me a few minutes.” She indicated a sitting area where Brigitte could wait, in front of one of the film reader stations, where later they would look at microfilm together, poring over lists and records and birth and death certificates from the region, photographed by the researchers who traveled around the world to film them.
It took about twenty minutes for her to return, carrying the film, and she and Brigitte sat down together. She turned on the machine and they began looking at what she had found. It was a full ten minutes before Brigitte saw anything that looked familiar to her, and then suddenly there it was, de Margerac, Louise, born in 1819, followed by Philippe, Edmond, and Tristan, all born within a few years of each other, and in 1825, Christian, who died a few months later, as an infant. The records were from a county in Brittany. It led them to look back further to the previous generation. It took another half hour, and there were three of them, boys, born between 1786 and 1789, right before the French Revolution: Jean, Gabriel, and Paul, brothers born of the same parents. This time, searching forward again, there were records of their deaths in Quimper and Carnac, in Brittany. All three of them had died between 1837 and 1845. Brigitte made careful note of their names in a notepad she had brought for that purpose, and the years they had been born and died. And by moving farther forward on the microfilm, they found the deaths of Louise and Edmond de Margerac, sister and brother, in the 1860s. But nowhere could they find records of the deaths of Philippe and Tristan. The young library assistant suggested they might have moved away and died elsewhere, and Brigitte knew they were the de Margeracs who had come to New Orleans circa 1850 and eventually died there. She knew that was the part of the research her mother had already gathered. Brigitte had written down everything so far to share with her, although she was planning to buy copies of the microfilm documents for her mother as well.
They went back to an earlier generation, and found the births of both Tristan and Jean de Margerac, names that had been used again in later generations. Jean had been born in 1760, and Tristan a decade before that. There was no record of Jean’s death, but it showed that Tristan, Marquis de Margerac, had died in 1817, after the abdication of Napoleon, and the Marquise de Margerac a few months later, but there was no record of her birth in the area before that. Brigitte wondered if she had come from another part of France, and as they checked the date of her death again, only two months after her husband, Brigitte scribbled the information down and was struck by her name. It didn’t sound French to her.
“What kind of name is that?” she asked the librarian. “Is that French?”
“I don’t think so.” The woman smiled at Brigitte. Like all families, or most of those she helped research, they had uncovered a mystery in hers. The first name of the Marquise de Margerac was listed as Wachiwi, in the careful scrolled hand of the county clerk at the time of her death in 1817. “It’s a Native American name actually. I’ve seen it before. I can look it up for you, but as far as I know, it’s Sioux.”
“How weird to give a French girl a Sioux name.” Brigitte looked intrigued.
The librarian left the reading station and looked it up while Brigitte checked her notes again, and then returned to confirm what she had said. “It’s Sioux. It means ‘dancer.’ It’s such a pretty name.”
“How odd that a French noblewoman would have a Sioux name.” It sounded a little eccentric to Brigitte, although who knew what the fashions had been then, or where Wachiwi’s mother had heard the name?
“Not really,” the librarian explained. “I’ve heard that Louis XVI was fascinated by Native Americans before the Revolution. I’ve read stories about how he invited Indian chiefs to France, and presented them to court as honored guests. Probably a few of them stayed, and the most common ports of entry then were in Brittany. So perhaps a Sioux chief and his daughter remained in France, and she married the marquis, your relative. She wouldn’t have come alone, and most likely one of the chiefs brought to court was accompanied by his daughter. The Revolution was in 1789, and if she came to France before that in the 1780s, that would make her about the right age. Assuming she was somewhere in her teens when she came into France in the 1780s, she would have been in her fifties when she died in 1817, which was considered a great age for a woman then. The three boys born between 1786 and 1789 were undoubtedly hers. More than likely she was a Sioux woman who came to Brittany from the States, and captured the heart of the marquis. I’ve never come across a Frenchwoman called Wachiwi-all of the women I’ve read about with that name were Dakota Sioux.
“There were definitely Sioux in France in those days, and some just never left. It’s a little-known piece of history, but it has always fascinated me. They weren’t brought in as slaves or prisoners, they were brought over as guests, and several were presented at court.”
Brigitte was enthralled by what she said. She had found a piece of history in her own family that had sparked her interest. Somehow, somewhere, for some reason, the Marquis de Margerac, who would have been the grandfather of her mother’s great-grandfather, had married a young Sioux woman and made her a marquise, and she had borne him three sons, the eldest of whom was named for the marquis’s younger brother, who had died somewhere along the way. They found a record a few minutes later of two other of the marquis’s children, born earlier than Wachiwi’s three sons. Their names were Agathe and Matthieu. The marquise listed as their mother had a different name than Wachiwi, and she died in 1778, on the same date their youngest child was born. She had obviously died in childbirth, and Wachiwi had been a second wife to him. It was fascinating piecing it all together from the ledgers the Mormons had photographed in Brittany.
“How would I find out more information about Wachiwi?” Brigitte asked Meg with a look of delight over the information she’d been given and that they had unearthed together. It had far exceeded her expectations and surely even her mother’s. She had gone back another hundred years from what her mother had been able to learn, and now they had some really interesting things to work with, like a young Sioux woman married to a marquis in Brittany.
“You’d have to go to the Sioux for that information. They keep records, not as detailed as ours, or as varied geographically obviously. But they’ve transcribed a lot of the oral histories. It’s not as easy to find people, but sometimes you do. It’s worth a look.”
“Where would I go to find that? To the Bureau of Indian Affairs?” Brigitte asked her.
“No, I think to the Sioux historical office in South Dakota. Most of the material is there. It might be hard to find a record of a young woman, unless she was the daughter of an important chief, or had done something illustrious herself, like Sacajawea, but the Lewis and Clark expedition was about twenty years later than our dates for Wachiwi,” Meg said thoughtfully. They both felt as though they had a new friend, and Brigitte felt suddenly bonded to the ancestor who had married the marquis. “You look a little Sioux yourself,” the librarian said cautiously, not sure how Brigitte would react to that information, and she looked wistful as the librarian said it.
“My father was Irish. I always thought that accounted for my black hair, but maybe it’s not him at all. Maybe it’s some kind of throwback to Wachiwi.” She suddenly loved that idea, and wanted to know everything she could find out about her. They pored over the records at the Family History Library for another hour, but for now there was nothing more. She had discovered three generations of relatives, all descended from Tristan and Wachiwi de Margerac, and a mystery she had never known of before that felt like a gift. She thanked Meg profusely and it was midafternoon when she got back to her room at the hotel and called her mother. Marguerite sounded in good spirits and said that she and her partner had won at bridge.
“Have I got a fascinating piece of family history for you!” Brigitte said victoriously, in a voice of excitement that delighted her mother.
“You found something?” Her mother sounded thrilled at the news.
“Lots of somethings. Three generations of de Margeracs in Brittany, and two who have no death dates, Philippe and Tristan, and since Philippe was the eldest, he would have been the marquis at that time. I was able to trace back three generations.”
“Those are the two who went to New Orleans in 1848 and 1850!” Marguerite said excitedly. “Ohmigod, you found them, Brig! Who else was there? I know all about those two. Philippe was my great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather. His brother Tristan moved to New York after the Civil War, but Philippe died in New Orleans before that. I’m so excited you found their birth records. Who else did you find? The Mormons are amazing, aren’t they?”
“They’re incredible. I found their sister or cousin Louise and brother Edmond, who died in France, and a baby brother Christian, who died as an infant. And in the generation before that, Jean, Gabriel, and Paul de Margerac, whose father was the Marquis Tristan de Margerac, and I found his two earlier children as well, and both his wives, one who died in childbirth, and the other who died around the same time he did. We should probably go to France and look at records there to discover exactly who was married to whom. Sometimes it’s a little hard to figure out who are siblings and who are cousins, unless they make it very clear. They don’t always, but the really exciting piece of history I discovered was the second wife of the marquis at the time of Louis XVI.”
