Field notes

August 2026

Aunt Esther's ledger, and the papers Judy kept

In August 2026, Judy Larmann Gifford sent over two sets of family papers: a photocopy of a handwritten ledger kept by her great-aunt Esther Marguerite Larmann (1904–1976), and several pages of tree notes in Judy's own hand. Esther never married; she was the youngest of her family and its record-keeper, and her two pages carry birth, marriage and death dates for three generations, down to the day of the week and the godparents at each christening.

Nearly every date in Esther's ledger checks out against the Louisiana death and marriage indexes, several to the exact day. As a source, she has earned her keep.

The packet rebuilt the whole maternal side of this tree in one afternoon. Before it, the Larmann line stopped at Anthony H. Larmann, a name on a 1902 birth record. After it, and after a verification pass through the state indexes, the line runs back to John Casper Larmann, born New Year's Day 1846 in the Kingdom of Hanover, and the tomb his in-laws bought in the 1870s. Five new couples joined the tree:

• John Casper Larmann (1846–1921), of Hanover, Germany, and Emily Mevers (c.1844–1882), married New Orleans, November 1870.
• Henry Moore (1847–1893) and Valentine Goubler (1848–1926), married New Orleans, May 1871.
• Joseph Goubler (c.1818–1892) and Victoire Théoline Circlot (c.1821–1895), Valentine's parents, patriarch and matriarch of the family tomb.
• Alonzo Lemoine and Genevieve "Poupone" Rousselle, Johanna's parents, with her grandparents Valery Rousselle and Marie Eve Delatte: Creole names from the river parishes.
• Henry Bernard Wellmeyer and Caroline Lobmeyer, a fourth Wellmeyer generation, and Louis Edward Sander (1851–1914) and Catherine Ohr, married June 1872, Grandma Bertha's parents.

The ledger also returned two people the family had lost entirely. Esther Mae Larmann, born 18 July 1925, was Charles and Johanna's first child and John Richard's elder sister; she died at two and a half in February 1928, and the state index confirms her to the day. The family carried her without a name: John was always remembered as having lost his only sister when they were small. This is her. And Louisa Francis Larmann, listed in every earlier version of the family as a daughter who simply had no children, turns out to have died at eight months old in May 1898. The 1900 census confirms it, catching the household that June with only Mary and Bernadine at home.

The ledger against the index

Family memory and government paper, side by side. Where they disagree, the civil record is preferred and the difference is kept visible:

The hard part of the story

The papers also explain things the index alone never could. Anthony Larmann died at thirty-two, six weeks after Esther was born, and Eugenie raised six children alone. Johanna Lemoine's mother is very probably the Genevieve Rousselle who died in Orleans in August 1915, when Johanna was eight; Judy's notes record, without a name, that Johanna's brother died in the orphanage. And the Wellmeyer page keeps the family's own arithmetic for a boy named Aloysius Roch, drowned in 1901: eleven years, one month, fourteen days. That is a number a mother counts.

Judy says there is more: "I have tons of info. Just never sat down to put it all down properly." Every page of it is welcome here.

Why nobody found this family before

The name that wouldn't hold still

The reason the Pedeaux line sat unfound for so long is simple: no two census takers ever spelled it the same way. Anyone searching "Pedeaux" straight down the decades finds nothing and gives up. The family was there the whole time:

The same trap nearly hides the family in the church books: Pedeau, Pedaux, Pedou and Pedeaux all appear, and the New Orleans notary family Pedesclaux sits immediately after them in every diocesan volume, waiting to be merged by a careless eye. The Mississippi coast Dedeaux family is unrelated. So is a "Jean, of Nantes, son of Jean Joseph and Jeanne PEDOU," who shadows the line through Volume 4.

A story, checked

Are we related to the man the airport was named for?

Family lore says the Moizants are kin to John Moisant, the aviator who crashed near Kenner in 1910 and gave MSY its old name, Moisant Field. It is a good story, and it was worth checking properly. The verdict: unlikely.

• Our Alfred Leopold Moizant was born in France in January 1838 and emigrated to New Orleans.
• The aviator's father, Medard Moisant, was born in Quebec in that same year, 1838, and emigrated to Illinois.
• Two men, exact contemporaries, from different continents' migrations: neither can be the other's father, son or brother.
• In ninety years of Louisiana records the MOIS- and MOIZ- spellings never once cross. No shared given names, no shared spouses, parents, or cemetery plots.
• John Moisant spent a total of eight days in Louisiana, as a touring exhibition pilot. "Moisant Field" honors a crash site. The airport code MSY stands for Moisant Stock Yards.

Why does the story feel true? Because there is a real New Orleans Moisant family, descended from the aviator's Quebec cousins, and because both surnames grow from the same medieval French root. A shared name origin five centuries back says nothing about two immigrant families being kin. One document would end the question for good: Alfred's French birth record or his passenger manifest, either of which would name his parents and his home commune.

The open case

John Brunetti's file

Everything known and suspected about John Brunetti's origins is laid out on the main page: born in Italy in May 1893, documented in Chicago by the 1917 draft, married in New Orleans in June 1921. The strongest lead puts him in Plataci, an Italo-Albanian village in Calabria that sent fifteen Brunettis to America between 1905 and 1922. It is deliberately not drawn on the tree, because nothing on that manifest names New Orleans or Veronica.

Any one of these documents would settle it, in rough order of cheapness:

• Veronica's 1923 birth certificate: Orleans Parish, Vol. 181, p. 2241. Public since 2024. States the father's birthplace. A small mail order to the Louisiana State Archives, 3851 Essen Lane, Baton Rouge.
• The 1921 marriage licence application: Orleans, Vol. 46, p. 90. Names both parties' parents outright.
• His Declaration of Intention: National Archives at Chicago, RG 21, Northern District of Illinois, soundex B653. A post-1906 declaration states the exact town and date of birth, the ship, and the arrival date.
• His WWI draft card: gives date and town of birth in his own hand's moment.
• His January 1987 Times-Picayune obituary: past the public index, which stops at 1972; it is on microfilm at the New Orleans Public Library, 13–18 January 1987.

Worth knowing before anyone repeats the searches: the 1920 census has no findable John or Giovanni Brunetti in Illinois or Louisiana, the New Orleans library's obituary index has only two unrelated 1840s Brunettis, and Chicago's federal naturalization records are not searchable online at all. You have to write to the archives.

Method, made of marble

Two tombs that solved two lines

Twice now, a cemetery has done what no paper index could. The Wellmeyer tomb at St. Vincent de Paul No. 3 holds ten Wellmeyers who resolve cleanly into one household: Henry John, Bertha, three of their sons with their wives, his brother and sister, and one woman who fits no role in that family except daughter. That is how Ann Wellmeyer's parents were identified, a year before Judy's notes confirmed it in writing.

The Larmann tomb turns out to run five generations deeper than its name. Its roster starts with Joseph Goubler, born about 1818, and his wife Victoire Circlot; it took in their children, then their daughter Valentine's Moore children, then Charles Larmann who married into the Moores' line, then Johanna, then John Larmann Sr. himself in 2018. One vault, bought by an Alsatian-sounding family in the 1870s, still receiving the family a century and a half later. New Orleans burial custom is a genealogy engine: the tomb remembers who belonged to whom.

The living map

Cousins you may actually know

Genealogy gets real when it names people you have met. From the documented tree, these connections hold:

• The Slidell and Shreveport Pedeauxs: William, Kenneth, Nancy, Paul and David, the children of Uncle Sonny (Numa Louis Pedeaux Jr.) and Barbara Beth Smith, are Buddy's first cousins. Kevin's family knew Kenny.
• The Westbank Wellmeyers: Buzzy (Leslie Jr.), Sonny (Roeling), Jill, Dr. David and Steve are the children of Leslie Henry Wellmeyer, Grandma Ann's brother. Kevin's mother remembered Buzzy and Jill; Judy's notes list all five with their spouses.
• The attorney Larry Larmann (Lawrence Emig Larmann, 1941–2026) and his sister Barbara were the children of Anthony Leo Larmann, Grandpa Charles's brother, and Beryl Emig. First cousins of John Larmann Sr.
• The Thomas cousins: Mary Eugenia Larmann married Matthew U. Thomas in 1926; their son Matthew Jr. ("Mat," b. 1931) had Brian, Mark, Deborah and Cheryl in 1959–1965. Esther tracked every one of their birthdays in her ledger.
• The Himels of Labadieville descend from Marie Alice Pedeaux, Numa's sister, who married Taylor Paul Himel in 1873.
• The Melvin Pedeaux line descends from Philip Joseph Pedeaux, Numa Sr.'s eldest brother.
• Aunt Patricia (Patricia Pedeaux Ruda, married Sheldon Ruda) is Buddy's sister, in Rochester, New York.

Still hunting

The open questions

• Which Michel crossed. Michel Pédeau and Jeanne Muraille of Nantes raised two sons named Michel, born 1765 and 1777. Both fit the Louisiana record. Whichever one died in a Nantes burial register is the one who stayed; the other is the ancestor.
• John Brunetti's hometown. See the file above. The Plataci lead needs one document to live or die.
• Casper Larmann's German town. Esther wrote it as something like "Gruswald," in Hanover. His two Times-Picayune notices of November 1921, on microfilm at the public library, may name it; so might his death certificate or a passenger arrival. Two fresh leads to chase: his probable sister Marie Antoinette Larmann, who died in 1899 as Mrs. Joseph Prinz, and a generation-older John Mathias Larmann, raising a family in New Orleans by 1857.
• The Lemoines upriver. Alonzo Lemoine and Genevieve Rousselle married somewhere outside Orleans Parish. Their marriage record, Genevieve's death certificate, and the name of the brother who died in the orphanage are all findable in principle.
• Antoine and Marie's wedding. Antoine Florentin Pedeau married Marie Cancienne about 1846, in no register the Diocese of Baton Rouge abstracted. An Ancestry compilation places it in Assumption Parish; the original is still out there.
• Where the Gaiennies began. François Gaiennie and Élisabeth Sarde were in New Orleans by the 1790s, and the trail above them runs through the Archdiocese of New Orleans sacramental archives, not yet searched.
• Anthony Franovich's birthplace. Dalmatia or Louisiana? An Antonio Franovich who died in 1902 at about 77 may be the actual immigrant.
• Alfred Moizant's French commune. The document that would finally close the Moisant question.
• The 1910 Plaquemines census image, whose relation-to-head column would upgrade Veronica Franovich's parent link from inferred to documented.

Family assignment desk

How you can help

The best sources left are not in archives. They are in attics and memories. If you are family and any of this rings a bell, tell Kevin:

• Aunt Patricia may know John Brunetti's Italian hometown, or remember him talking about Chicago. One town name would close the oldest open case on the tree.
• Judy's "tons of info." Every further page, photo or funeral card from the Larmann side is wanted, exactly as it is, hard to read or not. The last batch rewrote a quarter of this tree.
• Photographs. The Gaiennie tomb at Greenwood, the Wellmeyer and Larmann tombs at St. Vincent de Paul No. 3, the Pedeaux plot at St. Louis No. 3, and any old family photos with names on the back.
• Memories of the Buras side. Anyone who heard the Franovich or Moizant elders talk about the lower delta, the oyster boats, or Croatia.
• The name of Johanna's brother who died in the orphanage, if anyone ever heard it spoken.

Corrections are welcome most of all. This archive has already overturned a dozen published errors; it would rather be corrected than comfortable.