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."

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.

It is not proven, and it is deliberately not drawn on the tree. Nothing on that manifest mentions New Orleans or Veronica Franovich, and a man born on 5 May 1893 would have been eighteen that April, not nineteen. Manifest ages are wrong by a year all the time — but "close enough" is exactly what put Michel Pedeau in the wrong family for a decade.

It is worth being precise about what is being claimed, because two different things are easy to run together. That he was born Giovanni is safe — Giovanni is simply the Italian for John, and an Italian immigrant going by John in America was almost always christened Giovanni. That he is this particular Giovanni, off this particular ship, is a separate question, and it is open. Three documents would answer it — and one of them, his daughter's 1923 birth certificate, only became public in 2024, when it crossed Louisiana's hundred-year line.

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 parents. Plataci in Calabria is a strong lead — see the crossings above — but it rests on a manifest that never mentions Louisiana. His Declaration of Intention at the National Archives in Chicago, his daughter's 1923 birth certificate, or the 1921 marriage licence application would each name a town or a parent outright.

Johanna Lemoine was born outside Orleans Parish and hasn't been placed at all.

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 exactly. Whichever one is found dead in a Nantes or Chantenay burial register is the one who stayed; the other is the ancestor.