Who Is Maria Francisca Ovispo?

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this photo more than once.  This is a photo of my great great grandfather Joseph Auguste Leveque.  I shared this photo on Christmas Eve in 2015.  That was when I was first started sharing photos and I only wrote a short little caption with the photos.  Through the years, the number of words per post has increased significantly.  That’s a good thing, right?  I also have access to tools to enhance old photos and I’ve never shared this edited photo before.

J. A. Leveque was the father of Marie Celeste Leveque.  I shared a new photo of her last week.  It was a photo of her with two sets of twins who were her great grandchildren.  Even though I am her great grandchild, too, I was born 30 years later than they were.  When I write a post about a family line, I usually move on to another line the next week.  But earlier this week I saw something about the Leveque line that really intrigued me.

That’s why I had to write about Maria Francisca Ovispo.  You may ask, “What does this Ovispo chick have to do with the Leveque family?”  That’s what I was wondering when I saw the name associated with the profile of a Leveque ancestor.  If you were a linguist, you may not have wondered, particularly if you specialize in Romantic languages.

I saw the name on WikiTree.  It is a website that is striving to connect everyone with one single tree.  You don’t have your own family tree; you enter your parents and previous generations until you find ancestors who are already on the tree.  So everyone adds what they know to anybody in the tree.  It has its benefits and drawbacks.  This week I definitely benefited from it.  Someone entered the baptism/birth record for Maria Francisca Ovispo onto the profile for Joseph Auguste Leveque’s older sister Marie Francoise Leveque.  In the biography, the person said that the baptism entry from the Diocese of Baton Rouge (DOBR) church records for Marie Francoise Leveque used her family name Ovispo.

“Ovispo?” I thought.  “That’s not right!  Her maiden name was Leveque.”  Then it donged on me that it might be a translation.  From dealing with French records, I’ve seen the word leveque in many church records.  Not because there were a lot of Leveque family in France.  I’m sure there were some, but it is usually in reference to a church official.  LeVeque means ‘the bishop’ in French.  So I did a search for the word ovispo (or obispo), and sure enough it is the Spanish word for bishop.  Louisiana was under Spanish rule in the late 1700s and many of the records show names using Spanish versions.  

I’ve never thought to look for records of the Leveque family by anything but Leveque and Levesque.  I’ve seen the name spelled both ways and I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced the same way.  Our family usually spells it without the ‘s’ in the middle of it.  I usually see that with families in Canada.  

So Marie Francoise Leveque was Maria Francisca Ovispo.  She wasn’t just my great grandmother’s aunt; she was also my 4x great grandmother and she was married to Joseph Sylvestre Bujol.  The great thing about the DOBR baptism record is that it lists both or her parents and all of her grandparents.  It lists her father as Agustin Ovispo.  That would be our Henry Augustin Leveque.  His parents are listed as Mauricio Ovispo and Julia Verto.  That would be our Maurice Henry Leveque and Marie Julie Berteau.  Marie Francoise’s mother is listed as Margarita Prevo.  I think of her as Marguerite Justine Prevot.  Her parents are listed as Pablo Prevo and Felisa Viso.  I show them as Paul Prevost and Felicite Perpetua Bujol.  

Even though the names are a bit different, it still refers to the same people.  It’s nice to see a record that confirms all of those names.  I won’t get into the different birth dates that we have for her.  The baptism record states that she was born November 15, 1796.  The headstone shows it as November 17, 1797.

Marie Francoise died in 1875.  I’ve never seen a photo of her, even though she lived well into the age of photography.  If anybody knows of one, please let me know.  Who knows? One could be out there.  My godmother has her wedding band.  I’m sure that if she had a photo of her, she would have shared it with me.  She’s generous like that.  She’ll probably share a photo of the ring if we ask sweetly.