Marianne Lalande

• Reference: WikiTree Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jan 22 2019, 12:38:12 UTC

See "Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans" p. 39

Marianne Lalande (or Delha) gave birth to a daughter named Maria Francesca in 1755. The father was probably a Frenchman named Francois Monplaisir Chauvin Beaulieu, and his daughter often went by the shorter name Francoise (or Francesca) Monplaisir.

Francoise Monplaisir lived with Michel Dragon, a Greek immigrant and slave trader, whom she eventually "married" in 1815 when he was seventy years old. In 1777 they baptized a daughter, Maria Anna Dragon, who years later became the legitimate wife of her father's friend Andreas Dimitry, also from Greece. George Pandelly's mother, Euphrosine, was born of this union in 1801.

Consisting of marriage certificates, baptismal records, notarized slave sales, and wills, Wiltz's evidence clearly shows that the Monplaisir-Dragon-Dimitry women were commonly referred to as "mulatresses" or "quateroons." The oldest document, a baptismal certificate from 1756, records the ceremonial rites given to "Maria Francesca, mulatress daughter, aged about eight months, of Marianne Lalande, slave of Mr. Lalande le Conseiller." When Maria Francesca baptized her own daughter in 1777, the official record identified her as a "free mulatto woman." In various transactions from 1785 to 1795, including a debt recovery and a number of slave sales, Francoise appears as a "free quadroon woman of this city." The public record of these women as free mulatto women or free quadroons began to vanish in 1799 with the marriage of Dragon's and Monplaisir's daughter, Maria Anna, to Dimitry.

The marriage certificate refers to Maria Anna as the "natural legitimate child" of Dragon and notes that Pere Antoine read "a publication of the marriage bans at their ceremony." These factors betray a certain ambiguity surrounding the marriage. White fathers typically referred to their white children by marriage as legitimate and their duly acknowledged children of color as their natural children. Here, Maria Anna receives both appellations. In reading the "marriage bans," Pére Antoine—a priest who was reputed as being open to performing interracial "marriages"— seemed to acknowledge the potential impropriety of the marriage"' Despite these caveats, the ceremony proceeded with "no cause or impediment preventing [it]." By 1801, when Maria Anna and Dimitry gave birth to a daughter, she could be baptized as legitimate and recorded on the white register of baptismal acts.