One of my early goals as a budding genealogist was to track the direct descent of the paternal surnames of my four grandparents at least as far back as their respective first immigrants to America. Those four surnames are Todd and Wilson, Hardin and Sims. That's been easier said than done since my heritage goes back seven or eight generations in this country on at least three of the four branches. I've hit a brick wall on the Wilson branch at only four generations--for now. (I've explored Todd and Sims lines for this blog series already.)
The three branches I have traced successfully all held varying degrees of controversy and mystery before I could bridge the respective connections for each surname between Old World and New.
The story behind the immigrant ancestors for my mother's maiden name, Hardin, took a combination of paper-trail documentation and extensive genetic genealogy DNA research* to help me confirm the identities and eighth-generation stories for my fifth great-great grandparents, Marc Hardouin and Marie de la Chaumette.
French Huguenots Marc Hardouin and Marie de la Chaumette
Marie Madeleine de la Chaumette was born in 1673 in Rochechouart, Poitiers, France, to Daniel de la Chaumette and Marie au Couturier.
The Chaumette family were French protestants (Huguenots) in the Haute-Vienne, formerly the ancient Aquitaine controlled by the English, in the region of Limousin and the city of Rochechouart, where many of the Chaumettes lived. Marie Madeleine’s parents were married in de Confolens, Charente, France, on 30 April 1653, but against the church edict, which at the time would not record marriages for Huguenots.
Some members of the Chaumette family were weavers, and they began exporting serge cloth to
England at least as early as the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) They were members of the upper-middle merchant class (“le petite bourgeoisie”) but also public officials, including consuls, notaries, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers and barristers (defense attorneys). Marie Madeleine’s father, Daniel, was a barrister.
Her future husband Marc Hardouin was from the Hardouins (or Ardouins) of the city of Rouen in Normandy, France, who were also from a weaver merchant class, but they had moved to the nearby Normandy Cotentin Peninsula to avoid the plague in the sixteenth century, very near the Channel Islands where members of the Chaumette family had moved to be nearer their own weaver trade with England.
The Hardouin family were also Huguenots, and were among those who also fled, like the Chaumette family, to England in the late seventeenth century after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had protected French Protestants from persecution.
Marie Madeleine’s uncle Jean and father Daniel de la Chaumette (also father to Jean-Baptiste de la Chaumette) may have fled with their families to England as early as 1681 with Pastor Clovis Palasy.
That both Hardouin and Chaumette families were engaged in the weaver trade with England, that both families were Huguenots, and that both families fled to England and lived for a time in the relatively small and contained area of Spitalfields, London – all suggest that the Hardouin and Chaumette families would certainly be acquainted at the time that Marc and Marie Madeleine were of marriageable age.
By some accounts, Marc was friends with Marie's brother Jean-Baptiste. Research suggests Marc and Jean-Baptiste knew each other in England, and considering Marc and Jean were strong advocates of the Protestant Faith as French Huguenots, the two may have served together in the English army before emigrating separately to the New World.
Marc emigrated to Colonial Virginia no later than 1707. Mary (anglicized for Marie) Madeleine and Mark Hardin (also anglicized) may also have married before 1709 in Northumberland County, Colony of Virginia. (Their son, my own fourth great-great grandfather, Henry Hardin was born in 1710 in Prince William County, Colonial Virginia.)
An account on Jean-Baptiste (later anglicized to John) Chaumette’s WikiTree profile states he immigrated from the West Indies Island of Martinique to settle in Stafford County, VA, because Mark Hardin facilitated Chaumette’s purchase of 200 acres of land in that county. The Wiki Profile biography for Jean-Baptiste de la Chaumette also places his later death around 1728 inside Mark Hardin’s tavern: John "was killed by a blow in the head by a highwayman wielding the large door key of Marc Hardouin's ordinary"--that is, his tavern.
According to the account, years later after Mark's own death when the tavern was demolished, "workmen pulled up the treadle on one of the steps [and found] Spanish money galore."
Daniell [sic] Shumate (the anglicized name of the Chaumettes) and Judith Shumate both signed as witnesses for Mark Hardin’s will dated 21 May 1735, in Prince William County, Colony of Virginia, and then the same “Danl Shumate” also signed an oath for the probate of the will. The Hardin will also names witness Judith (Bailey) Shumate, Mary Hardin’s niece-in-law married to Jean (Chaumette) Shumate, another son of Mary’s brother John (anglicized from Jean-Baptiste). “Danl Shumate” in Prince William County would have been Mary’s nephew, the son of her brother John/Jean-Baptiste. Clearly, the Hardin and Chaumette/Shumate families remained close and intertwined in Colonial America.
Mary Hardin passed away after her husband Mark's death in 1735 but before March 1755 in Prince William County, Virginia (changing to Fauquier County after 1 May 1759).
Both Hardin and Shumate families were well-to-do when they arrived in the New World on account of the prosperity of their respective family's earlier weaver trades, so their experiences in Colonial America gave them material advantages and opportunities as planters and merchants from the very start. And they thrived in a New World that favored the very protestant values which had caused their persecution in the Old.
* The next post, published in tandem with this one, documents the DNA evidence confirming the genetic link between the Hardin and Chaumette lines, and establishing Marie Madeleine de la Chaumette as wife to Marc Hardouin, a connection that has been debated for years by genealogists. This subsequent post will likely be of interest to only Hardin and Chaumette/Shumate descendants. For the rest of our readers...
The subsequent post will explore the sobering legacy of my slaveholding ancestors in Colonial America and the Antebellum South.
Mark and Kym Todd are volunteers on WikiTree, a project to create the entire human tree. Profiles, sources, and documents for key individuals described above are on WikiTree:
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