Charlotte Bouniot

Charlotte had two children by Papineau: John (Jean--date of birth unknown; perhaps 1704-5); and Peter (Pierre), baptized in 1706. Her maiden name was written as Bounos when Pierre was christened.[1] In her second marriage, to Samuel Seely in Stamford, Connecticut, May 13, 1709, she is listed as Charlotte Popino.[2] Between 1710 and 1724 she had eight more children by Seely.[3]

The name Bounos exists in Greece but has not been found in North America during the colonial period, leading me to conclude that the actual name was different. So I began a search for her possible real name.

Frenchtown, the French settlement at Narragansett (East Greenwich, RI) was earlier and larger than New Oxford, involving forty or fifty families. Unfortunately, they bought land with a bad title and, in 1691, were forced to abandon it by the court and the adjacent English settlers whose claim was upheld. Twenty-one of the families went to New York, seven went to Boston, and René Grignon went to New Oxford.

One of the leaders in Frenchtown was Pierre Bouniot--variously spelled Bonniot, Bonyot, and Boigniot.[4] Bouniot with a silent "t" sounds a lot like Bounos. Bouniot was an educated and pious man who served as elder and secretary of the church, and frequently read the scripture to the congregation. In 1688 he asked permission to set up a private bench for his family in the church--the first to do so--for which he paid 3 shillings a year. This suggests that he had a family consisting of more than infants, who would have need for a bench. In 1689, his wife Elizabeth de Faucquembergue gave birth to a son Ezechiel. Two other children, Marthe and Jean, were also born to them at Narragansett, but both died. When Jean was born in 1690, Abraham and Charlotte Faucquembergue presented him for baptism. Since these names do not appear as landholders, they were presumably part of Bouniot's family, probably his wife’s parents.

Our Charlotte is not mentioned. We might assume that she was named after her grandmother and was born before 1686 when the Narragansett records begin (but not too much before since Samuel Seely was born in 1687 and would be unlikely to marry a much older woman.) After the community broke up, we next find the name Bonyot and Boigniot in the records of the French Church in New York (where Pierre Papineau was baptized), showing various children of Ezechiel and his wife Ester being baptized between 1716 and 1721.

How might Charlotte Bouniot have met Jean Papineau? Both families appear to have had a connection with Niort in France and may have belonged to the same church there. The New Oxford and Narragansett communities were connected with each other and with Boston. The three American churches maintained a close communion. The route from Frenchtown passed through Providence and then split to New Oxford and to Boston. During one period, the minister was in Boston but returned to Frenchtown once every two months for services. Remember that René Grignon, Papineau's partner in New Oxford, had lived in Frenchtown before moving to New Oxford. where Bernon set them both up in business (perhaps providing a return on Papineau’s father’s £460). Jean Papineau could have met Charlotte Bouniot in New Oxford or Boston or New York and could have married her around 1703 in New Oxford when he was 25 and she would be 18 or slightly older. Jean's move to New York in 1704 would be not only a matter of following Jacques Laborie, his minister, but also of rejoining Charlotte's family. The other possibility is that Jean married Charlotte in New York after leaving New Oxford in 1704, and that Jean Jr. was born in 1705, and Pierre in 1706. In those days people usually had a first child shortly after marriage and Charlotte was obviously a highly fertile woman. Note that her first child bore the name of her husband; her second child that of her presumed father.

In 1709, Charlotte married Samuel Seely in Stamford, Connecticut, about 40 miles to the east.

[1] Alfred V Wittmayer, Registers of the French Church of New York, reprint GPC, 1968. I have looked at a photocopy of the original register at the New York Historical Society and it clearly says Bounos to me. Bear in mind, however, that in those days there were no established spellings and a scribe would merely write down what the name sounded like to him.

[2] Rev. R. E. Huntington, Stamford Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths, Stamford, CT 1874, photocopy 1995 NEHGS

[3] Descendants of Robert Seeley, Vol 1, Seeley Genealogical Society, 1977, p 19.

[4] See Records of the French Church at Naragansett, 1686-1691, in NY Genealogical and Biographical Record, Vol 70, 1939, pp 236-241 and Vol 71, pp 51-61. See also Elisha R Potter, Memoir concerning the French Settlers in the Colony of Rhode Island, 1879, reprinted by GPC 1968. In Thierry Du Pasquier, Généalogies Huguenotes, Paris, Editions Christian, 1985 (in the Huguenot Society Library, NYC) the Bonniots are discussed as an important Huguenot family in France (judges, lawyers, merchants and big landholders) with a long connection to Niort—one was mayor in 1373—but the Rhode Island family is listed as unlinked (p 240). I have no documentary proof that Charlotte Bounos was Charlotte Bouniot, but the evidence gives this a high probability.