Louisiana Conundra: Genealogy at Pitard.net

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Gustave Pitard Sr.'s family owned
Pitard's Hardware on Canal Street
until the end of the First World War.

The Louisiana branches (most, but not all, from New Orleans) have not historically been as well researched as families on this website from Maryland and New England. Asahel McLellan, whose family moved from the northeast to New Orleans, has a fairly well documented family. But research on the other families here—the Pitards, Gamards, Courets, Maupays, DeGranges, and the rest—has required some fairly difficult, but also rewarding, research. As you can see by the number of queries below, help would be appreciated!

All of these problems are about parentage. I would really like to push back all the major branches on the site to immigration, but it's just not that easy. These people's parents (it seems) lived in America, but can't be found. . . :

John McMillan, the second husband of Barbara Klipfel. Her first husband (Charles Fields) was apparently a drunk who died young. And then John McMillan died relatively young as well. He was from "State of New York," according to several vital records, But, who was his New York family?
Caroline Rebecca Simmons. It was hard just to find her maiden name: the only place it seems to occur is on the death certificate for her son Alfonse Gamard Jr. Her own death certificate says that she was from Charleston, South Carolina. Did her family move to New Orleans when she was young, or did she move there after being married?
There are two different Couret families on the tree: might they be related? One, the family of Jean Bernard Couret, is traceable back to France (thanks to the work of a Couret relative). But there is a second group, the family of Jean Louis Couret, who was also born in France; his daughter Marie Octavie Couret married into the Gelpi family, who are related to the DeGranges. Were Jean Louis Couret and Jean Bernard Couret at all related?

From a different branch of the tree altogether

Who were the parents of William Chisholm Tomlinson? According to a history of his son the Civil War veteran Augustus A. Tomlinson (who moved over to Texas), he "came from Georgia." His son, however, was born in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana.