Eight generations,
and the paper to prove it.

The crossings

Two families, one bayou

The Pedeaux name comes from Nantes. In April 1765 a priest at the parish of Saint-Nicolas recorded the baptism of a boy born that same day to Michel Pédeau, charpentier de navire — a ship's carpenter — and Jeanne Muraille son épouse, living au bas de la Fosse, at the foot of the quay. Nantes was then the busiest port in France. A generation later one of their sons took a ship west.

He turns up in Assumption Parish, Louisiana, on 26 January 1808, marrying a girl from Brittany. The register calls him Michel, of Nantes, Brittany, France, son of Michel and Jeanne Muraille — the same two names, five thousand miles away. He was dead within about five years, leaving three small boys.

For years this line was written off as a dead end — "no child of the marriage appears anywhere." The children were in the published parish abstracts the whole time.

His bride's family had come the harder way. Michel Aucoin and Isabelle Hébert were Acadians, deported from Île Saint-Jean and landed at Saint-Malo on 23 January 1759. They settled at Saint-Énogat, a village on the Brittany coast now swallowed by Dinard, and raised a family there for twenty-five years. On 29 November 1780 the curé baptised their daughter florianne Margritte aucouen, born the day before.

In 1785 the family boarded La Ville d'Archangel at Saint-Malo — one of seven ships that carried some 1,600 Acadians from France to Louisiana. The passenger list survives, and entry twenty-one reads: Michel AUCOIN 53 years, Isabelle HEBERT, his wife 48 years, with ten children named after them. The ninth is Floriane, 4 years. They reached New Orleans on 3 December 1785.

Twenty-three years later she married the carpenter's son from Nantes. She outlived him by forty years, remarried, and in May 1848 stood as godmother at the baptism of her grandson Pierre Numa — the entry that finally proved the whole line hangs together. She was buried at Plattenville on 31 March 1852, "age 72 years."

Method

How to read this

One rule governs everything here: a link is only recorded when a document names both the child and the parent. A shared surname is not evidence. That rule is why this research spent a week refusing to connect a real eighteenth-century Michel Pedeau to a real nineteenth-century Pedeaux family — until a register was found with both of them in it.

The three badges

Documented means a civil or sacramental record names both people. Single source means it's probably right but rests on one source, often a user-submitted memorial. Inferred means the circumstances are strong but no document says it yet — for example, Ann Wellmeyer being buried in the Wellmeyer tomb among Henry John's household with no other role available to her.

Where the records came from

Most of the pre-1900 material is from the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which has published twenty-three volumes of sacramental abstracts covering 1707 to 1905 as free PDFs. Nine volumes were searched for this. The Louisiana material after 1877 is from the Secretary of State's public vital records index, which carries Orleans Parish births from 1790, statewide deaths to about 1976, and marriages with no waiting period at all — a marriage licence is the cheapest way to jump a generation, since it names both sets of parents. The French material is from the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique and Ille-et-Vilaine, whose registers are online as scanned images with no name index — you page through them by hand.

What's still open

John Brunetti's Italian hometown. He was born in Italy about 1893 and left no Louisiana-born kin; his parents are unknown. His 1921 Orleans marriage licence would name them. Johanna Lemoine was born outside Orleans Parish and hasn't been placed. And in Nantes there is one real ambiguity: Michel Pédeau and Jeanne Muraille had two surviving sons named Michel — André, born 1765, and Pierre, born 1777. Both fit the Louisiana record. Which one crossed is not yet settled.