Marguerite Bertrand

A mother and godmother at Michilimackinac

At Michilimackinac, the Great Lakes community around the straits connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron in present-day northern Michigan, Father Payet recorded baptismal ceremonies on July 16, 1786 for four children of Daniel Bourassa and Marguerite Bertrand. Daniel had been born in June 1780, Marguerite in May 1782 and Archange in March 1784. Jean Baptiste, born on June 24, 1786, was only weeks old. The entries preserve a household already several years into family life.

Four days later, Payet solemnized Daniel and Marguerite’s marriage. The register explains that they had previously pledged their consent before witnesses while waiting for an approved priest to confirm the union. The July 20 entry records the religious confirmation of their existing union.

It names Marguerite’s parents as Laurent Bertrand and the late Marie-Thérèse Dulignon. Daniel’s parents were René Bourassa and Anne Chevalier. Louis Carignan, a notary, and Joseph Oneille, a trader, appear among the witnesses. The baptismal entries likewise place the family among a network of named sponsors, including Pierre Grignon, Jean Baptiste Laframboise and Luc Chevalier.

Marguerite also acted as a sponsor herself. On July 20, a baptismal entry for her brother Joseph, son of Laurent Bertrand and Marie-Thérèse Dulignon, identifies the godmother as Madame Bourassa, the child’s sister. Another entry that day names Madame Daniel Bourassa as godmother to Jean Baptiste, a child of Luc Chevalier. The priest recorded that she could not sign her name. Her participation nevertheless appears plainly in the register: she was present as a sister, godmother and member of the parish community.

The Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s family history describes Marguerite and Daniel as parents of fourteen children and as godparents within the Pokagon family. It also identifies her brother Joseph Bertrand as a trader. These connections locate her family in the French and Native communities of the Great Lakes, where kinship and religious sponsorship crossed households.

Later marriage records continue to name Marguerite through her children. Her daughter Marguerite married Guillaume Varin in 1804. An 1821 entry regularizing Madeleine Bourassa’s marriage to William McGulpin names Daniel and Marguerite as her parents.

In those July entries, she is more than a name between generations. Four children are brought into the parish record, an existing marriage receives its religious confirmation, and Marguerite stands as a godmother within her own family and another household.

The family reconstruction also records her father as Joseph-Laurent or Laurent and her mother as Marie-Thérèse Dulignon or Lamirande. Leon appears among the couple’s children. The tribal history identifies Leopold Pokagon and Elizabeth as the parents of children for whom the couple served as godparents.