Marois in Louisiana

The earliest Marois settler in Louisiana was  Joseph Marois who in 1787 settled in Assumption Parish Louisiana, bought some property, and married Rosalie Foret, the daughter of Joseph Foret and Elisabeth (Isabelle) Leger.

     It was during this time that Spanish speaking priests were in charge of Louisiana churches ( Louisiana, like Canada, was handed back and forth between Spanish, French, and later American control.) and Joseph's name was initially misspelled on the marriage certificate as Baria (I later confirmed, it was really Marois). His parents' names were written in the Spanish style as Carlos Baria and Carlota Olivier. I can't tell you how many months I tried to locate his birthdate, birthplace, and parents. I looked at ship lists, Diocesan records for Canada, New Orleans, even Detroit (it was a French fort at the time). I pretty much gave up, until I went to the Baton Rouge Diocesan Family Life center where most of the church records are now kept. The very helpful archivist there pointed out a supplement to a Canadian genealogy that was unavailable in Houston and in it, lo and behold, were the parents of our ancestor Joseph Marois. His parents were Charles Guillaume Marois and Marie-Charlotte Jolivet of L'Assomption, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. You see, Joseph Marois was not an Acadian exile at all, he was a Quebecois from Montreal who migrated down the Mississippi River to Louisiana (or else hopped a boat and sailed down the Atlantic coast to the port of New Orleans). (And so, in a small way, my grandmother and Aunt Madeleine were right, the MARROYS weren't Cajuns, they were French.) I guess we'll never know why Joseph Marois came South, but because of this discovery, I was able to use Montreal church records to trace the Marois back another three generations to the first Marois in Canada, Guillaume Marois and his parents, Charles Maroist and Catherine Livrade who were members of the parish of St. Paul de Paris in France. We lucked out with this genealogy because apparently these Marois are also the ancestors of Cardinal Leger of Montreal. (I later looked up this Cardinal--he was active at the time of and was instrumental in the implementation of Vatican II in the 1960s.