Jean-Baptiste Oligny

Corrèze to Fort Saint-Frédéric

Jean-Baptiste was the son of Jean Oligny and Jeannette Balle of Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel, in the diocese of Tulle. He crossed to New France and ended up at Fort Saint-Frédéric, on the shore of Lake Champlain, where he married Marie-Françoise Moitié dit Lafonderie on 18 February 1759. The marriage contract was drawn by the fort's chaplain, since no notary was within reach — the same arrangement that produced the one document naming his own parents (see their page). One compiled family sheet gives the marriage location as "Dipeut, Récollet, Canada," which reads as a place name but almost certainly isn't one: the fort's chaplain from mid-1758 to mid-1759 was a Récollet named Père Antoine Depéret, and "Dipeut, Récollet" is very likely his own name and title, garbled by someone reading a hard-to-parse abbreviation. That reading is Probable, not confirmed — the 1759 marriage act itself has never been sighted; the contract survives, but the parish record of the marriage does not.

PRDH abstract of marriage contract #340314, 18 Feb 1759 · graded Probable as to the marriage and date, resting on an abstract rather than a sighted original — the contract itself survives, but no image of it has been sighted by this project; the officiant reading graded Probable

A daughter, and the couple sighted together for the first time

On 9 August 1771, twelve years into the marriage, a daughter was born and baptized the next day at Chambly — Marie Louise, the parish register naming both parents outright as husband and wife: "née hier du légitime mariage de Jean-Baptiste Oligny dit Lauvergnat et de Françoise Moitié." This is the first time anyone connected with this project has actually seen an original document naming the couple together as parents — everything else about their marriage has rested on PRDH's compiled record of the unsighted 1759 contract. This baptism doesn't prove where or exactly when they married; it proves, independently and on a sighted act, that they did.

Whether Marie Louise was already counted among the couple's known children under a different record, or is a genuinely new find, isn't yet settled. Existing family material gives the couple ten or eleven children; neither tally has been checked against her by name.

Baptismal act, Marie Louise Oligny, 9 Aug 1771 (bapt. 10 Aug), Chambly (St-Joseph), image sighted directly · graded Proven as to the baptism and the parents' identity as a married couple; the exact date and place of the 1759 marriage itself remains Probable, per the citation above

What actually happened to Marie-Françoise before she married him

For years, the family's own account held that Marie-Françoise, born at Fort Saint-Frédéric in 1742, was betrothed at thirteen to a Lieutenant Pierre Robineau of Bécancour, in a marriage bond signed 6 December 1755 — and that Robineau was killed in the war, freeing her to marry Jean-Baptiste in 1759. It's a good story. It also isn't what the document says.

The 6 December 1755 act is not a marriage bond. Its own section heading, in the full published source, reads "L'engagement d'une servante" — the hiring of a servant. Marie-Françoise's father hired her out to Lieutenant Robineau as a domestic servant for two and a half years, unpaid, to be compensated at the end of her term in clothing: six shirts, six kerchiefs, two petticoats, two pairs of stockings, and one pair of French shoes. There was no fiancé. There was no death in the war to explain why she married someone else four years later. Her term of service simply ran its course, ending around June 1758, and she married Jean-Baptiste roughly nine months after that.

The error is worth naming precisely because nobody involved in it lied. An early transcription rendered the French engagement as the English "Bond," and "Bond … to" reads, in English, like a betrothal. A later family account, working from that compressed rendering, filled the gap with a plausible ending — the fiancé dying in the war — to explain a four-year gap the record didn't actually need explained. See Corrections for this alongside the other claims this site has had to walk back.

P.-G. Roy, Hommes et choses du fort Saint-Frédéric (1946), full text · graded Proven — supersedes the earlier "marriage bond" reading entirely

A name that drifted, and a province he never lived in

Jean-Baptiste's own name shifts across the documents of his life: Jean Olignis Mathurin in the 1759 contract, plain Jean Oligny at his son Joseph's baptism in 1766, and Jean Baptiste Oligny dit Lauvergnac by his son's own wedding in 1784. That last form is the one that stuck for six generations — and it names the wrong province. He was from the Limousin, not the Auvergne; someone in the parish placed him one region over within a few years of his arrival, and the mistake outlived whoever made it. See Dit Names for the fuller mechanism.

Jean-Baptiste died 10 January 1810 and was buried two days later at St-Luc. Marie-Françoise outlived him by eighteen years, dying 14 October 1828 at Napierville. Family account has one branch of their descendants moving on to Wisconsin, where the surname was altered again, to Olena. The first half now has a man in it: their great-grandson Noé Oligny, born at St-Rémi in 1835, was probably the Noah Oligny farming in Jackson County, Wisconsin, by 1880. The second half has no document yet — the Wisconsin records write Oligny and Oligney, never Olena. See Open Questions.