Mathurin-Michel AMOUREUX was born in the small
French
seacoast town of Bourgneuf-en-Retz, near Nantes
on Dec 4,
1747
and died in Ste. Genevieve, MO. 84 years
later on April
26, 1832. His father, a retired military
officer, was
certified in
foreign
languages and the family
appears to
have been well
to do...Mathurin-Michel, his father and both grandfathers
bore the
appellation "noble Homme" indicating
that these
families
had
become
prosperous enough to reach
the bottom
of the
rung of
the noble class,
which was a matter
of
considerable
advantage in the 18th century
France.
Mathurin-Michel's
surviving papers
indicate that he had
received an excellent
education, further
proof of the family's
financial
circumstances.
By the 1780's, Mathurin-Michel was a large scale
merchant
at the
seaport of Lorient, in southern Brittany,
where he had
dealings with
numerous foreign merchants, in London,
Philadelphia and elsewhere.
At this point, Mathurin-Michel
seduced the orphaned
daughter
of a
sea captain, Perrine
Janvier, who produced
his only known
daughter in 1871. In
the following year, Amoureux married
Perrine and
acknowledged the child
as his own and the couple
produced
four
or five sons.
One of Amoureux's clients in this period was the
American
naval
hero John Paul Jones, who carried
operations against
the
British
from Lorient. Jones
eventually was hired by
Catherine
the Great
to improve
the Russian navy. He had left
property
with Amoureux
to be sold. Amoureux had a number
of exchanges
of correspondence
with Thomas Jefferson, then
U.S.
Ambassador
to France, about the
sale of these items
and
the transmittal of
the proceeds to Jones.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789,
Amoureux,
like
others in the business class and the
lesser
nobility, sided with
the
Revolutionaries. British
blockades of
French ports during the
revolutionary wars
apparently
crippled his business, but worse
was
to
follow: in 1793 much
of western France rose in revolt
against the
revolutionary
regime because of it's brutal
persecution
of the
Catholic
religion.
The conflict was
extremely bloody and
many
thousands of
revolutionary
soldiers and their sympathizers
were
slain
before the
government succeeded in suppressing
the
counter-revolution at the cost of some 200,000 lives.
During this storm period, the pro-Catholic
counter-
revolutionaries
pillaged Amoureux's house at
Lorient,
completing his financial ruin. Amoureux emigrated
to
the
United States
(with only his 14 year old
daughter,
Marie)
leaving his wife and
sons behind. Perrine lived
for
a
time in
a refugee camp near Rennes in Brittany,
a baby son
died
at
Nantes.
The privileged life
that the
family had enjoyed before
the
Revolution had come to
an
end. It appears that Amoureux
remained
forever
bitter against
the Catholic church because
of his losses
at
the hands of it's
defenders, and so when he
died in
Ste. Genevieve he
did
not have
a Catholic funeral,
although his widow did when she died in
1845.
In the U.S., Amoureux seems to have settled at first
at
Georgetown in the District of Columbia. He apparently
had
succeeded
in bringing some money with him, for he
traveled
about looking for
opportunities to open a
business of some
sort,
and corresponded with old business
associates in
Philadelphia
and elsewhere to seek their
advice (he
considered a winery,
a general store and other
ideas).
He also wrote periodically
over the next year or
more to
acquaintances in various American ports
(such as Boston)
to inquire
whether Perrine and their
children had arrived
there.
At some point in 1795, the family had apparently
somehow
been
reunited, and began to move west.
Amoureux appears
as
a property owner and taxpayer
in a couple of different
places in Kentucky
(1797 and
1801). At this time his youngest
son,
Benjamin was born
in
Frankfort on the 17th of November
1797.
Soon after in 1801,
Amoureux arrived in New Madrid,
Missouri
where his superior
education and his knowledge
of
the French
language procured him an
appointment as
probate
judge and
recorder after Missouri passed
under
American
control
in 1804.
In 1812 Mathurin-Michel and his family came to Ste.
Genevieve
where he held office as Justice of the Peace
for a
number of years,
and seems to have conducted a
thriving
mercantile business with
his sons. Once again,
his superior
education gave his status in the
community
and his previous
business experience was of great value.
He did not achieve
wealth, however, and in an effort to
increase his
property he
made periodic attempts to
collect on
old business debts
in
France and also to assert
whatever
claims he had to possible
inheritances from
various relatives
in France.
Slavery in Ste. Genevieve was as old as the town
itself,
and
even
older dating from the black mine laborers
brought
across
the
Mississippi by Renault. Even the
relatively rare
practice of enslaving
Native Americans
was not unknown
in colonial Ste.
Genevieve, because
of the general scarcity
of European women
on the
frontier. Creole men frequently
developed liaisons with
Indian and Negro
women, and often
lived as man and
wife in
the community.
Although both law and custom dictated against legal
sanctions for
such unions, in the laisse faire,
live-and-let-live,
easygoing world of
colonial French
culture they were not
unusual. But because slaves
had
value as property, events
took
place which are very much
at odds
with today's social
values.
For example, when Felicite Beauvais
freed
her slave
"Pelagie"
on June 12, 1833, she also freed Pelagie's
child,
*Felix (photo above), who was in reality also the son of
Beauvais' fellow Creole
townsman, Benjamin C. Amoureux.
Joseph, son of Benjamin was
forced to purchase his own
daughter, Clara, from L. C. Menard,
apparently the owner
of Joseph's wife Elizabeth at the time of
Clara's birth.
Although their relationship was evidently one of
permanent
commitment, they could not legally marry
in
Missouri because
laws
in effect at the time prohibited
interracial marriages.
No
official
record of it has been
found,
but a tradition in the
family
was that
Benjamin
and Pelagie
crossed the Mississippi
by boat
at night and
were secretly
married by a sympathetic
Catholic
priest on the
Illinois side.
At the time of Pelagie's death in 1890, long after the
days
of
slavery, her obituary listed her as the 'relict'
(widow)
of
Benjamin C. Amoureux. It states: "At her
home in Ste.
Genevieve,
on Tuesday, November 11, 1890,
Mrs. Pelagie
Amoureaux, relict of
Benjamin C. Amoureux,
aged 85 years
2 months and 6 days.
The deceased leaves
five children, of
who
two, Felix and
Joseph Amoureaux
are
well
known citizens
of
Ste. Genevieve.
The funeral took
place on Wednesday." In
Ste. Genevieve's
small world of
French culture
the community
had
long since
accepted this
type of living.
Descendents of
Benjamin and Pelagie occupied the
house
for
over
70 years, leaving it in the 1920's, and the
house,
now
some
two centuries old, still bears the
Amoureux name,
despite
a
succession
of owners. It is in
this interplay between
structure
and personality that this
house
assumes an
identity,
and take
it's place
in history.
*The St. Gemme Beauvais/Amoureux House was built
using
a
method of construction quite common in 18th
century
Ste.
Genevieve. Characterized by their wall
construction,
'Poteaux-en-terre' buildings were
constructed from heavy
hewn
timbers set vertically into
an earthen trench, the
upright
logs
were
placed close
together, with the interstices
filled with
a
mixture of
mud and animal hair or an infill of stone
rubble.
Buildings of this
type had no foundation and support
came from
the rot resistant
cedar log walls, today this
architectural style
is quite rare, with
Ste. Genevieve
claiming
three of the five
known surviving houses in
the
United States.
It was built in
about 1792 by Jean
Baptiste St.
Gemme
Beauvais.
(Photo of the Amoureux house below)
More photos of the Amoureux's . . . See
Amoureux
Photo Gallery
Amoureux records (Federal Census, Marriages,
Burials) . . .
See
African-American
Genealogy-Missouri Roots
Amoureux Family Trees -
Rootsweb Search Engine
(Submitter: Fran Barker)
Note:
Some of the information on this webpage was
taken from
the display boards in the Amoureux house
(provided by Tony
Pregaldin), other information and
some of the photos were provided by Amoureux
descendents.
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