| Notes |
- Denis Beauregard (citation details below) calls him "Jacques Chauvin de Charleville", but as noted below by the Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, no evidence sems to exist that he used a "dit" name.
From the Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (citation details below):
CHAUVIN, Jacques, colonial settler. Chauvin’s role in the early Louisiana colony was largely overshadowed by the contributions of three brothers. Baptized at Montreal, Canada, on May 17, 1672, Jacques and a younger brother Joseph Chauvin de Léry (q.v.) arrived in Louisiana with the second expedition of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (q.v.). Both appear to have been among those Canadians who accompanied Iberville to France to seek the king’s support for a second Le Moyne expedition, as their names appear on the roll of Canadians ordered by the king to embark on the Renommée at La Rochelle, October 17, 1699. The 1700 census of the garrison at Biloxi reports that Chauvin received an annual wage of 30 livres. After the colony’s site was transferred to Mobile Bay in 1702, he appears periodically in the records of governmental affairs -- sometimes with contemptuous references, made by political opponents, to his illiteracy and humble origins. In 1704, Chauvin was one of the several “private settlers” who shipped a small quantity of goods to Veracruz, Mexico, for black market sale, to boost the economy of the starving Mobile post. The circa 1706 map of Fort Louis de Mobile assigns “Chauvin, l’aîné” a lot on Le Marché Square, adjacent to his younger brother Nicolas Chauvin de La Frénière, who had come south from Montreal to join him. In 1708, Jacques was one of eight witnesses called to testify on behalf of Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville (q.v.), when that leader was accused of incompetency and mismanagement. (Chauvin’s testimony also reveals that, unlike his Louisiana brothers, he used no dit name (sobriquet) at the time; and no evidence of a dit for him has been found elsewhere.)
Beyond this point, Chauvin’s life is an enigma. In 1708, he sold a dwelling at the post and virtually disappears from colonial records. The meager subsequent facts that are known all center upon his marriage, for which no record is extant. That union, prior to 1715, made Chauvin the brother-in-law of the region’s wealthiest settler, Jean Baptiste Baudreau dit Graveline, a Canadian cattle rancher of Dauphin Island and subsequently Pascagoula. Their wives were sisters -- Chauvin marrying Marie Anne de la Vergne and Graveline marrying Marthe de la Vergne (a relationship known only because Chauvin’s son and daughter petitioned the Superior Council in 1747 to grant them financial control over their late aunt’s husband who was by then senile). This suggests that Chauvin may have followed Graveline to then-remote Pascagoula -- a supposition supported by the aberrational baptisms of Chauvin’s two children. His daughter Marie Anne was baptized at Mobile on January 13, 1715, at which time the child was said to have been born there on January 3, 1715; her godmother was the well-placed Marie Magdelaine de la Mothe, daughter of the colony’s governor Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac (q.v.). However, under the date January 13, 1727, the Mobile registers record the baptism of a son born to Jacques and Marie Anne and cite the child’s birth on January 9, 1715; godparents were prominent residents of New Orleans. The possibility that both children were baptized on the same January 13 and that one of the records was later entered out of sequence seems nil; the 1715 godmother was not in the colony in 1727, and the 1727 godparents were not in the colony in 1715 (nor did the village of New Orleans then exist). The connection with Graveline --and by extension with his kinsman, Simon dit La Pointe of Canada and La Rochelle -- suggests that the de la Vergne sisters may have been part of the Canadian De la Vergne family which sent at least two sons to New Orleans by the 1720s (Jean de la Vergne, son of Pierre de la Vergne and Françoise Simon; and Louis de la Vergne, son of Louis de la Vergne and Marie Simon; Louis, Jr., witnessed Simon dit La Pointe’s 1723 marriage at New Orleans). Whatever the origins of Jacques Chauvin’s wife or the place of their residence, both he and she were dead by January 30, 1736, when their daughter wed for the second time.
|
Nielsen Hayden genealogy
Bef 1672 - Bef 1736 (< 63 years)
[2, 3] 
Siblings