mississippi. There are several stories in my Witherspoon branch including a first person account by my ancestor's older brother of the boat trip that brought the entire family from Ireland to South Carolina. But for this week's theme I decided to go farther back in time, and farther out on a limb, on my Booksh branch.

Anne Coudray Leonard (1709-1776)

My Fifth Great Grandmother, Anne Coudray, was one of the survivors of the Natchez Massacre. I had found her in the traditional genealogical way of going back in time one family at a time, mostly through Catholic Church records in Louisiana. One day when I was doing research in Vero Beach, Florida, at the Indian River County library I discovered the story of her involvement in the Natchez Massacre.

As background here is the short version of a very long story taken from Wikipedia:

 The Natchez Massacre was an attack by the native Natchez people on French colonists near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, on November 29, 1729. The French had lived along side the Natchez people in the Louisiana colony for more than a decade, mostly conducting peaceful trade and occasionally intermarrying. A new French colonial commandant, Sieur de Chepart, arrived and upset the delicate balance, demanding that the Natchez give up their main village for his plantation near Fort Rosalie. The Natchez planned and carried out an attack on the fort and homesteads and killed about 230 French soldiers and colonists. Some of the colonists escaped and fled to New Orleans while about 30 women were held captive in the fort. After weeks-long negotiations for the release of the remaining captives the Natchez slipped away during the night. The surviving women were brought to New Orleans and placed under the protection of the Ursuline nuns while they arranged matches with soldiers and male colonists who needed wives.

There have been many books written on the Natchez Massacre including Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand's 1827 epic Les Natchez, incorporating his earlier best-selling novellas into a longer narrative. Chateaubriand saw the Natchez Massacre as the defining moment in the history of the Louisiana colony, a position consistent with the views of other 18th-century historians, such as Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny.

One of the most recent books about the Natchez Massacre is  The True Story of Pierre and Marie Mayeaux by Kenneth Myers published in 2017. It is definitely worth a read.

In The Louisiana Historical Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 3 January 1918, p.126-127 there is a list of "those killed at the time that the massacre was begun." In the list of 183 total killed are:

"17.   Chartier - Julien, from Burgundy, his wife and child, came to the concession of Mr. de Koly"

Anne Coudray was the wife of Julien Chartier.  We don't know what happened to their child and assume it was one of the victims.  On 11 July 1730 Anne was married to widower Jean Baptiste Leonard. According to their marriage record at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans she was a "native of Plouanne [Prouasne?] diocese of St. Malo, Brittany, France." Her parents were Francois Coudray and Gillet Gautier. She was born c1709. (Estimated from her age 67 at death in 1776.)

Her new husband Jean Baptiste Leonard was a "native of Liege, our parishioner, widower of Marie Paulus." There is a Leonard listed among the  Natchez dead as #23. "Leonard - Gascon, came to the concession of Mr. Law) but we don't know if he was related. We do have many other ancestors that were among the John Law settlers in Louisiana.

There is a 7 April 1721 listing for Jean Baptiste Leonard, his wife and 4 children listed on the Venus bound for Louisiana from L'Orient [Belgium], a soldier-worker of the company. [Company of the Indies]. He is listed as a gardener in December 1721. L'Orient was the port from which the John Law German settlers departed in 1721.

Anne and Jean Baptiste had three children, Marie Francoise, Jean Baptiste, and Louis. It was Louis that is our ancestor. He married Marie Anne Dardenne in 1764 at the St. Louis Cathedral. They had 8 children including Honore Leonard (1771-1861), who fought in the Battle of New Orleans and was the oldest ancestor that the family had memories of. All of these records are in the Sacremental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Jean Baptiste Leonard died 9 March 1757 at about age 66.  Anne Coudray Leonard died 1 October 1776 at age 67.