Esther Fouché, b4

There are 2 Esthers

Philippe Fouchè, arrived in 1688 with the ship "Voorschoten", with his wife and three children: Anne (6 jaar), Esther(5), Jacques (3).

So this Esther born +/- 1683

Source: Geslagsregister van Vroeë Kaapse families. Cor Pama

Hugenote aan die Kaap 1688-1988 - Prof. Pieter Coertzen Naam: Fouche, Esther.(1683 -?) Dogter van Philippe Fouche Plek van herkoms: Suevres(Orleanais) Datum van aankoms: 1688 saam met haar ouers Philippe Fouche en Anne Souchay aan boord die Voorschoten. Gevestig te Wildenpaardenjacht,Paarl. ONGETROUD.

Jacques PINARD, born 1665 arrived on the same ship in 1688 together with his wife Esther FOUCHE who he married on 10 Desember 1687 in the Waalsekerk in Delft. She was then 21 years old so born in 1667.

"Esther Foucher has not been positively identified with others of that surname, but it may reasonably be assumed that she was related to the Foucher family which travelled out on the Voorschoten. These were Gaspard Foucher, twenty-one years of age, who perhaps died on the voyage, and his brother Philippe, accompanied by his wife and three children: Anne, aged six, Esther, five years of age, and Jacques, who was three. Philippe Foucher was a cultivator from the parish of Saint-Lubin de Suevres, the church of the village of Suevres, a short distance from Mer on the road to Blois and not far from Menars, seat of Jean-Jacques Charron, the marquis of Menars, intendant of the Orleanais in 1674 and of Paris in 1681. Saint-Lubin was a sixth-century bishop of Chartres.

The father of Philippe and Gaspard Foucher, the agriculturalist Bernard Foucher of the farm La Bruslee near Suevres, was born in March 1617 and died in January 1674, leaving a widow Anne, daughter of David Bruere of Mer. In this town lived her brother Etienne and his wife Susanne Ylaire, very probably the parents of the Cape refugee Etienne Bruere, who also sailed on the Voorschooten, A wainwright by trade, he was then twenty-three years of age. Anne Bruere’s brother, a miller, was still in Mer after the revocation. Mer too was the home of Pierre Foucher, a cooper, and his wife Anne Rousseau. Pierre died on April 20, 1669 and the burial notice with its characteristically quaint spelling and vagueness about age, says of him: “Le deffeunt lors de son vivant estoit age de trante quatre a trante sinq ans ou en Viron”. Present among the relatives at the funeral was the vine-dresser Noe Retif. It will be apparent therefore that there were close relationships among the refugee families from the region at the Cape of Good Hope.

The temple at Mer and that at Blois to the south-west must have held a special place in the affections of those from this part of the Loire valley who made the Cape their home. The congregation at Mer was a flourishing one until Calvinists began to leave the district after 1680, and that despite attempts to make Catholic converts and to curtail worship. A Catholic missionary drive in 1659, a few years before the great famine in the district, is said to have had some success; in 1668 a dispute over title led to the demolition of the temple, but a new one was soon erected to replace it. Several provincial synods were held there, one as late as 1679, and church life continued until July 1685, under the pastoral care in the last decade of Salomon le Clerc and Louis Scoffier. The former was twice imprisoned in the Bastille before he was able to enjoy his state pension as a suitably repentant retired minister; the latter chose exile in the United Provinces.

It was Scoffier who officiated at the marriage of Philippe Foucher on Monday, June 7, 1677. Philippe took as his wife Anne, daughter of Paul Souchay and Anne Paillevert of Aunay. This was clearly an excellent match. The merchant Paul Souchay was the son of Jean Souchay, an Aunay lawyer, and was connected not only with the world of local commerce, but also with a landowning lesser nobility which had ramifications from the Blesois to the Perche. And, in the context of Cape families from this region, we may note the alliance of the Souchays with the Le Roux family of Blois and Nantes. On April 3, 1684 the merchant Paul Souchay de Lamerie married Constance, daughter of Theodore le Roux, agent for the West India Company, whose son Alexandre, a merchant, became an Amsterdam citizen in March 1686. Paul and his wife also fled to the United Provinces, joining the ’s-Hertogenbosch congregation. A son Paul was born to them there is April 1688. The father served in William Ill’s army, but died in poverty in London; the son, however, prospered in the English capital and attained high office in the Goldsmiths’ Company before his death in 1751. A second link between the Fouchers and the Souchays is revealed in the registers of Blois and Mer. On July 1, 1685 Jean Foucher married Marthe Dutens at Blois. The bridegroom was the son of Anne Souchay and the late Pierre Foucher, probably the usher of that name at Mer who died before March 1670.77 The Dutens were of some distinction in the Blesois and Touraine.

Philippe Foucher, the Cape settler, evidently moved into the merchant class after his marriage to Anne Souchay. Sons Philippe were born to the couple at Suevres on May 8, 1679 and September 26, 1680, Salomon le Clerc administering baptism to each. Both must have died in infancy, unless the son Philippe at the Cape was the second of them, whose name was perhaps accidentally omitted from the passenger list for the Voorschooten, or who travelled separately.The daughter Anne would seem to have been born in November 1681,but there is no mention at Mer or Blois of the children Esther and Jacques. Military means to encourage conversion were not used at Mer until December 1685, but news of Marillac’s brutal dragonnade in Poitou in 1681 cannot have failed to have caused considerable alarm among Calvinists in the Blesois and the Beauce. It is therefore possible that the Fouchers took refuge in Paris, particularly as it is known that one member of the family made his way there. The escape of a Pierre Foucher of Mer to the United Provinces is noted in the papers of the police chief La Reynie. A young man of twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, he had abjured on April 6, 1686 and had been working as a waiter in a tavern on the Place de Greve, but had fled later in the year to The Hague where he was received into the Walloon congregation on October 5. He was perhaps the Pierre Foucher who married Marie Hattenville of Bolbec in Normandy at Rotterdam on September 15, 1692.

If the precise relationship between Pierre Foucher and the Cape refugee Philippe Foucher is uncertain, there is no doubt about that between Philippe and the exile in England, David Foucher. The two were brothers and David made his home in London, where on October 22, 1693 he married Marthe des Fontaines at the church of La Patente in Spitalfields. A daughter Susanne was born to them while they were living among the Huguenot weavers of Stepney. Her name appears in the baptismal register of the French church in Threadneedle Street, London on July 29, 1705."

• M. Boucher (1981). French speakers at the Cape: The European Background. Pretoria, UNISA: Ch 5: Cape settlers I: from the Loire to the Channel