Eleven 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."

A third crossing, a century later

The other Atlantic story in this family is much more recent, and it came within one lifetime of being lost entirely. John Brunetti was born in Italy in May 1893 and died in New Orleans in 1987, and until now nothing was known about where he came from — no parents, no town, not even a region. Apart from his own daughter's, there is not a single Brunetti birth in the Louisiana index — no brother, no cousin, nobody followed him south. The surname ended with him in this state. His descendants are here in numbers; they just carry other names.

What broke it open was a piece of family memory: he was in Chicago first. That turns out to be documented — one John Brunetti registered for the draft in Chicago in 1917, and not a single Brunetti registered anywhere in Louisiana. There is an Illinois naturalization declaration for a Giovanni Brunetti born in 1893, and none in Louisiana. He came south sometime between 1918 and his wedding in June 1921.

And an Ellis Island manifest dated 16 April 1912 records a Giovanni Brunetti, 19, off the S.S. Luisiana out of Naples. Last residence: Plataci, in the province of Cosenza, Calabria. Nearest relative at home: "father Michele, Plataci." Final destination: Chicago. The passenger on the line below him is another Brunetti from the same village. Fifteen of them left Plataci between 1905 and 1922 — one family pulling the next across.

Plataci is an Arbëreshë village — an Italo-Albanian community that has been in Calabria, speaking Arbërisht, since the fifteenth century.

For years this page said the Plataci lead was "deliberately not drawn on the tree," because nothing on that manifest named New Orleans or Veronica. In August 2026 the missing document surfaced: the 1921 marriage record itself, which names John's parents — Michele Brunetti and Domenica Forano — matching the manifest's "father Michele, Plataci" and closing the chain. The same night, a Veterans Administration index card confirmed the other half of the family story: he served in the First World War, with service recorded at New Orleans in May 1919 — the service through which, as his family always told it, he became an American. Michele and Domenica are on the tree now.

It is worth being precise about what closed it, because for a long time this page was careful to say the opposite. That he was born Giovanni was always safe — Giovanni is simply the Italian for John. That he was this particular Giovanni, off this particular ship, was the open question, and a matching first name and birth year were never going to settle it. What settled it was the marriage record naming Michele Brunetti and Domenica Forano as his parents, because the manifest had already recorded a nineteen-year-old from Plataci naming his father as Michele. Two independent documents, nine years and an ocean apart, agreeing on a name neither clerk could have got from the other. That is the standard this whole archive is built on, and this is the case that had to wait longest to meet it.

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, Veronica Franovich's parents, named by every circumstance of the Buras household she grew up in and by no record yet read.

Badges are meant to move, in both directions. Ann Wellmeyer sat at inferred for a year on the strength of her place in the family tomb, until Judy Gifford's notes named her parents in writing and moved her up. Casper Larmann's grandfather went the other way: he was marked documented here until someone asked how sure we really were, and the honest answer was that the baptism act proving that link had never actually been read. He is back at single source until it is.

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.

And in August 2026 a fourth kind of source arrived: the family's own papers. Judy Larmann Gifford sent a photocopy of her great-aunt Esther's handwritten ledger and her own tree notes, and nearly every date in them has since checked out against the state index — the full story is on the field notes page.

Lately answered

The German towns — both found, in one night. On 10 August 2026 the two oldest questions on this side of the family fell within an hour of each other. The Wellmeyers came from Ibbenbüren in Westphalia, where Bernard Heinrich Wallmeyer was christened on 1 July 1823. The Larmanns came from Gesmold, a village near Osnabrück in the Kingdom of Hanover — the town Aunt Esther wrote in her ledger as something like "Gruswald," a word no one has been able to read for a century. His baptism act was then read in the village's own register: born 5 April 1846, baptised the seventh, son of a Neubauer — a new-settler farmer — at Weringhof. The two villages are about thirty miles apart. Two branches of the same New Orleans family, from the same corner of Germany, without ever knowing it.

The Lemoines — a generation restored. Johanna Lemoine, unplaced for years, has her story back. Her father was Robert Lemoine, a career Navy man who lies in Arlington National Cemetery; her mother was Agnes Hanley, married in 1906, who left when the children were small; and her grandmother Poupone raised her, so Johanna called her grandmother "mother," which is how the written tree lost a generation for a while. Agnes's own 1964 obituary, found the same night, names Johanna as her daughter and settles it. The research page tells the whole story, battleship spoon included.

Alexis Lemoine, who was the wall. For a long time the oldest Lemoine we could name was Alonzo, and behind him nothing. A man called Alexis Lemoine kept appearing at the edge of the record — he stood as godfather at Poupone's baptism at Edgard in 1864, two decades before she married a Lemoine — and the guess was that he was Alonzo's father or uncle. He was his father. Alonzo's own name turns out to be Paul Alonzo, Alexis's to be Alexis Alonzo, and the Edgard registers carry the pair of them. The Lemoine line now runs a generation deeper than it did.

Casper Larmann got his life back. The Larmann immigrant has been a set of dates for two years. His obituary, transcribed in a file Judy Gifford sent in August 2026, gives him a trade and a parish for the first time: he was a carpenter and cabinet maker, a union man of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local No. 1312; his church was Holy Trinity, the German national parish; he died at home on Dauphine Street in the Bywater and was buried in St. Roch Cemetery — the same ground as the Goublers, who lived three blocks away and would not marry into this family for another generation.

The Lemoine wall came down. For as long as this archive has existed, the oldest Lemoine anyone could name was Alonzo, and behind him nothing — the one branch of this family with no other shore. On 11 August 2026 the Archdiocese's own published abstract of the Edgard register produced Alexis's baptism, and with it two names never spoken in this family: Joseph Lemoine and Marie Ribas. Born the fourth of February 1829, baptised the twenty-second of November, sponsors Pierre Gravois and Marie Latour, "all of St. Charles Parish" — which also moves the family one parish downriver from where the tree had them. Ribas is a Spanish name on a French-Creole river, and a Rivas household headed by an Antoine "de Santo Yago" was living in that same parish in those same years.

What's still open

Which Michel crossed. Michel Pédeau and Jeanne Muraille had two surviving sons named Michel — André, born 1765, and Pierre, born 1777. Both fit the Louisiana record. In August 2026 the 1810 census finally tipped the scale: Michel's Assumption Parish household held no man of forty-five or over, which fits Pierre — then thirty-three — and sits badly with André, just past forty-five. The Nantes side has now been checked: every city death table from 1793 to 1852 was read page by page, and the only Michel Pédeau who dies at Nantes in those sixty years is the father, on 30 December 1799. Neither brother died in the city. Probable, not yet proven: Chantenay-sur-Loire kept its own registers, and they still get the last word.

Why the children went to the orphanage. The family always said it was Poupone's death that did it — but her baptismal certificate and the family's own record now put her death in 1938, not 1915. She outlived the orphanage years by more than twenty. So the reason is unknown again, and so is the name of Johanna's brother who died there.

Where the Lemoines came from. Every other line on this tree now reaches a named town in Europe or an Acadian village. The Lemoines and Rousselles do not. They run back to Edgard and Lucy in the river parishes and simply stop there, in the 1820s, without ever crossing the ocean on paper. It is the last branch with no other shore, and it is the one this family is closest to by blood memory — the country John Larmann was taken to as a boy. The field notes keep the full list of what's open.