Bywater · The French Quarter · Bayou Lafourche · The delta
Where they actually lived.
A tree tells you who. It never tells you where — and in this family the where is half the story. Every pin below comes off a document that is quoted on somebody's page: a census sheet, an enlistment card, an obituary, a cemetery register. Where the record gives a house number, the pin is on the house. Where it only gives a street, the pin says so and sits in the middle of it, waiting to be corrected.
Zoom into the Bywater first. Almost everything happens in six blocks. The Larmann house on Dauphine and Holy Trinity, the German parish named in Casper's obituary, are 123 metres apart — one block. His son Anthony, found on the 1900 census at 922 Port Street, was 247 metres from his father's door. John Brunetti owned the corner of Mazant and Derbigny, a few streets over, and his grandson grew up on it. The cemetery their priest founded is a quarter-hour's walk away. And the church at 3051 Dauphine, where Kevin and Lauren were married, stands 237 metres down the same street Casper died on, five generations later. Nobody arranged any of that.
Then look at what the pins admit. Solid pins sit on a building. Hollow, dashed ones do not, and each says why. The Larmann house is drawn on the block because two sources disagree about its number — the 1900 census says 2833 Dauphine, the 1921 obituary says 2883, "near Press" — and this archive prints both rather than picking the tidier one. Until today Franklin Avenue was the emptiest pin here: a street the family remembered and no record could fix. It is now two solid pins, 727 and 927. The reason it hid so long is that the avenue changed its name three times — Enghein to Lafayette in 1852, Lafayette to Almonaster in 1924, and Almonaster to Franklin only in 1957, ten years after the aunt who lived there died on it. The 1910 census taker wrote Lafayette and the 1940 census taker wrote Almonaster, and both of them were right. A gap you can see is worth more than a number you can't check — and sometimes it closes.
And four of these pins are not in Louisiana at all. The map opens on New Orleans, but the list on the right runs back to Brittany — to the quay at Nantes where a ship's carpenter lived at the poor end, to the vanished mill at Sainte-Pazanne, to Machecoul where the surname is still thicker than anywhere else in France, and to Chantenay, which turns out to have been the Acadian quarter of Nantes in exactly the decade the emigrant was born there. Click any of them and the map will take you across.