Notes for: John (Jean) Vigneau Tillou
He was supposedly a twin with Pierre, but their birth dates do not line up.
He and Marie have many children baptized in the French and New Amsterdam Dutch Churches in New York. Ann Messecar sent me a list of them by mail.
The following seems to be about this John Tillou. It is from https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/oa_monograph/chapter/2151834:
The final two apprenticeships Edward Burling recorded are particularly interesting, given what we now know about his working relationship with Joshua Delaplaine. On October 8, 1707, Burling engaged his first Huguenot apprentice before Delaplaine’s indenture in 1714, “John Vignoud Tillou, aged 15 years, with the consent of his mother,” apprenticed, “to Edward Burling, Joyner, from November 6th, 1706, for five years.” Young Tillou’s indenture follows the conventional form, except that it lacks the usual reference to remedial education. Unlike the terms of Thomas Sutton’s indenture, this apprentice was to be taught “to read write & Cypher English [emphasis added].” This is an intriguing alteration. Tillou could write. He signed his full name in its French form, Jean Vignau Tillou. The indenture implied, however, that Edward Burling (or someone in his household) understood French well enough to teach an already literate Huguenot apprentice to read and write in English.85 Because of his mercantile interest in shipping and shipbuilding, it would not be unusual for Burling to converse in French, since many New York shipwrights, like Joshua Delaplaine, were Huguenot.
Indeed, the shipbuilding trades ran deep in the family of John Vigneau Tillou. He was the grandson of Pierre Tillou, who had fled from persecution in the old shipbuilding town of Saint-Nazaire, a short sloop trip of seventy-five miles up the Atlantic coast from La Rochelle, in 1681 and was naturalized in England on March 21, 1682. Pierre first appeared in New York in 1691, where he declared himself a French refugee and asked for protection and rights of citizenship. His son Vincent joined forces with another Huguenot family, of which little is known, when he married Elizabeth Vigneau. Before 1709, possibly about the same time that his son John was apprenticed to Burling, Vincent died, leaving another son, also Vincent, along with three daughters.86
Vincent was a favored Christian name for sons in the Tillou family. But it was also the surname of a prominent family of New York craftsmen, indicating strong connections between the Tillous and the Vincents. Two Huguenots witnessed the apprenticeship of John Tillou to Edward Burling: François Vincent and Benjamin d’Harriette. Both were artisans in the maritime trades with strong family ties to La Rochelle and Soubise in Saintonge. Vincent family members were seen working as block makers, sail makers, and coopers everywhere in New York’s French shipyard. Moreover, they were allied during the eighteenth century with the upholsterer and merchant Benjamin Faneuil, their fellow émigré from La Rochelle and one of two masters available to Germanicus Andrews in 1707. Indeed, François Vincent signed the broadside in defense of Faneuil’s loyalty to New York in 1708.