So I saw a Facebook post in my feed from a random Mississippi Gulf Coast genealogy group I wasn’t even a member of. Someone in that group shared this document, a deed of sale from 1850 for some beachfront real estate in Biloxi. Frances Price, a free woman of color, purchased the property from the estate of Louis Fayard for $500.

From the original poster:

This was, of course, irresistible to me, so I went and started poking around in full-text search on FS to see if I could find anything about her. I quickly located another deed from June 1855 where Frances transferred the same Biloxi property to Charles A. Labuzan for $4000.

The next documents I found Frances on were her death record (very shortly after she sold that property), probate file, and will.

Frances was a native of Richmond, Virginia; she was about 44 years old when she died. The most interesting part of this record is that she died at the home of Charles A. Labuzan, the same person she sold her Biloxi property to.

From Frances’s will, we learn she had four “natural” children between 10 and 21 years old. She directed that all of her estate go to them and named Charles A. Labuzan executor and tutor of the minor children. That is because they were also his children; all four were Labuzans. Frances was buried in “Charles Labuzan’s vault”. It’s unclear if the vault was really “his”, as everything else certainly seems to have belonged to Frances; she owned the house they lived in and most of the things in it. She also owned five slaves in 1850 and two at the time of her death. On the 1850 census, the only person in the household with anything in the “value of real estate” column is Frances. Charles and their four children are also there; Charles was apparently a U.S. deputy marshal and was born in Georgia.

Another interesting thing on that census is that Frances and all four children are marked “M” for mulatto, and Charles has a blank there. Looking at the other entries around this one, this census taker seems to have just treated white as the default and marked no one “W”. Only those not considered white had a letter there. This is similar to what I’ve seen so far on other documents, where Frances is consistently noted as a free woman of color, while Charles is not labeled with any race, presumably white. They would not have been legally able to marry, hence the “natural” children despite a clearly long-lived relationship.

All of this is pretty interesting all by itself, but I wouldn’t have felt the need to write a whole post about it. 😊It was interesting enough to me that I wanted to know more about these people. How did they come to New Orleans? Where did they meet? Was Frances born free, and if not, who enslaved her, and how was she emancipated? What kind of name is Labuzan, anyways?

So I started researching Charles Labuzan.

I learned Charles was born in Augusta, Georgia. He served in the Mexican War, and he went to live in New Orleans about 1832. His first child with Frances was born in 1834. When the Civil War broke out a few years after Frances died, Charles served as brigadier general in the Louisiana Legion. This was a citizen unit that predated the war by several decades and was sort of a “home guard” type of organization, apparently mostly consisted of “foreigners”. The Legion was eventually made to disband so the members could join regular military units.

After the war, when most of his children would have been married already, he married for the first time to Sarah Ellen Moody, a native of Manchester, England. They had one daughter born to them named Isabella (who eventually ended up in Texas), and Charles died six months after the birth. He was 62 years old. Only his legitimate daughter was mentioned in his obituary. Although most of Frances’s children were in Charles’s household on the 1860 census, I have not yet tried to find them beyond that. I also haven’t found any probate documents to enlighten me on what happened with his existing children or what their relationships may have been like.

But I still wondered, why’d Charles go to New Orleans? Who are the Labuzans? I’d never seen that surname in my life. It turns out they’re one of those blessed families where the surname is so rare, I never did find a person with it that wasn’t related to Charles in all my time researching them. It turns out the easiest way to understand this family is comprehensively; I could tell that the surname was incredibly rare and that all the Labuzans I was finding in all kinds of places were connected to each other, but I couldn’t really see how until I had gathered up all the details I could find and looked at them all together. There were no straightforward birth/marriage records showing relationships, in a lot of cases.

This is the path the Labuzans took in the United States, broadly, down to Charles’s generation.

I’m not going to attempt to take you through my reasoning on this as it evolved, we are just going to skip to the part where I can explain this family’s story in a linear, sane manner. 😂 But in New York City in March 1817 some property-related documents were recorded at the request of one Charles Labuzan. The first part of this (very long but thankfully nicely written) bunch of documents related to the Labuzans is an indenture made on 24 September 1816 in Georgia between Bartholomew Labuzan and his wife, Amelia and Charles Labuzan, all of Augusta, Georgia.

Bartholomew and Amelia were transferring the property Bartholomew had inherited from his father, Bartholomew Labuzan of New York, who was deceased, to Charles. The property was in New York City, bounded by Third Street, Pump Street, and another property that was bequeathed to Ann Labuzan by Bartholomew, senior. Bartholomew, junior, was also transferring all of the property his father had bequeathed to Anthony Labuzan (same general area but bordering on land that had gone to Charles). Anthony Labuzan had conveyed his portion to Bartholomew.

For some reason, this went before a judge in the Supreme Court of the United States in February 1817. John Cummings, Esq. testified that he knew Bartholomew and Amelia and they were the same people who were described in this document. The judge affirmed its validity.

The next document is another indenture between Anthony and Bartholomew. It describes Anthony as formerly of New York, but now of Augusta. Anthony had also inherited property from their father, Bartholomew. Apparently Anthony and Charles used to be in business together and had borrowed $3000 from Joseph Corre of New York, the guardian of their brother, Bartholomew. (Sister Ann Labuzan married a Vincent Corre, likely a close relative.) The money came from the part of their father’s estate that Joseph Corre managed and rightfully belonged to Bartholomew, and Anthony and Charles mortgaged their respective properties to secure the loan. Anthony and Charles had then dissolved their business partnership, and while Charles repaid Bartholomew his half of the loan, Anthony never had. Not only had he not paid, he had actually borrowed more money and now owed Bartholomew more like $4500. Bartholomew had offered to consider the debt repaid if Anthony gave him the share of their father’s real estate that he had received. That is what happened, and this agreement, too, was validated by the Supreme Court.

So this group of property records confirms that the New York City Labuzans and the Augusta, Georgia Labuzans were the same family. Bartholomew, Charles, and Anthony all moved to Augusta probably sometime between 1805 when their father died and 1817 when these documents were recorded.

A recurrent theme in documents I’ve found about these brothers is that Anthony consistently seems to have had financial difficulties and trouble with debt. In addition to the above, his father’s will acknowledges that he had already “expended for my son Anthony sums of money to a considerable amount and the rights of my other children require that some deductions should be made” in the distribution of his property. Therefore, he gave each of the other three children $1000. There are some documents from New York City prior to the move to Augusta that show Anthony was arrested over his debts at one point. And when he died in Jefferson County, Alabama, about 1826, his probate was opened and the executor stated that his estate was “totally insolvent” and unable to pay its debts.

Now, the only part of this chain of descent I can’t fully document is which of these Labuzans was definitively the father of Charles Augustus who eventually moved to New Orleans. I know that he belongs in this family because of the incredibly rare surname and the mountain of corroborating evidence about this family and their distinctive migration path. I know that Charles Augustus had a brother, Louis Anthony, who died in New Orleans in 1839.

I can make a quite confident educated guess that Charles Augustus’s father was Anthony Labuzan, however. His brother being named Louis Anthony is significant; Louis was the name of Anthony Labuzan’s father-in-law. This family were big users of the pattern where sons were often named after their father and maternal grandfather. We see it in the son of Charles, Charles Robert Labuzan, whose maternal grandfather was named Robert.

Additionally, I can rule out some other Labuzans; Charles (the eldest Charles, son of Bartholomew senior) is traceable on censuses; he had another son named Charles who was a different person. Therefore he’s unlikely to have been Charles Augustus’s father. That leaves only two other brothers, Bartholomew and Anthony. It is possible that I’m wrong and Bartholomew was Charles Augustus’s father; but even if that is the case, Bartholomew and Anthony married two sisters, so the final tree for Charles Augustus would hardly change at all; he’d still have the same four grandparents regardless. Pretty much everything I’m going to go into next would apply regardless of whether Charles Augustus’s dad was one brother or the other.

So, these sisters that the Labuzan brothers married. Who were they? This is the part where things get really interesting, so buckle up!

The sisters were named Juliet Ann (married Anthony) and Amelia Formon Boisclair (married Bartholomew). Anthony married Juliet Ann in New York City in 1802; Bartholomew married Amelia in Augusta in 1814. They were the daughters of Louis Formon Boisclair and Marie Rose Cambry.

Louis Formon Boisclair was baptized in Couëron, France (near Nantes), in 1751. He was the son of Michel Formon, sieur de Beauregard and his wife, Dame Jeanne Mariot.

His wife, Marie Rose Cambry, was a native of Torbeck in Saint-Domingue. 😊 Louis’s will clarifies the relationships.

Louis and Marie Rose married in 1804 in Augusta, Georgia, actually after the marriage of Anthony and Juliet Ann. However, their relationship likely predated the family’s arrival in the United States. Louis’s brother, Pierre, married in Torbeck in 1777.

And you can see a Cambry in the list of witnesses at that marriage. It’s likely that Louis was also in Saint-Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolution, and the family left, first going to New York City before relocating to Augusta.

Why no marriage record for Louis and Marie Rose? Because Marie Rose was an emancipated former slave, a free woman of color, and their relationship was not legally sanctioned. A very well-sourced tree on Geneanet references just one document related to Marie Rose beyond her marriage and children:

Mistive ayant un acte de liberté du 3 août 1789 (enregistré au greffe de l’intendance de Saint-Domingue).

Mistive holding a deed of manumission dated August 3, 1789 (registered at the registry of the Intendancy of Saint-Domingue).

I have not seen this document myself, but I believe it exists.

I looked all over Torbeck and elsewhere in the Saint-Domingue registers for Cambrys; without exception, the Cambrys I found were “mulatto” children of Yves Cambry. Marie Rose was likely either another child of Yves or perhaps his grandchild. Clearly she was white passing, and most of her ancestors would have been white; her mother, at least, however, was enslaved. I did not find any other Cambrys but these, period. There are Cambrys living today who are black Haitians. The surname persisting into modern times is actually pretty unique in Haiti, where the most common surnames are overwhelmingly things like Jean, Pierre, Joseph, and Louis, from the common practice of adopting a father’s first name as a surname when not able to take on his surname due to legal restrictions. Yves Cambry, however, appears to have recognized his illegitimate children. They used and continue to use his surname. This is the marriage record for a son, Yves Denis dit Cambry, mulatre libre, natural son of the late Mr. “Yve Cambry” and Marie Jeanne, negresse libre.

Most of the references I’ve seen to Yves Cambry have been in relation to his children, all free people of color. He’s also mentioned in some business-related documents in Saint-Domingue that I didn’t dive too deeply into. Then there’s this:

This is from enslaved.org. Apparently, an Yves Cambry was the captain of a slave ship called Baleine. The source for that:

La Baleine sailed from Nantes in September 1743, headed for “Gabingue”, interpreted as Cabinda, Angola, by the slave voyages database, and arrived there in April 1744. In August they set out for Saint-Louis, meaning Saint-Louis-du-Sud in Saint-Domingue. 3 out of 38 crew members died and 4 deserted in Saint-Domingue. The captain seems to have been one of them. Something seems to have gone very wrong on this trip, as it took a very long time, has a lot of uncertainty in the dates, and ended in the ship being condemned when it finally made it back to Nantes fully two years after setting out.

According to the slave voyages database, 351/386 of the African slaves embarked in Cabinda disembarked in Les Cayes.

When I went to learn more about La Baleine, I realized I’d been here before…

Yep. This is the name of ship that brought the famous “casket girls” supposedly brought to Louisiana so the white colonists would have potential white brides. That includes some of my ancestors. They were landed in Biloxi, my hometown and where this article started, in 1721.

So… then I wondered if this was the same ship. Wouldn’t that be nuts? Per Wikitree’s detailed article about this:

On January the 8th, 1721, the French flute BALEINE anchored at Ship Island, nine miles off the coast of present-day Biloxi, Mississippi.

So I searched this ship database site that collects information about all kinds of ships, their voyages and associated people.

Only one on there is described as a “flute”. And it was “broken up” in 1744 just like Yves Cambry’s ship.

So… okay. I’m going to go ahead and say that I think this was the same ship, let’s unpack some of the details here. First I went ahead and looked into the petty officer named as a crew member in 1738, Antoine Nicolas Choiseul-Beaupré (Comte de Marcheville). I found a likely candidate on Wikitree for this person, but actually I didn’t find him by searching for Choiseul-Beaupré. I found him when I was searching for Antoine Walsh, who was named on the record related to Yves Cambry and La Baleine. The slave voyages site labels him “investor”.

I know that Antoine “Wailsh” or “Wailch” as rendered in these sources was referring to a specific historical figure, because I have learned about him before when I was working on something else.

What something else? The O’Duhiggs…

… that Irish family who lived in Saint-Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolution. In Torbeck. Francis O’Duhigg later was Edward Livingston’s overseer at his Plaquemines Plantation. Francis was also the estate administrator and neighbor of the Pierre Gautier who died there in 1805. That’s why I wrote this profile for Martin O’Duhigg over a year ago which mentions Antoine Walsh, whose nephew was apparently in charge of O’Duhigg’s military regiment. 😂

And when I searched for Antoine Walsh on Wikitree I found this guy, too young to be the one on Wikipedia, but married to…

a Choiseul de Beaupre.

I am so serious when I say that it does not matter what I start to research, I’m getting led back to the same things, the same people and places. It’s actually starting to feel absurd, but what can I do? This is where the evidence went. 😂

There’s a historical marker in Biloxi where the house that was built on Frances Price’s property now stands. It was originally on the property that is now the White House Hotel but was moved to a different location.

Charles Labuzan is named on this plaque, but Frances is not mentioned anywhere. But it was Frances’s property and, in all likelihood, Frances who was having the house built. She bought it in 1850 for $500 and sold it just before her death to Charles for $4000. She owned their house in New Orleans. And then the same year Charles became the owner of this property (1855) the house was heavily damaged by a hurricane.

The house:

If it moved, it wasn’t moved far. The White House Hotel is on what was probably part of the same property at one point. The red pin is the house’s current location.

This Labuzan family is the only one I’ve come across looking for them very broadly. Almost all of these people, no matter their recorded or actual race, owned slaves. These people were, without exception, recorded as white on every document about them in America. (Okay, I lied; the exception is the children of Charles and Frances Price. But while she and his kids were free people of color, Charles was clearly considered white.)

I wasn’t able to learn more about Frances, although I may yet find more on her, too. I want to know more about her and how she and Charles ended up in New Orleans. She’s harder to trace because she (and surely, her parents) were treated as people of color. If Frances was born enslaved, I’ve seen no record to show it. It’s definitely possible. It’s also possible she was also the child or grandchild of a family that fled Saint-Domingue and were in Richmond, Virginia when Frances was born. Both could be true. Or she could have a completely different story.

I think all of this serves as a fantastic example of just how much different these stories tend to be from what you may have assumed. It started out as interesting because a free woman of color bought property in Biloxi in 1850. That is interesting in itself. But keep pulling on that one interesting thread and next thing you know… this😂

There are a lot of white people in places like Alabama, Texas, and California who have mysterious brick walls in their trees that go directly back to this same Labuzan family. Maybe some of them are aware of their family’s history; if they are they’ve not shared much. The well-sourced tree I found stopped at Louis Formon Boisclair and Marie Rose Cambry, it was coming from the other direction (earlier) and belonged to a French person. I didn’t find any well sourced trees related to Bartholomew Labuzan’s descendants or the Formon Boisclair family in America. There were some that had most of the names in them, always without any sources at all. They don’t broadly agree with each other in a lot of important ways. And lots of descendant trees that stop at Charles Augustus’s generation or maybe one earlier, seemingly brick walls.

There was a famous emancipated slave named James Boisclair whose story and name strongly suggest he was also a relative of this family. He wouldn’t have taken that name for no reason, and he was last owned by Michel Boisclair, probably the nephew of Louis. I do not think that his having been previously owned by another person does anything much to convince me his surname wasn’t his dad’s surname. It is worth looking into more, it doesn’t seem anyone really has.

James Boisclair was one of a whole group of slaves directed by Daniel Grant to be emancipated on their thirty first birthday. He wrote the full date each was to be emancipated, which means he knew exactly when they were born — and almost certainly who their parents were. That age is significant; in many states, illegitimate children born of mixed race unions were at certain times legally required to be indentured until they turned 31. There was definitely a punitive element to this requirement, and it was meant to discourage such unions. It applied even when both parents were born free. When Daniel Grant died, Michael Boisclair bought James and eventually emancipated him (it looks like he did it much later than he was supposed to, but I did not deep dive on James so not sure what happened there). Every single person freed in Grant’s will was likely the child of a mixed race union. There are surely more interesting stories in there…

If anyone finds this Googling these people feel free to reach out! Wikitree links with many more sources (but always WIP!):

Frances Price

Charles Augustus Labuzan

Louis Formon Boisclair

But today I want to show y’all a different way of engaging with newspapers that is less about searching for a target person and more about understanding the historical context of a time and place so deeply that you actually get all the inside jokes and references in old newspaper editorials. They contain information you would never find by searching the index, only by just… reading the paper. Closely, slowly, not glossing over parts that don’t make sense and assuming they aren’t important but instead digging deeper until they make sense.

I was browsing in the collection on GenealogyBank recently and noticed there are a few single editions of some small, brief pamphlet style publications from the early 1800s in Louisiana. The one I want to focus on now is an edition of a newspaper called La Lanterne Magique that was published on November 20, 1808, in New Orleans.

It’s just four pages, two for the French version and two for the English. Comparing the two, they seem to be direct translations of each other. Sometimes the French version of a paper contains completely different content, but this doesn’t seem to be one of those times, so I’m just going to concentrate on the English, at least for now.

The first page is a very, very long editorial piece that rambles on and on and is frankly hard to get through. It actually made me suspect Daniel Clark was involved in this paper because trying to read it feels much like trying to read Clark’s Proofs of the corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson, and of his connexion with Aaron Burr, with a full refutation of his slanderous allegations in relation to the character of the principal witness against him but that’s just a hunch. 😂 I think the title of that work is enough to convey what I mean about how it feels to try to read this. It probably is worth analyzing in detail, but the second page is easier to understand so I’ll start there because I know this article is going to end up way longer than I intend it to be even if I only do a single page.

Translation: we won’t be thanking subscribers for their support, because we know that your support is not given as a favor, but because you want entertainment and we provide it. This is a transaction. Said in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way that may have been intended to be cute but also feels pretty adversarial? This appears to my modern eyes as a very weird thing to print at the top of your paper, but my humor isn’t calibrated to the humor of the time. For that I would need to read a whole lot of these. 😊

Then:

This is clearly a quote of some kind. I would have guessed this is quoting some Greek scholar. I don’t speak Greek. Pasted into Google Translate:

It thinks it’s Hindi. It’s definitely not Hindi. I tried to switch it to Greek & Latin manually but I never got any translation. Hmmm. So I asked Claude, and it turns out that this is Greek but it’s in Latin characters, basically it’s Greek phonetically written with Latin orthography the same way Arabic speakers often type in Latin characters on the Internet when writing Arabic. Very hard to read or translate if you aren’t already fluent.

But Claude was able to parse it! I had to type these words in myself for Claude to be able to give me a full picture, it had a hard time reading the image alone even though to my eyes the text is very clear. So I did that and the information I got back was:

Just below this quote is this:

So this second quote actually helps me understand why the first one is there. The Embargo Act of 1807 was a huge topic at the time of publication. Thomas Jefferson was the president at this time, and he was widely lambasted for the embargo in places like New Orleans that really depended on international trade. Like Demosthenes, Jefferson enacted this embargo policy with good intentions and sound judgment, but the outcome was, perhaps, not what he had hoped (or, at least, not what this paper’s editor hoped).

“Both Bull and Boné suck their paws” is a reference to the rulers of Great Britain and France. “John Bull” is basically the British equivalent of “Uncle Sam”, a personification of the British national character. And Napoleon was commonly nicknamed “Boney” in English papers at the time. The Embargo Act was hurting them, which was Jefferson’s intention.

These two quotes taken together suggest the editor of this paper did respect Jefferson on some level and acknowledged that the embargo was harming the British and French as it was meant to, but nevertheless did not think that it was the right decision. The usage of quotation marks here is not meant to imply sarcasm, but to emphasize; if you’ve ever seen a handwritten sign at a gas station that says they have “NO” public restrooms—it looks like simple misuse of punctuation, but it’s actually just a way that quotations used to be used and aren’t anymore.

Okay, so now we can get to the “meaty” parts! And as I will soon demonstrate, analyzing those two quotes before I dive into the actual articles on this page is really what allows me to understand the editorial text that follows. And it’s juicy, right from the first paragraph.

Now, I still do not really know what broader point this author is making with this whole paragraph. But that highlighted part, I do get. This is a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s illegitimate children with his slave, Sally Hemings. This is a very direct, clear nod to something that historians argued about for 200 years, even after we actually had DNA evidence that it happened. In 1808. Buried in a random tiny New Orleans paper. The “Great Mammoth” is a nickname for Jefferson. Apparently, the guy was obsessed with mastodons. TJ’s relationship with Sally was so well known that this sentence made sense to the newspaper reading public in 1808, in New Orleans. You would never find this by searching for Thomas Jefferson or Sally Hemings.

But the Sally Hemings reference is not the point of this paragraph. If anything, that was the author being unable to resist any opportunity to bring up that juicy bit of well-known gossip. He immediately pivots to talking about something else entirely.

“This monster was unnaturally and unlawfully begotten on the body of the Great Mammoth himself by a French ambassador.”

This is not about Sally and TJ’s kids. This line is implying that Thomas Jefferson is the person who was “impregnated” by a French ambassador, and the language suggests it was against his will. Some French ambassador has foisted a thing on TJ and now he has to deal with it. He then describes the monster being sort of assembled piece by piece, laboriously being forced into existence with the result being some kind of haphazard combination of a bunch of separate pieces. This language is pretty emasculating and strips TJ of his agency, like he wasn’t fully in control of what happened.

The gunboats mentioned here are referring to a plan of Jefferson’s that was widely criticized. He basically came up with his own design for small, cheap gunboats for the navy, and it didn’t work out well, and he was mocked for it. Here’s a quote from someone at the time speaking about these gunboats:

Mr. Jefferson, two years ago, adopted an idea of his own, in order to raise the credit of the American navy, and for the destruction of the powers of Barbary. This is, to build a number of small vessels of about 100 tons burden, to be called gun-boats, each of which is proved with too [sic] heavy pieces of ordnance – one at the stem, and the other at the stern. Though the inutility of these mockeries of men of war has been manifested on many occasions, yet the president persists in riding his naval hobby-horse, even in Kentucky; where several gun-boats are building on the river Ohio. One of them was nearly lost on a voyage to the Mediterranean – being, the whole voyage, to use a sea phrase, “wet and under water.”

I’m not entirely certain, but I suspect the urchin here is Napoleon. The language really calls to mind the French Revolution. “Trampling down indiscriminately the rich man’s palace and the poor man’s harvest.”

Okay! I think I am starting to understand. The monster that was born of Jefferson and some French ambassador is the Embargo Act itself. There were other earlier acts that enacted some of the policies of embargo earlier on, so it sort of came into existence piecemeal, like in the earlier description of the birth of the “monster”. The effect of the act was to seriously kneecap American commerce; the “six large and beautiful cities” are probably the six most prosperous American ports at the time. The author is making the point that Jefferson, whether willingly or not, played into Napoleon’s hands by enacting a policy that hurt Americans more than it hurt France, while also conveniently hurting France’s other enemies. And if anyone tried to get around the embargo by smuggling, a district attorney would “torpedo” the efforts. Funnily, Philip Grymes, the district attorney in New Orleans at this time, is considered to have been soft on the Baratarians or even in cahoots with them. 😂 New Orleans, at least, didn’t seem too interested in enforcing Jefferson’s embargo. This is exactly why the Laffites were so successful there and are celebrated instead of remembered as villains.

This is such a vivid picture being painted here. Let’s unpack it.

The “monster” (the Embargo Act) is sitting there blocking maritime commerce from operating, ordering all foreign trade to “quit his watry realms”. But, just like Demosthenes’s plan, it didn’t have the effect it was supposed to have. The monster is raising its limbs above the water, cracking its joints thunderously, and then nearly washing itself entirely off the face of the earth by blowing water into the air that then falls back upon itself.

The author is arguing that the Embargo Act was essentially cannibalizing itself. It was (at least supposed to be) intended to harm America’s enemies, but instead it was crippling the nation far more than it was hurting any foreign powers, and may even have been helping France.

So I’ve made it to the end of a single column on a single page of this newspaper, and I am going to have to stop here. 😂 I find this type of analysis endlessly fascinating, but it’s also mentally exhausting. I wish I could do more, because the amount of stuff out there that is just like this and easily accessible is endless.

I would highly recommend taking the time to do some close readings like this every once in awhile from the times and places you’re interested in, it really can help you understand any documents and situations you encounter in your research much better. It helps you answer “why” when you learn about things that just don’t really make much sense to us today. Whatever it is, it made sense to people at the time, and so if it doesn’t make sense to us now, it’s because we still lack context. Understanding the context really deeply enables you to instinctively understand what would have made sense and what would not have, and you can start to be able to guess at people’s moves and motivations and formulate more realistic hypotheses about whatever it is you are trying to learn.

Now I need to go do something mindless because my brain hurts. 😂 And I didn’t even get to get into who published this paper and that whole context, which also matters. The rabbit hole is endlessly deep, y’all.

It was created by a group of a few descendants who have gotten interested in learning more about his story. You don’t have to be a descendant to join; general interest is totally fine & all contributions are welcome! I’m not a descendant, either. :-)

The group is here, feel free to join if interested and share with others who may be! I was initially trying to contact the various people who have commented on my posts here about HST individually, but then I realized that there are probably people who end up on my Substack from Google and never comment but would still be interested in learning more.

Hope to see some of y’all there!

The Wikipedia has “Pierre Brugman” as an alias of Beluche, and you will find all kinds of people debating whether or not Brugman was actually Beluche. I won’t make you wait until the end for the conclusion: he was not. There shouldn’t really be any debate; Brugman is well-documented as a different person with a whole different life trajectory, different wives, different kids, different parents, different locations. The only thing that suggests they were one person is that they both at some point served as captains on Bolívar’s privateer ship, Nuestra Señora de la Popa. Brugman’s actual story is far more interesting than “this was just Beluche using an alias”, and the more I’ve learned about him the more aggravated I feel that this theory has propagated at all. Brugman’s been effectively written out of history because of people only looking for and seeing what they expect to see, despite the abundance of evidence establishing Brugman as an individual, and one worth learning about at that.

This is from an academic book about Bolívar:

Do you see the bracketed correction there? The author has done a good job of obscuring what source this is actually from (not intentionally, I’m sure) by making it hard to tell who “he” is that is doing the urging in this November 1815 letter and also not having footnote citations in the text, instead only including a list in the back of the book. So I can’t find the referenced document easily to look at what it actually says.

My guess is that the correction of “Pierril” to “Renato Beluche” here is likely erasing Pierre Brugman from existence even though his name was probably recorded right there. Instead of questioning why the captain’s name wasn’t written as Beluche if Beluche was the captain, this writer has just corrected the primary source they were consulting to say what they expected it to say. This happens more than you’d expect at all kinds of levels of scholarship; nobody is immune to blind spots and unexamined assumptions. In this case, however, there is overwhelming evidence about Pierre Brugman out there to find; he’s no Laffite mystery man, that’s for sure.

I first came across Pierre Brugman because I searched my DNA matches looking for people from Puerto Rico who had someone from New Orleans in their tree somewhere. I wasn’t trying to make any kind of inference about how I am related to them; I just wanted to know about the links between the two places and which families are connected to both. Pierre’s son, Mathias, was born & baptized in New Orleans in 1811.

Mathias (Pierre, native of Curacao, and Ysavel DULIEBRE, native of Port-au-Prince on the island of Santo Domingo, both residents of this city), b. Mar. 16, 1811, bn. Jan. 3, 1811, pgp. Mathias BRUGMAN and Luisa LEVIS, mgp. Francisco DULIEBRE and [o], s. Pierre Marie PETIT and Maria Constanza [o] (SLC, B22, 127)

A daughter was also baptized in New Orleans the following year.

Clara Maria (Pedro, native of Curacao [D.W.I.], and Ysavel DULIEBRE), b. Dec. 31, 1812, bn. Oct. 4, 1812, pgp. Mathias BRUGMAN and Luisa LEVI, mgp. [o], s. Etienne GAUM[EA?]UT [@GOMEAU], absent, p. Juan Pedro DUFOURE, and Maria Clara BRUGMAN (SLC, B25, 57)

These two records are very clear on Pierre’s origins and parents. He was from Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies, and his parents were Mathias Brugman and Luisa Levy. His wife was named Ysabel Duliebre, and she was from Port-au-Prince (not Puerto Rico or Santo Domingo, as you can see stated on Wikipedia and almost every other piece of writing related to this family, never with any source cited). Already, we’ve ruled out he and Beluche being the same person; Beluche is on records at the same church under his own name; he was baptized there, and so were his siblings and at least two of his children. It would have been hard to pass himself off as an alias at his own home church, and why would he have even wanted to?

The omission of Ysabel’s parents from one of these records and just her mother from the other one suggests Ysabel’s mother wasn’t white; Ysabel was probably a free woman of color who fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. Perhaps Pierre met her there; perhaps they didn’t meet until later. I haven’t managed to learn a whole lot more about Ysabel at this time.

Fortunately, however, I learned a lot about Pierre.

The earliest primary source documents I’ve found him on are from 1805.

Capt. Brugman was in command of the Creole, a French privateer. Further evidence of his position on that ship can be found in the records of Baracoa, Cuba, from the same year.

That says that Pierre Brugman was the captain of the French corsair La Créole, commissioned by General Ernouf. The statement he made, roughly translated:

On the twenty-first of last April, finding himself departing from the port area, at the crown on the island of Saint-Domingue, and having spotted a vessel navigating along the coast that he recognized as one of those belonging to the rebels of that island, he immediately gave chase; but that the sound of his artillery attracted an English royal brig that was then passing north of Tortuga heading for Jamaica, so that he found himself surprised and caught between the shore and said brig in such a way as to have no hope of escape by flight; that recognizing the impossibility of escaping, he was obliged to lower his flag and surrender as a prisoner of war; that he was immediately transferred with his entire crew aboard this English brig, which he recognized as the Reindeer, and was taken to Jamaica; that brought before the English Commissioner to make his declaration, he took advantage of the negligence of his guard to escape from the enemy, and that after having remained hidden for several days in the city of Kingston, he embarked on a vessel sailing for Santiago de Cuba, and from there came to Baracoa.

The said declarant added that at the moment of his capture by the said English brig, there were aboard the said corsair la Créole some bales of dry goods coming from a vessel named la Sauveur belonging to the rebels of Saint-Domingue, which had been included in the prize taken from said corsair and had followed the same destination.

So Brugman’s reporting here to French authorities at Guadeloupe. He is describing his efforts to capture ships operated by the Saint-Domingue rebels. He’s not helping the revolution; he’s working for The Man. (More accurately, we could probably say he’s working for himself, and France happened to be paying at the moment.) His ship was captured by a British vessel, however, along with the prize goods already on board from a previous encounter.

While I’m here, I want to share another document I found in the same records from Baracoa, from close to the same time. This is an 1807 document with a very similar intro to the one I just shared about Brugman.

Yes, that is Pierre Laffite, consignee of the French corsair General Soult, under a commission from… the same guy as Brugman claimed to be commissioned by. Pierre’s statement is about his vessel having taken an American prize. And General Ernouf’s Wikipedia page has this fun little blurb:

There is evidence to suggest that he encouraged French privateering against British and American shipping; British officers later found letters of marque allegedly signed by Ernouf to privateers. Four French privateers operating out of Guadeloupe between 1805 and 1810 were named Général Ernouf, one of which was the captured sloop-of-war HMS Lilly.

Yes, there is indeed evidence to suggest that. 🤣

But back to Brugman. I’m going to grab his signature from that document for continuity purposes, lest anyone should doubt whether the later documentation I’ve found about him refers to the same guy. Unlike Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, Pierre signed his name consistently throughout his life.

Note the little hat over his surname and the swirly bits underneath.

Also in 1805, Pierre Brugman submitted an account of another cruise he had undertaken, this time as captain of the French privateer L'Aimable Aimée, also found in Baracoa records.

If Pierre wrote this statement himself, he missed his calling as a writer. You can find a translation of the whole thing on Wikitree if interested, but here’s the introduction:

Mr. Pierre Brugman, commanding the French privateer L’Aimable Aimée, has presented to us an official report—signed by the principal members of the said privateer’s crew—attesting to the insubordination and outright mutiny of the boatswain against his captain, as well as the involuntary and fatal consequences that ensued for the instigator of this disorder; furthermore, he presented a second official report—likewise signed by various members of the said crew—detailing a conspiracy fomented by one Delille, the said privateer’s hold master, with the aim of compelling the captain to put in at Baracoa; and finally, a memorandum signed by the appearing party, in which are set forth all the facts mentioned in the aforementioned reports, together with documentary evidence justifying the conduct he maintained throughout these various circumstances. The said appearing party has requested that we formally accept the deposit of the said reports and memorandum, so that these documents may be incorporated into our official records, and that a duly certified copy thereof be delivered to him, to serve as valid legal proof whenever and wherever required before the competent authorities.

Brugman’s actual statement includes gems like this paragraph:

A thousand confused and fleeting thoughts swirled through my mind and set my heart boiling. I was particularly struck by the suspicion of a cabal—a plot seeking to disorganize our ranks, to degrade my standing as captain, and perhaps even to make an attempt on my life. Scarcely had I broken free from the clutches of that furious man—and still seething with such righteous indignation—when I rushed to seize my saber. The skipper’s audacious and insulting remarks served only to further inflame my fury; I lunged at him, intending to cow him into submission through the mere display of arms. As he threw himself upon me once again, attempting to run me through, my saber strokes came swift and fast. Amidst my defensive maneuvers—in the heat of that struggle—he cried out that he was wounded; yet, in that moment, I alone failed to hear him. Finally, the officers and crew—shaking off their state of utterly inconceivable paralysis—rushed in to separate us. The ship’s surgeon—along with several others who, from the very outset of the altercation (finding themselves too far removed to physically intervene between the skipper and myself), had—as I was told once calm had been restored—urged their nearest comrades to prevent any further bloodshed—immediately set about dressing the skipper’s wound, which he found to be a severe one.

And the whole statement is written like that. It’s great, way more fun to read than your average formal statement. And he’s signed his name again, clearly and consistently.

I next find Brugman mentioned in an 1810 article in New Orleans about “French Freebooters”. He was commanding L’Intrepide. This article mentions many other Laffite associates and vessels as well.

Another 1810 article that included a physical description of Brugman:

In 1812 we find Brugman again working as a ship captain, this time on a vessel called General Morla which was taken from Spaniards and renamed and repurposed, then fought over in court when the original owners complained.

The President of the United States has received the Petition of P. Brugman, Commander of the Spanish Cruiser General Morla, with a statement of the case of this Vessel, which appears to have been forced from her destination and brought into the Port of Baltimore by unavoidable circumstances, having a number of Africans on board, by which she was made liable to seizure, and was accordingly taken possession of, in the name of the United States; and he authorises me to state to you, that it is his intention to cause the Vessel to be released, provided such a disposition is made of the Africans in question as may be conformable with the Laws of the State of Maryland. In no case however, will he consent that they shall be exported in the same Vessel.

Now, regarding La Popa, the ship in Bolívar’s privateer fleet that was associated with both Brugman and Beluche. In 1813, Beluche was recorded as being the captain of La Popa.

By April 1816, however, Brugman was captaining that vessel.

It’s unclear when Brugman took control of La Popa, but it’s entirely possible that in November 1815 when that letter was written to Bolívar, Brugman was the captain of La Popa, not Beluche. Brugman took La Popa in to New Bern, North Carolina, along with its valuable prize cargo.

This is also documented in admiralty court records, which show that Brugman was a native of Carthagena (not quite accurate, but understandable considering where he was from and the fact his ship sailed under Carthagenian colors) and a resident of New Bern.

… and he’s helpfully signed again! Once again including that distinctive accent mark on his surname.

It’s not clear to me why Pierre Brugman relocated from New Orleans to New Bern. But he definitely did; he’s on the census there in 1820, and he’s on property records buying and selling real estate, and he married there, to a different woman. Her name was Marie Anne Guillet. They had several more children. It appears that Ysabel Duliebre, Mathias, and Marie Claire did not accompany Pierre to North Carolina for whatever reason. We know that the two kids, at least, ended up in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, where Mathias eventually became famous for his revolutionary activity there (and was executed for the same). Pierre is in newspapers continuing to run privateer ships out of New Bern all the way up until he died in 1831 and his probate case was filed there, with no mention of his first family at all.

Pierre, then, has many descendants in Puerto Rico as well as in the United States. I’ve traced the kids from the second marriage, and they wound up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Hartford, Connecticut, among other places. Many from the Puerto Rico branch eventually moved back to the U.S. and settled especially in New York City.

And what of Beluche post-1813? Per Wikipedia:

After serving as an artillery commander beside Dominique You in the Battle of New Orleans, Beluche was drawn back into the Gran Colombian struggle. He participated in the Aux Cayes Expedition, the Battle of Lake Maracaibo, and the Siege of Puerto Cabello on 8 November 1823. In 1824, Beluche settled his family in Puerto Cabello, and after the Spanish were expelled from Gran Colombia, he worked as a captain in coastal shipping. In 1836 he fought on the losing side of a rebellion against the Venezuelan government and was exiled for nine years. He returned in 1845 and helped crush another revolt that raged from 1848 until 1850.

Where he definitely was not is New Bern, North Carolina. And he outlived Brugman by a good bit.

I hope when people Google Beluche and Brugman this article will be high in the search results so maybe we can stop with the “Beluche alias Pierre Brugman” stuff. It’s pretty disrespectful to the real Pierre Brugman, who was a Dutch-Sephardic Jewish privateer captain from Curaçao, not a Frenchman from New Orleans. 😅

This is an engagé contract for one “Henry Thybaudau”, cordonnier (shoemaker), who was signing on to join a fur trade expedition in 1789. Hilariously, this document is part of a set of notarial records from Terrebonne, Quebec. If you search for that spelling of his surname on FamilySearch full-text, this is the only document that comes up, period.

So at last, we substantiate some part of the HST lore. He seems to have actually been a poor shoemaker, as he claimed. In addition to 500 livres as compensation for the contract, he received:

“a double outfit consisting of six ells of cotton, two blankets of two and a half points, and a collar, beyond his wages, plus as an advance on his wages the sum of forty old shillings in merchandise”

The contract also notes he was in the position of milieu, described here:

This contract was signed on May 14, 1788, just a few years before Henry appears in Louisiana. Henry was to accompany this voyage “both going up and to winter over at the said place of the Illinois or in the environs where the said Sieur Cerré will judge appropriate, and to return the following spring”.

So being me, I could not wait to start learning about the other people on this contract and trying to see how they connect to each other and to the world.

Henry contracted with “Mr. Jean Philippe Leprohon, merchant of this city (Montreal), acting as agent for Mr. Gabriel Cerré, merchant of Illinois”.

Gabriel Cerré is pretty well-known. From Wikipedia:

So Cerré spent most of his time in Kaskaskia and St. Louis. I found him on Wikitree as well.

Jean Philippe Leprohon is less well-documented, but that surname seems to be limited to this one family, so it wasn’t hard to find him either.

Cerré was the uncle of Leprohon’s wife, Marie Marguerite Parent.

So, I have only ever researched a couple of other people with ties to St. Louis, and revisiting them actually led me to some very interesting connections for these two.

Awhile back I wrote an article that featured Francois Marie Guyol, who was one of the first judges in Terrebonne Parish. He was also a next-door neighbor of both Henry Schuyler Thibodaux and my ancestor, Pierre Gautier.

Guyol was born in Saint-Domingue, and after the Haitian Revolution he made his way to Louisiana, where his mother was actually born. The family seems to have gone to Saint-Domingue after the 1769 rebellion in New Orleans. Guyol married in St. Louis, Missouri, and later ended up moving to Terrebonne Parish. He may be the person who painted that painting of Henry Schuyler Thibodaux… Guyol was a painter of some repute, and although I can’t find anything specifically attributing the one of Thibodaux to him, I can’t find anybody else attributed either, the style is similar to Guyol’s other work, and Guyol was literally living next door to Henry.

When I was researching Guyol’s wife and her family in St. Louis, I noticed the marriage record for Martin Duralde on the same register page. I wondered about Duralde and whether he was connected to any of these characters, since he was important in Louisiana later.

So I went and looked at Duralde again and his connections. His wife’s family immediately jumped out at me, because I recognized her grandfather, Raymond Babie.

I had never heard the name Raymond Babie in my life until I did a bit of work on connecting Jean Philippe Leprohon to his wives and their families yesterday. I actually connected up all the Leprohons I found on Wikitree, because there were only a few, and it turns out they all descended from the Jean Philippe I am interested in. One of the connections I added while doing this was another daughter of Raymond Babie named Marie Anne.

Duralde’s wife’s mother was a sister of that Marie Anne Babie. 😂

But wait, there’s more!

I also noticed while working on this that Raymond Babie’s wife, Therese Lecompte, was actually the sister of the patriarch of the Dupre-Terrebonne family in Louisiana!

!!! 😂😂 So this is all very interesting.

So one weird thing we still need to contend with is that Henry apparently spelled his name at least three different ways during his lifetime.

I think his initials are the place where you can make the best comparison here — they’re on the upper left margin of the contract, and those initials look very, very close to the “HS” in the final version of Henry’s signature.

Now, why would a man who was obviously literate choose to keep spelling his name differently like this? In 1788, Thybaudau. In 1793, Thebodo. And after that, at some point, he adopted the final form of H. S. Thibodaux, which remained consistent to the end of his life.

My best guess at the moment is that his name was actually something in a language other than French that sounded sort of similar to Thibodeau, and Henry was trying to French-ify the name and took some time to settle on a spelling that was not too “weird” but still let him feel he was distinguishing himself from the mass of other Thibodeaus who he knew he wasn’t related to. Some contenders are the Dutch name Tiebout and the Italian Tibaldi. 🤷‍♀️There are certainly other possibilities, as well.

For now I’m going to continue to learn more about the people in this general network; I hadn’t done much research on Quebec or people in the fur trade prior to now, and the amount of information out there is wild! A lot of people have studied the fur trade in extreme depth for a very long time, so there’s a whole lot of stuff to go through. I will be stalking people in Illinois and St. Louis if anyone is looking for me… 😂

The Prize Papers Project.

This project is a collaboration between researchers in Germany and the UK. It’s government-funded. Their mission is to make a huge treasure trove of documents publicly available for all researchers. What are these documents?

They are the papers and objects that were taken along with prize ships captured by British privateers between 1652 and 1815.

All of this stuff, an absolutely enormous amount of documents and letters, has just been sitting around somewhere in the UK, unanalyzed, and they are in the process of releasing it into the wild.

The scale of this is crazy.

160,000 intercepted letters. Y’all, these are letters that never made it to their recipients and therefore wouldn’t have been destroyed if they contained sensitive information. Many of these letters have never even been opened before. People sent their mail on these ships when the ships were headed to the right destination, it’s how people communicated. These letters can be about anything; many are personal. There is probably something interesting here for anyone who has ancestors who were in the western hemisphere during the colonial period.

The website is already live right now, and there are a lot of documents accessible through it. However, they have a long way to go with digitization yet. The project is funded until 2037; it’s going to take time.

The site is a bit jank right now, it took me awhile to figure out how to access the database after finding the project’s information. But it is here. Do not expect it to work well on mobile! At least, not yet.

I went spelunking to get a sense of what’s in there today. The data filtering is quite good, so I was able to learn a lot just by looking at the search filters.

When I filtered down to only show letters, this is the language breakdown I can see of the ~5,800 currently available.

The overwhelming majority are in French, but the diversity of languages is so cool. Most of what’s currently up on the site is from a small range of time between 1742-1745, from what I can tell. It’s clear the British were targeting French ships during this time period from the dominance of French in these letters, I think. Of these letters, 968 are specifically tagged as related to “personal and family life”.

There are many types of documents in here other than letters. I can only show a fraction in screenshot, but:

Everything is categorized by relevant locations and subject matter. The documents are also indexed by the names of the people involved, so you can search by name.

So of course, I went and searched for Pierre Gautier because why not. 😂

Like I said, 1742-1745 is the time period for most of what comes back right now. But I got 5 hits on for the name Pierre Gautier. I don't know which specific person these are about, but the possibilities are nevertheless exciting.

One of the documents is a letter of marque issued to Pierre Gautier of the ship St. André, issued 3 April 1745.

Pierre lived in Fort Royal, Martinique. I think he is the person most, maybe all of the current Pierre Gautier documents are referring to.

I found a letter this Pierre wrote to his mother in Fort Royal.

Do you see why I’m excited yet?? Another letter to his cousin:

I searched for “Lafitte” and found 52 pages of results returned, essentially all of which have to do with people involved in trade between Bordeaux and the Caribbean/Americas.

Y’all this is such a tiny fraction of what they actually have in this collection.

I reached out to the project to see if I could contribute in any way and am meeting with them later this week to discuss. 😂 I want to support this initiative in any way I can, because it’s really extraordinary. Instead of these documents staying locked in an archive forever or being digitized by some private company and then paywalled so only people with lots of money or who work for a university that has lots of money can access them, they are being made publicly, freely accessible to all. This is a huge deal! This is what we should be striving towards.

There is so much we could learn from analyzing this collection. Almost certainly things we couldn’t learn any other way, previously unknown information, long-gone individuals given a voice through their letters hundreds of years later. Let’s go!!

I decided to check out the map of Ponce, Puerto Rico. The first thing I noticed almost immediately was a neighborhood called Los Pámpanos. That is the same name as the hacienda founded by Pedro Gautier; this area is probably the former location of that hacienda. There’s a mall there now, among other things.

So then I just started zooming around the area looking at street names and buildings, just to see…

And, would you look at that, there’s a Calle Laffite. One of those small streets connecting to Calle Laffite was called Calle Cofresi. Cofresi was a famous Puerto Rican pirate. From Wikipedia:

Cofresí began his new career in early 1823, filling a role vacant in the Spanish Main since the [possible, unconfirmed] death of Jean Lafitte, and was the last major target of West Indies anti-piracy operations.

My friends, this is no coincidence.

I didn’t find any other smoking guns in the street names of Ponce, but I have a lot more new information to share besides that. I have kind of been on a roll over here. 😂

A friend mentioned the other day to me that she had found the will of Honoré Fortier on a Puerto Rican genealogy site I’d never looked at before. So I immediately went and joined the site to see what else they had in there.

Interestingly, there were only a handful of wills in the site’s collection, but two of them were relevant names: Honoré Fortier and Louis Alexandre Harang.

To recap why these people are relevant: Louis Alexandre Harang was a New Orleans native who leased Los Pámpanos, Pedro Gautier’s estate, after Pedro’s death. Honoré Fortier was Harang’s brother-in-law and business associate. He was also the former owner of this property:

That is quite literally where the Laffites had their base of operations in Barataria. This map is from a letter Honoré sent to Edward Livingston in 1809 or so, related to selling that property. This was just a year or so after Honoré was involved in a trial for smuggling, in which Livingston represented him as his attorney.

I would also like to recall that Edward Livingston was a next-door neighbor of the Pierre Gautier who lived in Plaquemines Parish. And that decades after Pierre’s death in 1805, Genevieve Zulime Gaultier of Cap Tiburon, Saint-Domingue, claimed what appears to be Pierre’s property, claiming that her family had held the property for more than 40 years. Genevieve and her immediate family were not in Louisiana until around a decade after Pierre’s death in 1805, and it had not been 40 years since they arrived when she made this claim.

Okay! So what is my point in going over all this? Well, I have been following all of these different groups of people who I for one reason or another suspected were related to my mystery for a long time. At first I couldn’t connect them all to each other at all, but as time goes on the connections I’m finding among these disparate groups are getting reinforced in new ways over and over. Plaquemines Pierre Gautier is connected to the Cap Tiburon Gaultiers. He is connected to Livingston. Livingston is connected to Honoré Fortier, who is connected to Harang, who is connected to Pedro Gautier in Ponce. The number of hops between all of them is steadily decreasing. I will show you what I mean.

Louis Alexandre Harang’s will (1829) includes this item:

I declare that I have the following debts against me: I owe Madame Doña María Juana Gautier, widow of Don Juan Bautista Blancherau, of this neighborhood, the sum of four hundred and some pesos, which are due to her for the third year of the lease of the Los Pampanos estate…

Maria Juana Gautier was the daughter of Pedro Gautier and an unknown woman of color. I know this thanks to one of her descendants who contacted me awhile ago about the Gautier mysteries. 😊 So although Pedro’s other known (legitimate) daughters had all moved to France shortly after their father died, Maria Juana was still in Ponce collecting rent on her father’s estate from Harang.

Another exciting find on the Puerto Rican genealogy site was an 1827 census of “Barrio Quemado” in Ponce. The other hacienda Pedro Gautier was associated with was called Hacienda Quemado; presumably this is the same geographic area. This census is fascinating for a lot of reasons… especially interesting is that essentially every family I’ve ever researched because they had connections to both Louisiana and Puerto Rico is found in this one area. But I want to focus on two specific neighboring households.

So there’s Maria Juana Gautier in household #93. She was widowed by this time, 38 years old. And an exciting new lead: Maria Juana was born in Curaçao!! This is new information. And it means that Pedro Gautier was probably in Curaçao around 1789. Curiouser and curiouser.

But—check out household #92. I wouldn’t have recognized any of these people if I saw this several months ago, but today I recognize them. Asunción Brulé of Louisiana was the widow of Honoré Fortier. And she was living in the household of one Carlos Banchereau of France. Maria Juana Gautier was the widow of Juan Bautista Banchereau. Banchereau (sometimes written as Blanchereau) is a really uncommon name, and my suspicion is that Carlos and Juan Bautista were brothers. There is undoubtedly a connection there. So the circle tightens just a bit more…

Now I want to take a quick detour to tell you about some other tidbits I have recently gleaned from newspapers related to Asunción Brulé and Carlos Banchereau.

This ad was published in San Juan newspapers in 1904 by one Michel J. Fortier of New Orleans. A translation of this article:

Is there anyone on the island who has heard of Madame Planchard?

They are looking for her inheritance on the island.

At the end of the 18th century, it is assumed that Mr. Fortier arrived on the island with three ships and $300,000 in gold.

New Orleans, November 16, 1904

Mr. Mayor of San Juan, P. R.

Mr. Mayor: Could you please inform me about a Mrs. Planchard who died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, about 25 years ago?

She was married first to François Honoré Fortier and secondly to Mr. Honoré Planchard, who died before her. Later, in a newspaper article, you say that she died without heirs, leaving a large fortune.

At the end of the eighteenth century or beginning of the nineteenth, a Mr. Honoré Fortier left New Orleans with $300,000 in gold and three ships belonging to him. Nothing more has been heard of him, and it is assumed that he settled in the Antilles. The assumption is that this fortune left by Madame Planchard came from him. Therefore, the Fortiers of New Orleans will be his heirs.

Is it possible to know if Honoré Fortier, husband of Madame Planchard, has any descendants? Did Madame Planchard leave a will? If the Fortiers are her heirs, what steps should be taken, and to whom should they be addressed?

I am writing this letter on the advice of the Foreign Consul of Spain in New Orleans. I am also writing to the Foreign Consul of Spain in San Juan. Please accept, Mr. Mayor, the expression of my most distinguished sentiments.

Michael J. Fortier

In combination with several other articles published in New Orleans around this time, the picture becomes much clearer.

I’ll highlight the most relevant part:

“About fifty years ago the Planchards came to New Orleans from Porto Rico, under the name of Planchareau, which name was changed for simplicity’s sake. When the family emigrated to this city an aunt, known as Mrs. Arthemise Planchareau, lived at San Juan. She was immensely wealthy, and when she died there, twenty-three years ago, she left no children.”

Another article was then published retracting the claims that the Planchards in New Orleans were due any fortune in Puerto Rico.

Why would someone come up with this hoax? I have no idea. But this article clarifies some things.

Arthemise was a family nickname, her true name being Maria Asunsion Brule. She was married to Francisco Honorato Fortier, who died some forty or fifty years ago. She had by him a son, named Agustin Alfredo Fortier. She again married Carlos Blanchereau, who died a short time afterwards, and she herself died about thirty-five or thirty-six years ago. Her son Agustin Alfredo Fortier inherited the little property that she left, which is believed to be a small house and lot on Villa Street, and no other property is known of. She supported herself by making sweetmeats, jellies, etc., for sale to the people. This information has been obtained from relatives of her first husband, Francisco Honorato Fortier.

Although the first two articles had many details confused, this last one gets them right. Asunción Brulé remarried to Carlos Blanchereau after her first husband’s death. I have no idea why anyone thought the New Orleans Planchards would be due any fortune left by Honoré, because he and Asunción have many descendants in Puerto Rico via their son Agustin Alfredo. I would imagine the Fortiers in New Orleans thought they might be able to claim by showing that none of Honoré’s descendants were “legitimate”, but I’m not so sure they were considered illegitimate in Puerto Rico just because they were the product of a mixed race union. These sorts of laws varied a lot by both time and place.

In any case, Honoré’s will indicates that he left no fortune.

I declare that when I got married I had assets worth more than twenty-five thousand pesos, and today I only own half of the cotton gin located on Marina Street, on a plot of land approximately one acre in size, and the other half of said gin belongs to Mr. José Garrus.

His will was written in 1823 in Ponce, only a few years after he had moved his family there. It’s unclear what happened to all the money he had when he arrived. The only heir mentioned in his will is his son Agustin; there’s no mention at all of the numerous children he fathered in New Orleans with Adelaide Lalande. However, I located a letter from their son Juan related to his mother’s estate that was written from Ponce in 1819, so it’s not like Honoré completely disappeared and abandoned the rest of his kids when he went to Puerto Rico; it’s possible that most or all of them died quite young. He had at least 5 children with Adelaide Lalande and two other known kids with Asunción Brulé. Perhaps he arranged for his other kids in some less-official manner.

Asunción Brulé was supposed to be the grand-aunt of the “widow Planchard” in New Orleans. I haven’t yet worked out the exact connections there, but I believe she was a woman of color named Marie Francoise Francis or Lacroux/Lacroix.

So where does all of this leave me? Well, I have a bunch of new leads to follow from all of these new sources. And a feeling that this group of people is starting to coalesce in my mind; plausible configurations for how it all fits together are beginning to become easier to imagine.

I feel like I have come a really long way from where I was when I first found the article about my ancestor Pierre Gautier paddling the article’s author down Bayou Terrebonne in 1836. In that article, Pierre was described as French Canadian. The reality was apparently far more complicated and interesting than that. And… it seems less and less likely that it was just an impersonal bit of trivia he shared regarding the “pirate house”.

Who was he actually? One of these days I’m going to find out for sure… 😊

We managed to find a Y tester in his line to take a test at FTDNA, and the results are in!

Thibodaux wasn’t a Thibodeau. 🙃 His Y DNA appears to be Irish or Scottish. Autosomal DNA was used to confirm the line was unbroken back to Henry Schuyler.

So who was he, then? I still have no idea. He didn’t have many Y matches at all, none close to the tester. More testers certainly wouldn’t hurt to try to figure out who his dad was.

For now, my burning question is answered. It bugged the heck out of me that he made no sense as a child of the people we thought were his parents, and now I feel satisfied that the reason for that is that he wasn’t, in fact, their kid. There’s much we don’t know, and almost certainly there’s an interesting story there, but I’ll be putting Thibodaux on the backburner until I either come across something new about him working on other stuff, or a descendant pops up who is interested in fleshing out this story more. If anyone reading this is such a descendant, my inbox is always open. 😅

It’s an anomaly. Doctors love anomalies. Dark spot on an x-ray, bright spot on an MRI…. Killing that second inmate is the homicidal equivalent of blood in the urine. It doesn’t fit. I’m interested in things that don’t fit. Tell me why you did it. Your other victims you were almost bragging about. What was different about this guy?

That is a snippet from an episode of House MD I was watching the other day. I found that particular quote so relatable. And currently, I’m working on something that definitely falls into the “anomaly” category. I would love it if others who use DNA in their research, especially if you are familiar with endogamous DNA, could chime in on what I’m about to describe, because it’s throwing me for a loop.

I was recently contacted by a cousin match on Ancestry. She is trying to figure out the identity of her great-grandfather, and I have been trying to help as best I can. I don’t want to talk about her particular mystery ancestor, but rather about something else I noticed analyzing her results that I just can’t get out of my head.

Her match counts. They don’t make any sense!

So anyone who is familiar with working on Acadian or Creole or Isleño DNA knows the endogamy is real strong there. And, in every other case I’ve ever seen, the endogamy causes our match counts to be seriously inflated. The “normal” amount of matches for someone from these communities is anywhere from 100,000 to 175,000 people, in my experience. This is true for me and my mom. My dad, who only has one Creole grandparent, has about 70,000 paternal matches.

However, this cousin of mine has only around 20,000 matches total.

This is made even more puzzling by the fact that all four of her grandparents were from south Louisiana, and all of her lines were in Louisiana prior to the Louisiana Purchase. She has a lot more Spanish ancestry than French, but she also has a significant amount of Acadian admixture showing on her test, an amount similar to what my dad shows. And the rest is essentially Isleño. Her tree and my maternal grandmother’s tree share a lot of overlap. Her tree looks very typical for my cousins on that side.

The next question, of course, is whether her tree is correct. Does she have a recent NPE on one or both sides?

The answer to that is, as definitively as it can be, no. She has already mapped out a huge number of her matches, and her DNA matches her tree. In all my analysis of her tree and matches, I haven’t found any cases where her tree didn’t make sense. In ThruLines, every single ancestor at every generation has numerous cousin matches associated with them. The only gap in her tree is the one we are trying to solve, a great grandfather. This great grandfather may have been German, which may explain the lower match count on her mom’s side, but not on her dad’s side, which is the side she got almost all of her Acadian DNA from. But his side, too, has only about 13,000 matches. They aren’t all hiding in “both” or “unassigned” either, although there’s definitely a good amount of overlap between her maternal and paternal sides. Working with her matches is headache inducing because of the many relationships amongst all of the matches, just like I’d expect.

How could this be? Anybody have any ideas? This is really bothering me, because with my current understanding of How DNA Works, I would have thought that it wouldn’t be possible for someone from all of these endogamous communities to wind up with so few matches. If she only had one connection to the endogamous bunch, perhaps the DNA randomizer just hit in such a way that she barely got anything from those lines. But for ALL of her ancestors to be from the group… I just can’t make that make any sense.

Have you ever seen such a situation? Do you have any hot takes for what may in theory be causing this? If you’re from one of these endogamous groups, how many matches do you have on the relevant side(s)? I need more data. 😂

So, even though for much of the time the archdiocese has existed, the books have been explicitly sorted by race…

And even though if you request a specific record from them you have to answer a question regarding whether the record is about a person of color…

Neither the abstracts nor the issued certificates would include information about the race or legitimacy of the people in that record. The scans that are shared on the archdiocese site are generally very poor quality, so it’s not easy to just see the entire register entry you’re interested in like it is when looking at most French records.

But that information is pretty important if you are trying to trace people of color. Why the obfuscation in the church’s policy? Why were they worried about the “confidentiality” of people who lived over 200 years ago?

Recently, I noticed this in the foreword to volume 3:

This record is the only one specifically called out in the foreword like this. And it just so happens to be related to the only baptismal record in New Orleans that could possibly have referred to the pirate, Jean Laffite. I can’t say definitively whether this Jean Henry Lafitte was the same person as the pirate, but I can tell you these facts about him:

• His mother was the half-sister of Marguerite Henry, the mother of the famous voodoo practitioner, Marie Laveau.

• Much like the pirate brothers, Jean Henry had children with at least one free woman of color. His daughter, Elizabeth Zenoide, was born on the island of Guadeloupe. Her mother was a “free mulatress” named Reinette. She was acknowledged by her father.

• Jean Henry was presumed dead after he set sail from Guadeloupe for St. Thomas in 1818 and was never heard from again. He was a mariner, and he was assumed to have been lost at sea. Assumed, not known.

So this guy is interesting, to say the least. And this note in the volume’s foreword is interesting in its own right. Why was this baptism record legible enough to make a certificate from in 1915 but so “badly deteriorated” as to be illegible by 1989, when the record abstracts were published? Why did this merit a call-out in the foreword?

I think that question is probably best answered by explaining how I finally managed to connect the pirate Jean’s older brother, Pierre, to the world tree on Wikitree via his descendant’s line. This is a mini-project I’ve been working on off and on for some time. I thought it would be fun to try to connect one or both brothers, since for so long both have just been sitting unconnected on their own little islands. Both had kids, so even though we don’t know who their parents are, they could potentially be connected via their children and those children’s connections.

Pierre had at least five children with a free woman of color named Marie Louise Villard. All five of these are documented in the parish records of New Orleans. So far, I’ve researched three of the five in depth. The third child I looked into was the one that led me to the connection I was hoping to find to the rest of the world tree, but I will give an overview of what I learned from each.

Catherine Coralie Laffite was born in either Saint-Domingue or Jamaica. According to testimony in her probate file from people who knew her and her husband, Pierre Roup, both Coralie and her husbands’ respective families had come to New Orleans in 1804 on a ship from Jamaica.

Francois Remy, a resident of the city of New Orleans, being duly sworn says that he was well acquainted with Pierre Roup & Coralie Lafitte, long before they married; that their common families came to this country from Jamaica in 1804 on board the same vessel; that he was an eye witness to their marriage which has taken place in this city about thirty four or thirty five years ago; that said Pierre Roup & Coralie Lafitte had but two children from their said marriage, one of who was named Joseph Roup & the other Marie Roup; that both said children have been brought up under the presence of witness; that said Pierre Roup departed this life about twenty years ago in this city, wherein he was domiciled; that his said wife Coralie Lafitte departed this life in this city on 20 July 1855; that said Joseph Roup departed his life in this city one or two months after his mother had died, that he witness believes it was on the 22 Aug 1855; that said Joseph Roup was not married & had no forced heir, and has made no will; that he witness is now fifty six years old.

Pierre Roup is documented as having been a native of Gonaives, Saint-Domingue. Both he and Coralie were considered free people of color. When Pierre Roup died in 1836, three living children were mentioned in his probate file: Rose, Joseph, and Marie. At least two other children died young. I didn’t have much luck on my initial attempts to learn more about these Roups, so I continued to work on the next child of Pierre Laffite’s.

Martin Firmin Laffite was identified via his marriage record, which named his parents and also mentioned his brother-in-law Pierre Roup as having been a witness.

Martin Firmin (Pedro and Maria Luisa VILAR), native and resident of this city, m. Silvania Catarina BRUNETTI, Apr. 14, 1828, w. Pierre ROUP [@RUP], Francisco BRUNETTI, bride’s father, Juan DE CASTRO, and Francisco POREE (SLC, M3, 91)

Martin’s wife, Sylvanie Catherine Brunetti, was a free woman of color. Her father was a mariner from Venice, Italy. Her mother was a free woman of color known as Betsy Madeleine who was actually born in Africa.

Martin must have died young, because his widow remarried in 1831 to Francois Leon, another free man of color. I spent a good amount of time working on descendants of this second marriage; they are numerous. As far as I can tell, none of the descendants of Francois Leon and Sylvanie Brunetti ever identified as anything but people of color. They largely stayed in the New Orleans area. I thought that it might be possible to connect Pierre Laffite to the world tree via one of these lines, but it’s nearly always a challenge to connect people who weren’t white, because there just aren’t nearly as many profiles already created for families who were people of color, and you end up having to add tons and tons of profiles before you find somewhere to link in to what’s already there (usually because someone married a white person). This is one of the reasons I’m so grateful for the US Black Heritage project’s work on black families. It’s so needed if we want Wikitree to be a place that is useful and welcoming for genealogists of all backgrounds.

I worked on Sylvanie’s descendants for some time, but ended up moving on to the next child of Pierre’s before making the connection I was hoping to make. There’s certainly more work to be done here if anyone feels like jumping in. ;-)

And finally, the third child I researched, Rose Laffite. We know she’s Pierre’s from her baptismal record, which names her mother only, but includes her siblings as godparents.

Rosa (Maria Luisa, native of this city), b. Mar. 22, 1814, bn. Aug. 28, 1812, s. Martin [o - Lafita?], child’s brother, and Caterina LAFITA, child’s sister (SLC, B27, 3)

Interestingly, her marriage record to Andre Tessier has apparently been destroyed.

[* - fem.] (LAFITTE), m. [*] (TESSIER) (SLC, M9, 18) [ed. note: page torn out; surnames from volume index; marriage apparently took place between Aug. 21 and Sep. 3, 1831]

However, their union is documented on other records, such as the census, their death records, and the baptismal records of their children.

In 1840, the family was recorded on the census as consisting of 7 free people of color.

By 1870, however, this family was being recorded as white.

This race-switching is a familiar pattern to many who research families in Louisiana. It’s also the reason I was able to make the connection I was hoping to make via descendants of this line. They intermarried with white families and lived as white people. I found Rose’s daughter, Emilie Laure, already on Wikitree connected to the world via her husband’s family. So connecting her to her parents is what connected Pierre Laffite to the world tree. You can see her on this 1870 census recorded as “L’or Anette”. Her husband was named Auguste Allnet, and they were living in the same household as her parents and siblings.

So how did this work illustrate the reasons for the church’s lack of transparency with their records? Well, one of the documents I unearthed searching for information about Rose Laffite and Andre Tessier was a 1915 petition for a marriage annulment.

The marriage in question was that of Rose Laffite’s great-granddaughter, Mirielle Alexandrine Farr.

Alexandrine Tessier was the daughter of Rose Laffite and the grandmother of Mirielle. The court case includes copies of the birth and death registrations for Mirielle’s ancestors used by her husband to prove that she wasn’t white.

We know Mirielle did indeed have mixed ancestry, but in her response to her husband’s petition, she denied it categorically. She explained away the evidence thus:

• When Mirielle’s grandmother, Alexandrine’s, birth was registered, the reporter was Andre Tessier, who was illiterate. Therefore, he did not himself fill out the form, and therefore the racial designation could not be believed as it came from the recorder, not the family. They must have assumed incorrectly.

• Mirielle’s father’s death certificate also noted him as a person of color. However, the certificate was recorded by an employee of the undertaker who buried Mirielle’s father. This employee was unknown to Mirielle and her family, and he did not consult with them before making the designation, so his interpretation of their race was not valid.

• Mirielle and “all the members of his family, the ascendants as well as the col-laterals, have always occupied the status of white persons; that their friends and associates are and have always been persons of the white race; that all the private, religious, and public records of herself and family made by them, or under their sanction, show that your defendant and all the members of her family are of the white race.”

• Mirielle also alleged that the “erroneous inscriptions” on these records had already been fully explained to her husband, and that he had accepted previously that they were indeed erroneous. His present petition was made in the “spirit of hatred and vengeance” because Mirielle had left him after learning of his affairs and his contraction of “loathsome venereal disease”.

The church was actually subpoenaed to compel them to release the sacramental records related to Mirielle’s family.

The subpoena is painfully clear about its reason for demanding these documents: to “prove that the defendant is not a person of the white race”.

Is it possible that the marriage record of Andre Tessier and Rose Laffite is missing because a well-meaning parish archivist didn’t appreciate the sacramental records being used as a weapon against women like Mirielle Farr? Could this be related to Jean Henry Laffite’s record having been made illegible sometime between 1915 (the same year as this annulment suit) and 1989?

I can’t answer that definitively. I can, however, say that seeing this subpoena’s language has made it far clearer to me why the church enacted the policies it enacted regarding confidentiality. There are likely many, many people whose ancestors at some point started passing as white, and the evidence of this switch is likely to be found in these church records. Up until not so long ago, it would have been considered a very big deal to be exposed as a “fraud” this way. The policy likely exists not because of the church’s desire to keep secrets about long-dead ancestors for people who may be ashamed of mixed ancestry, but because limiting the accessibility of these records and the details recorded on certificate copies would have protected its parishioners from this kind of hateful revenge-seeking behavior.

Mirielle did indeed live as a white person; by the time she was around, her particular branch had been identifying as white for a long time. She may have known of her own ancestry, or she may not have. Either way, this very public petition by her husband was dangerous for her and could have had serious repercussions for her and her relatives at this time.

The court documents I found about this don’t include any information about the outcome of the case. I suspect George eventually dropped it altogether, because Mirielle filed for divorce in 1922, years after he made this petition for annulment. It’s not clear whether his subpoena of the church records ever actually was executed. Mirielle eventually remarried to another white man and she and her children, as far as I’ve seen, always identified as white, as did her siblings and their descendants.

I will admit when I first read the forewords to the published church record abstracts, I felt like the policies related to race/legitimacy information were both archaic and racist. I thought that the intention was simply to obfuscate and erase the complicated racial dynamics that have always existed in New Orleans, simply because the church wanted to pretend that these things hadn’t happened.

But reading that court case related to Mirielle’s marriage and seeing that subpoena to the church in black and white have changed my perspective on this. While I do still think that including race and legitimacy information in 2025 would be appropriate, morally correct, and extremely helpful to genealogists working on people of color, I no longer see the obfuscation itself as nefarious.

The policies and publications may need updating, but not having had those policies in the first place would have opened the door for more men like George Renton to take their revenge out on their wives by calling their entire identity into question at a time when it really mattered if people thought you were white or black. It would have made it that much easier for people with petty disputes to thwart their rivals by digging out records and exposing their mixed ancestry. If I was the archivist, I wouldn’t have wanted to let the records be used in this manner, either. The possibility of that kind of thing happening would have more than justified the church’s decisions not to include that information and to keep their record books private for as long as they did. Even if it does annoy me and frustrate my efforts in a lot of ways, my curiosity is in no way as important as Mirielle’s safety was.

So I understand, even as I hope that in the future we’ll get updated, higher-quality scans of the record books and abstracts that include ALL the relevant information.

And as for the baptismal record of Jean Henry Lafitte, we can’t really know for certain exactly what information became illegible on that record between 1915 and 1989, but it certainly seems at least possible that that information was obscured to hide a more complicated ethnic background in order to protect someone like Mirielle.

I have mentioned this before when I’ve written about Daniel Clark Jr., who wrote this ~150-page novel exposing the crimes of General James Wilkinson, long before he was exposed as having actually done all of the stuff Clark said he had.

Clark’s pamphlet can be understood to be 150+ pages in the same vein as that monstrosity of a title. It’s almost unreadable, so it’s not really much surprise nobody read it and Wilkinson kept his reputation until he was dead and it no longer mattered.

These “newspaper wars” were the early nineteenth century equivalent of when Donald Trump spams his social media accounts with posts in all capital letters exposing some person he’s currently feuding with. The New York Times has compiled a collection of all of Trump’s dis tweets, by the way. They could probably fill a book at this point.

So like, this is a whole thing and has been a thing for a long time for a certain type of dude. It might take different forms, but at the end of the day it takes a certain sort of personality be so sure that the world needs to hear why they’re right and [whoever] is wrong in excruciating detail, with no sense of tact whatsoever. Just put it all out there!

Today I want to share another paper duel story with y’all that took it even further than most. This argument wasn’t about politics, but about personal domestic affairs.

Luther Martin was a founding father of the United States, delegate for the Constitutional Convention, and attorney general of Maryland. His feud grew, unlike most others broadcast in this manner, not from some political disagreement, but from a personal one. Luther had a problem with his daughter Eleonora’s husband, Richard Raynal Keene. Fifteen-year-old Eleonora had eloped with Richard, who was 22. Richard was a young lawyer who had actually studied under Eleonora’s father before sneakily running off to marry his teenage daughter. Luther Martin was not pleased. He was not pleased at all.

Luther, eventually, published a five-part dis pamphlet. Apparently, when people took their published arguments from newspaper format to pamphlet format was when things got really serious, and Luther created a five-part pamphlet.

Yes, he called it Modern Gratitude. Yes, as in “kids these days don’t know how to show proper gratitude to their elders”. *shakes fist angrily* 😂

So I ended up here because something led me to recall Richard Raynal Keene’s name and I started looking for information about him. That “something” was me working on some people in Saint-Domingue with the surname Raynal. I had seen Keene’s name before and was curious if there was a connection. One of the places I’d seen Keene was in Edward Livingston’s letters; he kept up a long correspondence with Keene over several decades (all subsequent to this debacle).

So imagine my delight when I immediately found all of this craziness. I love an academic war, and this is, like, a flavor of academic war fused with reality TV show drama. The words sound professional and nineteenth century fancy but the content is trashy as hell. 😂

I started looking in old newspapers to find the beginnings of this war and any other information I could about Keene. One of the newspaper clippings I found that mentioned him, hilariously (to a nerd such as myself):

This dude was Daniel Clark’s second in his duel with Governor Claiborne. I did not know that when I was reminded of Clark’s dis pamphlet earlier.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I can’t, y’all.

I’ll probably share more on this guy later, because I’m going to be here reading about this dude’s feuds and exploits for a while. (The feud with his father-in-law was neither his first nor his last published altercation, believe it or not.) And I still haven’t figured out whether there may be a connection to those other Raynals…

The Acadians were the French people who got expelled from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s by the British. They descended from very early French settlers in that area who arrived in the early 1600s. They were in Acadia for about 150 years, give or take, before the expulsion. This is probably the most standardized definition: descendants of those original families who arrived before ~1650.

From 1654-1667 the British occupied Acadia. The territory returned to France, was briefly occupied by the Dutch, and in 1710 the British conquered Acadia again. The territory was disputed by the French and the British from then on, culminating in the expulsion of the Acadians. It was a turbulent time and region.

The definition used by many people today of “Acadian” includes not only descendants of the very first families, but also anybody who was in Acadia before the expulsion and was unfortunate enough to be there for the event. This is how the Wikitree Acadians Project operates. The defining characteristic of the group is their shared deportation experience.

But there are also a lot of widely understood facts about who the Acadians were as a people. They are considered to be culturally and ethnically distinct from other groups, and presumably that ethnic group existed before the deportation. Some of the defining characteristics of the Acadian group as normally understood are French ethnicity, the Catholic religion, farming, and poverty. They tended to intermarry with the same few families over and over from back then up to modern times. They were generally illiterate.

While all of this may be true, these dual understandings of Acadian as both “French citizen deported from Acadia” and as a member of a particular cultural group that has its own unique characteristics are at odds with each other. There were always people in Acadia who weren’t poor or farmers or Catholic or even French. Any society needed some people doing activities other than farming, and like in any French colony there were military and colonial officials around, and there were people being granted estates by the King. There were people new to the area who were kicked out right along with the old Acadian families. We don’t distinguish between those two concepts when we are talking about Acadians, and by using the same word for both “someone who was in Acadia” and “someone who belonged to this very specific kinship network”, it becomes frighteningly easy to mentally conflate them to the point you make cultural assumptions about a family that go far beyond them having been French and geographically in Acadia at the right time.

I want to highlight some of the ways that the term “Acadian” has proven inadequate and even created invisible obstacles for researchers, sneakily inserting unexamined assumptions into our minds and causing us not to be as thorough as we may otherwise be, or not to question things that have not quite made sense, because “well, they were Acadians” so they must have been a certain way or traveled a certain path or lived a certain lifestyle.

Many of the founding Acadian families came from the region of France known as Poitou. This includes the Gautrot family, whose founding ancestral couple apparently arrived some time after the 1636 birth in France of their earliest child, but before the birth of the second one about 1639.

I think most would agree that Gautrot (and its many spelling variations) is one of those quintessential Acadian surnames where when you see it, you can be fairly sure you’re looking at Acadian descendants most of the time.

Who, then, is this Jean Baptiste Gauterot who was having kids baptized in New Orleans in the 1740s, well before the Acadian expulsion? Was he, perhaps, someone who left Acadia earlier on and went to a different French colony? Were there actually more than one family by this name who were relevant in colonial America?

There isn’t much about this family in New Orleans or Louisiana records besides some children who were baptized. They disappear from the registers after the last child was baptized in 1762. Today I was doing some exploratory searching on FamilySearch’s full-text feature and managed to learn a lot more about this family and what happened to them.

This is a marriage contract entered in Cap-Français in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in July 1784.

The contracting parties were:

Sieur Jacques Gautherot, surgeon in the neighborhood of Morne Rouge and resident, native of New Orleans province of Louisiana, legitimate son of the late Jean Baptiste Gautherot and Dame Marie Elisabeth Laurense; and Marie Julienne Vibert, widow of the late sieur Pierre Jabal with three children from the previous marriage, native of the parish of Notre Dame de l’Assomption of this city of Cap, major and legitimate daughter of the late Jacques Claude Vibert and Marie Jeanne Guerin.

Indeed, Jacques was baptized in 1751 in New Orleans.

Simon Jacques (Baptiste, resident of this city, and Marie Elisabeth LAURENS), b. Nov. 18, 1751, s. Simon BRISSET, bailiff, and Marguerite RIEUX (SLC, 82, 236)

So at some point between 1762, when Jacques’s brother Honoré was baptized in New Orleans, and 1784, when this marriage contract was written up, this whole family moved to Saint-Domingue. I know it’s the whole family, because while father Jean Baptiste had passed away before Jacques’s marriage contract, Elisabeth Laurense was there to sign, as were his siblings, Claude, Jean Baptiste, Honoré, and Marie Elisabeth (wife of sieur Guyol de Guirand).

And sign they did, not an X mark in sight here.

I found the record Jean Baptiste Gautherot’s burial in 1782 in Cap-Français.

It says:

On 12 Aug 1782, Jean Baptiste Gautherot, former singer of this parish, native of Poitiers, parish of St. Paul, age 70, was buried in the cemetery of this parish; died the same day.

We can be sure this is the same Jean Baptiste Gautherot from New Orleans, because on some of his kids’ New Orleans baptismal records, their father has a dit name: “La Musique”. He is also noted as a “master cantor” on at least one of those baptisms.

So now we know that Jean Baptiste Gautherot hailed from Poitiers, and we even got a specific parish to look for his birth record in. Poitiers is in Poitou, the same place where the Acadian Gautrot family originated.

I looked in the registers of St. Paul’s in Poitiers for Jean Baptiste, although not exhaustively. I did not find him, but the registers are large and not the easiest to read. What I did definitely find is a lot of Babins. This is a St. Paul marriage record from 1710:

I looked on Wikitree to see what we know about the Acadian Babins. They, too, appear to have been from Poitou, arriving shortly after Antoine Babin married Marie Mercier in France in 1662. So like, not all that much earlier than this marriage record; these Babins could very well have known the ones who’d left for Acadia, for all we know. These Babins in France were literate. Is that strange? Perhaps, if we assume Acadian means poor and illiterate farmers…

Saint-Domingue registers often include the church parish when referring to a person’s origins, but that’s a lot less commonly included in Louisiana records. The parish is absolutely essential for finding records in France about a person, as there are so many registers and so many people. If you do not know where to look pretty specifically, you’re gonna have a bad time. But if you have the parish name, you have a key, and you can usually use it to find the person you’re looking for and probably lots of connections between their life in France and their life in whatever colony you started in. Repeated family names in both places, siblings, parents, witnesses, godparents.

I hypothesize that if we approached many Acadian questions with an open mind about what it meant to be Acadian, we’d begin figuring out the answers to a lot of our open questions about various Acadians. Most people would see the Gautherot in New Orleans in the 1740s and assume he was unrelated because he wasn’t deported with the Acadians. And they’d be right that he wasn’t Acadian. But I think they’d likely be wrong about him not being a relative, perhaps even a close relative, of the Gautrots that did go to Acadia. There may be specific church parishes named in records in Saint-Domingue for people we can connect to Acadians for whom we’ve never located a birth record, and I’d wager a guess that oftentimes their connections would have gone to the same church in France as they did. We should look in those places.

To take this a step even further into (in my opinion) mind-bending territory, let’s consider Jean Baptiste Gautherot’s daughter, Marie Elisabeth. She married one Louis Joseph Guyol de Guiran, probably in Saint-Domingue, and lived there until the Haitian revolution presumably caused her relocation to Versailles, France, where she died in 1815. When I noticed who her son was, I could not help but start laughing, because while I didn’t think I knew anything about this family earlier today, I actually know a lot about Marie Elisabeth’s son from a previous rabbit hole. 😊

Why did I already study her son? His name appears on many 1820s-era documents from Terrebonne Parish, an area and time period I have spent a lot of time in trying to break my own brick walls. He was Francois Marie Guyol, and he was one of the very first judges in Terrebonne.

I had realized at some point I had no idea who Guyol was despite seeing his name on everything all the time, so I decided to find out. I learned he was born in Saint-Domingue and after fleeing the revolution spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri, where he married a woman who was the granddaughter of a famous Spanish explorer. From there they made their way back to the birthplace of Francois’s mother, New Orleans, and then to Terrebonne Parish. Francois was a bit of a well-known artist, and some of his portraits still exist today.

So as you can see, this whole narrative flies in the face of the expected migration paths for people who fled the Haitian Revolution and for people named Gautrot. For a Haitian Revolution fleer, you’d probably expect a France → Saint-Domingue → Louisiana path. But instead what we have is France → Louisiana → Saint-Domingue → (France again, at least for Elisabeth) → St. Louis → Louisiana again. And we have a man with an Acadian surname from the same place as the Acadians with that surname, who went all over the French empire but never had anything to do with Acadia. If his brother or uncle (hypothetically) was the Acadian founding ancestor, what does that tell us about what it means to be Acadian?

My take from all of this is not that Acadians don’t exist as a separate group or that there’s no value in talking about them as a group in the context of the deportation; there certainly is. But we should be very careful to know if we are talking about Acadians in the context of the deportation, or if we are talking about that specific tight-knit family network, because they’re not necessarily the same thing. The Acadians belonged to a family network before they went to Acadia, too, and that network had tendrils all over the French empire, not just in Acadia.

When the Acadians were exiled, they didn’t end up in Saint-Domingue and Louisiana randomly. They went to places where they had known friends and relatives and existing kinship networks. Just like French people had been doing throughout the time of French colonization. Just like the Saint-Domingue colonists did a few decades later (which included some unfortunates who had been through the Acadian expulsion and were displaced yet again, as well as some French officials whose families had just moved to Saint-Domingue from Louisiana after the Revolt of 1768).

Migration between France and Louisiana and the Caribbean and Canada was continuous, and it went both directions, not just one. This seems like an obvious thing to state, but the Acadian deportation story so overshadows everything when talking about these families that it’s a little hard to even fathom that that is only part of the story. The implication is that we have been grouping people in a way that wasn’t in line with the reality of their social networks (“Acadian”) when the actual relevant lines were drawn differently. I would hypothesize that there are distinct sub-networks within the Acadian group that have other things in common besides what we normally think of and which started not in Acadia, but in France, and which extend out from France in more than one direction and back again.

So back to the Gautrots. There were several members of the Acadian branch who wound up in Baltimore after the expulsion, and they appear on some records with the Deschamps relatives of Henry Schuyler Thibodaux as “Guttrows”, a spelling their descendants still use outside of Louisiana. These Acadians, like Thibodaux, were literate and apparently quite wealthy. They held slaves. They had members who were physicians. They don’t seem to make much sense if Acadian implies poor farmer to you, but if you let that go entirely and consider that label as ONLY related to the experience of deportation, things appear far less confused. There were several such families in the Baltimore area who had some members remain and intermarry exclusively with non-Acadians thereafter, often changing the spelling of their names and sometimes being married in Protestant churches. They spoke English, and their descendants didn’t speak French at all a few generations later. Nothing about them appears Acadian at all but the fact that they had come from Nova Scotia. This is because the label does double duty, and without being intentional about it, it’s easy to completely miss that fact or make subtle faulty assumptions about them.

The founding Melancon ancestor was a French Huguenot who married in England in 1631 before making his way to Acadia. He spoke English. He was literate. The Blanchard family, as well, has a branch with Huguenot origins that came to America. It’s not proven that they were the same family, but with everyone locked in a framework that assumes that Huguenots and Acadians were separate groups entirely, why would it have been? Gautier and Deschamps, too, have branches that came to America long before the Acadian expulsion and were French Huguenots.

We need to be very careful not to let our after-the-fact analysis and application of labels cloud our eyes from seeing other possible connections between apparently disparate groups of people. They were all French people living in French colonies, and they had (usually) the ability to move among those colonies and absolutely did so. Acadians were not a monolithic culture or people, and they were still French like the rest of the French colonists. Their connections and culture from before the move did not simply evaporate within a few decades of them arriving in New France to the point of it making sense to throw out any hypothetical story for them that doesn’t match our beliefs about Acadians and the Acadian narrative arc we are used to. You have to be willing to see them as more than just Acadian, or you won’t notice these other connections, and they are very much worth noticing, especially if we care about understanding the group’s origins in France. The clues to unlocking some of those puzzles surely lies in documents that have traditionally been ignored because “they weren’t Acadian” or “Acadians are unlikely to have ____”. That term is doing way too much heavy lifting in most of our heads.

I am not the first person to ever straddle both worlds, but I haven’t really seen a whole lot of writing about the ways that approaching historical research as an engineer or a scientist can produce results that seem magical. I have been accused of doing genealogical “voodoo” more than once. I want other people to be able to do genealogical voodoo, and if I can share any of my methodology and help someone, I want to do that.

Fair warning: my blog is called the Genealogy Rabbit Hole for a reason. I am going to tell you about a problem I started with and where it has led me over time, but there are no neat answers to the original question to be found here. Instead, what I’ve gotten out of it is a thousand other interesting and unexpected insights, a really deep understanding of a particular group of people in a particular time and place, an intuition that lets me do things that seem like voodoo to other people, and more questions than I’ll likely ever have time to answer. But, as a scientist, I don’t work with the intention of reaching the “end”, but of furthering collective understanding and leaving something for others to build on. So that’s a feature, not a bug.

I have written a lot about what are basically snapshots of research I’ve done related to my original questions about my ancestor, Pierre Gautier. When I’ve found a particularly juicy line of inquiry that had a clear boundary around it and could be written up in a semi-coherent way, I’ve explained where I started on some individual person or question and how I got to some interesting new insights from there. But I haven’t really ever taken a higher-level overview of the work I’ve done on that over time, and I haven’t really given much notice to the systematic way I actually go about things. I’ll try to do that in this post. It will help me organize my thoughts and if it helps one other person think about a problem they’re working on it’s worth sharing. :-)

I’m going to try to break it down in terms of a slightly-modified scientific method, because that’s what it is. It’s an iterative process, meaning you follow these general steps, which lead you to a question (or questions) you can use to start over at the first step.

Define a question.

My question, for the purpose of this illustration, is “who was Pierre Gautier?”

Gather information.

This is the phase I spend the vast majority of my time in. Because of the paucity of documentation about the Pierre Gautier I want to understand, it’s never been a matter of just searching for him in the right register. However, that was indeed the first step of me gathering information.

First, I found everything I could find about Pierre Gautier in the place I knew him to have been in, Terrebonne Parish. I documented every relative I could find of his (his wife, her family, and his descendants several generations out) in a lot of detail to understand the family better and compare and contrast the information I learned about different people in it.

This included finding church records, property records, land records, and even a couple of newspaper articles that included personal anecdotes about Pierre Gautier and his son. I also traced the members of the family on the census and learned about their marriage connections and migration paths. I analyzed my DNA matches.

When I’d finished doing all of this, I had a far deeper understanding of what came after Pierre, if not what came before. Patterns and themes began to emerge. Trauma and familial issues seem to run in this family. Unlike most of my other family branches, Gautier side cousins often moved to New Orleans in the early 1900s, specifically the French Quarter and Treme areas. Some of my living cousins on this side are black, and lots of DNA matches I found had a hole in this part of their tree due to being adopted or family silence on their ancestry. Pierre’s descendants’ DNA suggest he was half European, half Afro-Puerto Rican, but he claimed to be Canadian, and he was married to a white woman with an apparently typical French/Canadian background. He first appeared in Terrebonne in the mid-1820s, where he married and entered into one of the first contracts in the parish, agreeing to build a cotton gin for someone. He seems to have lived well below Houma on Bayou Terrebonne and was familiar enough with the waterways down to the Gulf to have personally paddled a newspaper article writer to Caillou Island in 1836 and pointed out landmarks like a ‘pirate house’ used by the Laffites. His closest neighbors were Billiots.

All of this only served to fuel my curiosity, of course. I couldn’t find any documentation on Pierre to lead me to where he was prior to 1823. So I went to learning about other Gautier families in the area. There are a lot, but not so many I couldn’t learn about all of them. And that is what I did. I documented just about every Gautier or Gauthier I could find at his time and earlier on any records anywhere in Louisiana, eventually. When I find new ones I still document those now.

I expected to find Pierre with the Pointe Coupee/Avoyelles Gauthiers who were French Canadian at first. I did not, even though many families closely connected to Pierre’s wife and kids did come to Terrebonne from that same area. But I learned that there are a lot of naming patterns shared by that branch and my branch, that a lot of the Avoyelles Gauthiers also went to New Orleans, and that there are many mixed race Avoyelles descended Gauthiers.

I learned about the Gautier family that the town near me is named for. They came from France to New Orleans in the nineteenth century and were wealthy. I now suspect Saint-Domingue connections previous to that but I have not yet made my way to that part of the web to focus on it in detail.

I learned about the Plaquemines Gautiers. These were particularly interesting because where they lived wasn’t that far from Terrebonne by water, and there are many connections between the two places. They originate with another Pierre Gautier who served in the Spanish military from the 1770s, going from St. Charles parish to a spot on the Mississippi River near Pointe-a-la-Hache. There are many parallels to be drawn here, and indeed much of my research has spun off of this starting point, and I still think that this group are relevant to my original question. The Pierre Gautier in Plaquemines was not the same guy as the one I am looking for, but his story is incompletely understood. His parents were from Bordeaux but only their names are known, and they are “Pierre & Marie Gautier” so not easy to locate.

These are the three main branches I focused on in Louisiana. Not having answered my question, I then turned outside of Louisiana and learned about Gautiers (and variants of the same name) in Canada, the Caribbean, other parts of the United States, and even some who were French Huguenots that came from England. I found a Gautier son of French Canadians in Senegal, Africa. The Gautiers were a globe trotting bunch, and they spread out over the whole colonial web, and could claim French, Spanish, English, and American citizenships amongst themselves, doubtless among others.

I found Gautiers going from France to Canada to Saint-Domingue to Louisiana and various other colonies in a bidirectional manner over a span of 150 years or so in a way that suggests assuming geographically separated branches were always different families would be a real mistake. They were often involved in the military and colonial administration, so they were sent to wherever the king of France needed them. Their migration patterns suggest that the Gautier family is huge and has arms stretching to just about every continent today.

As I searched for information and learned really broadly about people with this surname and where they all fit into the world, I constantly tried to form a mental model in my head of how these different groups of Gautiers might fit together, while recognizing that not all pieces needed to fit right now (or ever) for me to start to work towards a more coherent understanding. I focused especially on those who moved from one place to another and on the connections they had in both places (marriages, godparents, witnesses).

I also picked up a lot of historical context as I went about events and people who were important during the time period I am interested in. When I noticed a reference to a historical event I had never heard of or didn’t know much about, I detoured to learn more. This was important to understand the different factors that may have driven people to move around or make other choices. People are people, then and now, but the context the lived in varied dramatically over time, and things that might seem crazy to us today may have seemed normal or even inevitable to them at the time. My mental model of them should be built using their context, not mine, if I hope to use it to guide me to new knowledge.

As I went through this admittedly very time consuming process of meticulous information gathering and analysis, I started to get an intuition about some possible stories that could make sense for my Gautier side. I didn’t learn anything specific like who his parents were or where he was born, but I had some theories to work with, which led me to the next step…

Integration.

Okay I made this one up, but I think it’s an important aspect of how I operate. When I have exhausted everything I want to learn about in the previous step and am thinking “what now?” it’s time to integrate all I’ve seen and learned into my mental model. This is a nebulous process, and it happens just by being alive and thinking about what I’ve been founding, but also by writing articles here on Substack. It takes time for my brain to process all of this stuff, and I often take a break after doing a lot of information gathering and just kind of let it marinate. Eventually some part of it sticks out to me and grabs me, and I know what to do for the next step when it’s time.

Hypothesis.

Given all my new understanding gained from the previous steps, I can now hypothesize about potential answers to my initial question. Does any particular story seem more plausible than the others? Where might it make the most sense for Pierre to have come from, and why, given the trends I’ve observed and the historical background I’ve learned?

And now we’re back at step one, asking a question. So my next question, given the various families I’d studied and ruled in or out as possibilities and DNA evidence was, did Pierre Gautier come from Puerto Rico, when, why, and how? Yes, that’s more than one question. But I don’t care about facts in isolation, I care about the entire story, so it’s more useful for me to think about this as a narrowing of my original question and a general target for my next round of information gathering.

In real life, I’m often working on several threads at the same time and letting myself spiderweb off whatever emerging question seems most interesting at the time and letting things lead where they will, often finding myself in familiar territory as I continue. But at it’s core, this is what I’m doing over and over again.

What have I learned so far?

I started researching Gautiers and other French nationals in Puerto Rico, learning about their connections and families with special attention to any Louisiana connections. A particular “Pedro” Gautier stood out as very interesting, because of his name, and because of his connection to Louis Alexandre Harang of New Orleans. And his children of mixed race. And his death the same year my ancestor first appeared in Terrebonne. His origins are not entirely clear, but it seems he was from Bordeaux and came to Puerto Rico via St. Thomas, possibly after being displaced by the Haitian Revolution. My strongest working theory is that my ancestor could have been a son of Pedro. I can hypothesize a story there that would actually make sense given all the other information I have ever found. But this is as far as I’ve gotten on the question of my ancestor specifically. It’s not a nice bow around the guy by a long shot, but it’s far more than I had when I started and had no hypotheses at all about who he could have been. I’ve ruled out many other specific Pierre Gautiers as my guy, and what’s left is a soup of people who appear to have been connected in a complex web over a very long period of time and huge distances. Somewhere in there is the story I want to learn, I just need to bring all these details into sharper focus and figure out how they all fit together.

But the above summary of the results of my research on this question do not do any kind of justice to the progress that has actually been made from my perspective. “Idk, maybe he was this guy’s son” doesn’t even begin to convey how much I feel like I have actually learned about history and this particular web of people at all. And it doesn’t express the real work that has been happening continuously for the entire time and delivers unseen exponential returns that manifest so frequently as what feels like magic. I may not have answered the original question, but there is no doubt that I have increased the body of what is known and documented about many people, including many who are famous for one reason or another. It’s not just about my question anymore at all (although I am way more capable of potentially one day answering it for my efforts).

The bonus discoveries make the ‘failure’ to answer the first question feel irrelevant

I have broken brick walls in family lines that would have been impossible to break for people searching from their own perspective in the family tree. For example, I was documenting a particular woman in Saint-Domingue using parish registers there and the Haitian indemnity records. I tried to follow her path after leaving Saint-Domingue and found her in England married to what appears to have been an Italian nobleman. Their descendants, still in England, have adopted the surname Duke after their father’s apparent title rather than taking his surname, and the wife’s maiden name is not documented on any records that are findable by just looking for them on ancestry sites and searching for names. I noticed her because I was documenting her whole social network; I wanted to know who the “duke of Sorrentino” recorded as her husband on the Haitian indemnity records was, so I looked for them and was able to find them in a descendant’s ancestry tree. This person knew his ancestor was the Duke of Sorrentino and his wife had a combination of several unique first names that sounded French, but had no information about who the duke’s wife actually was.

Their half of the story would have been almost impossible to trace from my starting point, just like they couldn’t get to my half from their starting point. But with our combined breadcrumbs a coherent story emerged, and that is just about the best feeling I think you can get doing genealogy. And it happens a lot when you research the way I do, especially in places where a family moved from one place to another & descendants lost track of the line because they did not know where to look.

I have noticed anomalies, like Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, who are important to our history and have not been studied enough to clarify fact from fiction. It’s only by studying networks so broadly that I could feel so strongly in my gut that something was not right with the story we know about him and make progress towards figuring him out one way or another. I am still hopeful about answering those questions, and now I even have other people working with me who also want to understand.

I’ve started being able to describe ways in which some of our dominant historical interpretations don’t seem to actually fit with reality much. The facts are often broadly correct, but when you really drill down into understanding the details and the webs as they really were, sometimes the usual explanation for how and why certain things happened stops making sense. Or another explanation appears in your mind, and it feels so much more plausible in light of everything else than the accepted one does that it seems insane that nobody has already published a paper about it and it’s not already being hotly debated.

An example of this is a thought I’ve had related to the identity of the Laffite pirate brothers: why has seemingly no one ever published anything exploring the possibility that they were mixed race Creoles from Saint-Domingue? 200 years and no one has yet been able to locate them on any baptismal register anywhere. That’s not normal for white men from France OR Saint-Domingue. It’s highly unusual, in fact, and I should know, having stalked hundreds of people all over the French empire largely via church records. If you can’t find such a record it’s generally because you did not know to even try to look wherever it was, but people have been looking all over France and its colonies for the Laffites for a very long time. Someone should have found them.

But if they were not white, they may have been recorded with only first names or with a different surname, perhaps their mother’s name only. We have speculative research about Laffite origins being everything from Spanish to French to Jewish to Acadian, but none of those theories (save the French one, maybe) is nearly as well-founded or explanatory as one in which they were free people of color from Saint-Domingue.

Some other insights from my broader research that inform my current understanding and working hypotheses of the Laffites (who I became interested in in the first place because of Gautier research spiralling):

• Both men had children with free women of color, sisters from Saint-Domingue. This was not entirely unheard of in New Orleans at the time, but it wasn’t the norm. It was more common among men from Saint-Domingue.

• There are probate documents from Pierre’s daughter’s estate that include witnesses testifying that their family had come to the United States from Jamaica in 1804 on the same boat with said daughter’s family and the daughter’s husband’s family prior to her marriage. This is a classic Saint-Domingue migration pattern.

• There are no baptism or marriage records for Pierre or Jean in New Orleans or elsewhere in Louisiana prior to 1815, when Jean’s daughter was born. We know the Laffites were around prior to that for long enough to establish their operations in Barataria, but we don’t really know anything about their activities prior to 1810 or so in any detail.

• Many of their known associates were either free people of color from Saint-Domingue themselves or married to the same.

• There is a pattern of very wealthy and powerful families having Saint-Domingue connections, including at the highest levels of power in New Orleans and even other parts of the United States like New York and Philadelphia. Many of these same families had mixed race children they documented and for whom they served as godparents and marriage witnesses in Saint-Domingue, clearly recognized as family. Their mixed descendants were educated just like the white ones and clearly raised as upper class people. These sorts of connections may have been what enabled the Laffites to operate seemingly with the full cooperation of authorities at every level for so long.

• The white refugees from Saint-Domingue were the 1%. They were extremely wealthy and well-connected, and they had a lot of slaves. They didn’t want to lose these slaves, which made up so much of their own net worth. The foreign slave trade was illegal, and getting them into the United States was a problem. The United States wanted these refugees to bring their wealth to live in the United States. They weren’t going to change the law about imported slaves, though. What would have solved that problem better than, say, having some people from Saint-Domingue put the slaves on “Spanish” ships, “capturing” the ships as prizes, and then bringing the slaves in via some back door? The timing couldn’t be more on the nose.

When synthesized, all of this information suggests a plausible story arc for the Laffites that is quite different from the usual narratives which are based on a lot less data. It explains their murky origins, their well-connectedness and apparent “gentlemanliness” and education levels. It explains their choices of associates and mothers for their children. It explains the lack of retaliation by authorities and the subsequent revering of them as heroes instead of criminals, even just a few years after they were however briefly on the hook for piratical crimes. I have never heard another theory that could do that level of lifting about so many aspects of the Laffites’ story.

But it only become materialized as an idea after thousands of hours of research into many aspects of their time, place, and connections. It wasn’t really a goal of mine to learn about them, but I have anyways. And if I ever am looking at records and scan over one of them, I’m well-prepared to notice them if they appear there even if they aren’t what I was looking for at that time. I can’t disprove this theory, although I’ve tried, and it lacks the sticking points of most other theories I’ve heard, which tend to include some level of confusion as to the ‘why’ of things. Do I know I’m right? Not at all. But I know which story I find most convincing, and I can tell you exactly why…

These are just a few examples of the phenomenon that has started to happen more and more the longer I’ve been researching this way and documenting everything I find on Wikitree. “Serendipity” has started to happen to me on a near daily basis, where I’m looking at something and oh look! Some other thing jumps out that answers a question I had or leads to a new path to follow that gets me to new insights. This is the voodoo. It’s magic woven from a thousand threads, and they just keep strengthening each other as time goes on because everything connects to everything else.

I really believe that if more people adopted some of these methods we’d soon start making huge breakthroughs in our understanding of genealogy and history on a regular basis. My bottlenecks are time and my own energy levels. The amount of information I continuously want to process is enormous, and that is both the hardest part of this way of operating to sell and its biggest selling point. It’s a lot of work, and there’s no clear start or end point, and it feels like you will never be able to answer all the questions you have. But the payoff is absolutely proportional to the amount of effort that is required, if your motivation is to further your understanding of our history and our human family tree.

You don’t get to pick exactly which facts you are able to learn, but the path is full of unexpected, fascinating, and important discoveries along the way. And there is a very real synergy that happens from all of this that leads to an intuition that makes it possible to understand and learn in a way that feels like a whole different level up from just being good at using search wildcards and filters to locate documents.

If people are still reading at this point, these are some bullet points I would most want to share about all of this pontificating:

• Documenting on Wikitree has many benefits and I really wish more people would seriously use it. It solidifies information in my mind through repetition and the process of extracting and recording that information. It creates a backup of my work that is publicly accessible to everyone and can be built on by anyone who wants to at any time. It lets me easily see the change history on profiles so I can see when I worked on them before and what I was thinking about. I can follow breadcrumbs like that to figure out why someone feels familiar when I can’t remember months later but find myself again looking at a profile I made coming from another direction. The relationship and connection finders help me contextualize people, too.

• Even more than looking for evidence of whatever it is you believe to be true, look for evidence DISPROVING whatever that is. This helps you get over your own unconscious blind spots and biases. We all have them.

• I don’t think history should be given a free pass on the “falsifiability” required of scientific research. If you’re going to make a claim, it should be possible for someone else to look at all of the data and find specific evidence either validating that claim or disproving it. But often we just get sweeping conjectures about how things worked based on what other people said before and newspaper accounts or records told from only one perspective. There’s usually no attempt even made to consult the actual nitty-gritty records and see if our hypothesis about some group of people was consistent with reality, even when such records exist and are accessible. In 2025, that is unacceptable. Extensive records are available digitally in many cases, and we have computers that can help a lot in crunching massive amounts of data, especially if you have institutional funding and research assistants.

• If you aren’t documenting siblings, friends, marriages, business connections and those of others in the community you’re not getting the full picture. You need to be able to compare and contrast to perceive anything unique or interesting that isn’t obvious. If everyone did more of this the synergy would be unreal

• Use secondary sources for clues and to see what others who have thought about your problem have said, what’s in other people’s trees, etc. Other people are smart and know all kinds of things. But the only REAL data is primary source data, and you should build your conclusions from that. Find what the other writers used as sources, and use those as your sources, not what somebody said after the fact. Sources can be misinterpreted, mistranscribed, incorrect, or even fraudulent, and if you don’t know how we know something, you don’t really know it, and neither does anyone else claiming to know something without saying how they know it

• Be very careful before concluding permanently that something or someone is definitely not relevant unless you understand them and those around them very deeply

• This whole post may or may not be an incredibly long winded way of wishing I had more hours in the day, more brain cells, or other people helping me get through the web documenting I’ve been going so hard on for a long time. It’s not something I can really ask of anyone because it’s a very niche interest, time consuming, and for most probably not nearly as interesting as I think it is. But more people doing this kind of thing, even if not on groups I focus on, is the surest way to accelerate what I wish I could accelerate more on my own. And more generally I truly do think that approaching history as a scientist is something that we should really think about doing far more. I also suspect that doing so en masse would soon throw a lot of accepted narratives into chaos, but, hey, maybe it’s past time for that

These reparations went not to the victims of slavery, but to the former slave owners and their descendants to compensate for the financial blow that emancipation caused them. Many slave owners’ wealth largely consisted of the value of their human property and the future children of their current slaves. That wealth evaporated when they were no longer allowed to keep slaves. And so many governments, as they enacted laws prohibiting chattel slavery, also enacted means of providing for compensation to those whose finances were adversely impacted.

The most well-known example of this is probably the Haitian indemnity demanded by France from the government of Haiti after independence. A couple of decades after the Haitian Revolution, once it became clear that no return to the status quo of French rule was imminent, France demanded that Haiti pay them 150 million francs to compensate for the loss of property. This was later reduced to 60 million francs (but interest brought the eventual total up closer to the original amount). This was an astronomical sum of money, and Haiti made its final payment to its loan providers for this debt in 1948. A lot more could be said about just how messed up this was; I’ve written about it a bit elsewhere. I consult records from the Haitian indemnity all the time; they are a really useful genealogical source if you’re researching people from Saint-Domingue.

But there are other, less well-known instances of reparations paid out for the loss of human property. For example, British taxpayers were still paying off loans taken on to finance reparations to slave owners as late as 2015.

The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.1

Apparently, this wasn’t even broadly known in the UK at all until a completely tone deaf government employee shared this on Twitter:

I’m not sure if people were meant to feel proud of their role in ending slavery 150+ years after slavery was abolished, but the reaction from many people of color was more along the lines of “so you’re saying my tax dollars have been being used to pay back my ancestors’ owners for no longer being allowed to own me?”

Most slave owners in the United States were not offered indemnity payments; this is because slavery only during the Civil War, by force, and the U.S. was hardly going to pay the rebels back for their troubles by then. However, in one case, American slave owners actually were compensated for the loss of their slaves.

The D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 ended slavery in the District of Columbia and provided loyal slave owners (meaning pro-Union rather than pro-Confederacy) compensation for their losses. Included in the allocations related to this act was money to pay each former slave $100 if they chose to leave the United States. Worth noting is that a slave was worth far more than $100, and slave owners received more than that per slave if they filed for compensation. A few black people who had owned slaves or purchased family members’ freedom were able to successfully file for compensation; Wikipedia mentions one such man received nearly $1500 for the eight family members he had bought.

Many countries implemented some form of compensated emancipation (not all of these are related to transatlantic slavery, e.g. Qatar, but most are).2

It was always just accepted that former slaveowners deserved this compensation if they were going to accept emancipation, yet reparations for people harmed by slavery remain a contentious topic to this day. I don’t think most people are even aware of the kind of reparations that actually were widely implemented, despite some of us who are alive today having had our tax dollars used for them.

So now you know, too.

Who was Aaron King?

We don’t know much about him. He first appears on records in Terrebonne Parish in the early 1820s, when he witnessed a few documents at the courthouse, one of which was a power of attorney for Jim Bowie. His first child with Eloise Bergeron was baptized in 1827. Their last child together was baptized in 1835.

Aaron appears on the 1830 census in Terrebonne, but he isn’t on the 1840, and there’s no trace of him after the youngest child’s baptism at all. He is recorded as between 30-40 years of age in 1830, so we can infer he may have been born about 1790. Eloise Bergeron was born in 1794.

The only evidence we have for where Aaron came from is a much later census where his son’s father’s birthplace is recorded as New York.

That’s all the primary source evidence we have about Aaron.

Who was William King?

We know somewhat more about William than we do about Aaron, but he is also a brick wall; we don’t know who his parents were. William is first found on the 1800 census in Herkimer County, New York, where he married Hannah Hungerford in 1802. Based on that, we can infer he may have been born about 1785. Hannah was from Connecticut.

About 1811 or so, William and Hannah moved to Ohio. William served in the War of 1812 out of Ohio. They had several children together; the oldest son was named Aaron, born in 1812.

In the pension application Hannah Hungerford made for William’s military service, she stated that he left home on 2 Feb 1819 with a large sum of money to buy potash kettles. He never returned and was presumed dead.

So both William and Aaron have their earliest known origins in New York, and they were born around the same time. Aaron appeared in Terrebonne a few years after William disappeared.

I first came across William King because when I looked at my dad’s close Y matches, one of them had a tree that went directly back to an Aaron King, who was William’s son. Naturally, this piqued my curiosity, given I was trying to figure out my mystery Aaron King. My Aaron was born too early to be the same person as William’s son. But the Y descendant and my dad have zero differences at 66 markers, which gives an estimated common ancestor right around the same time as our respective brick walls.

By searching my paternal grandfather’s autosomal DNA matches, I was able to find a large cluster of descendants of William and Hannah. These are pretty distant (Aaron was my grandfather’s third great grandfather—twice) but the pattern is very clear.

So I made a WATO tree on DNAPainter, with it set up to find the father of my Aaron’s son, Richard, using the DNA matches of his great-great-grandchild, my grandfather. I also used some matches from my grandfather’s first cousin, who was also a great-great-grandchild of Richard.

I found 18 descendants of William and Hannah to put into the WATO tree, and the results were as conclusive as you could expect to get working on a problem this far back.

Richard wasn’t a full sibling of William and Hannah’s kids. His mother was Eloise Bergeron. But the statistical analysis of these matches suggests most strongly that Richard was a sibling of those kids. This is an inexact science; finding more matches to plug in could always change the results. But the data seems to show that William King as Richard’s father is extremely plausible. Indeed, it’s the only hypothesis that is given as a possibility at all. The other hypothesis is that Richard was a half sibling of William and Hannah’s kids, which is probably the correct one, despite seeming far less likely based on these numbers alone—one explanation for that is that my side descends from Aaron twice.

With the combination of William’s disappearance at precisely the right time for him to have gone to Louisiana and started a new life as Aaron King with the DNA evidence from both Y and autosomal tests, it seems reasonable to conclude that William and Aaron were probably the same guy.

Unfortunately, none of this tells us who the heck William/Aaron was. Who were his parents? Where did he actually come from originally? Why would he have left his family and went to Louisiana? These are still open questions. But knowing where Aaron likely was before he came to Louisiana is in itself a pretty big deal, and it opens up more research avenues to try to figure out more about this mystery man.

The source is a book called Sugar and slavery in Puerto Rico: the plantation economy of Ponce, 1800-1850 by Francisco Scarano. I actually found a PDF of a draft version of this work in Spanish on the Internet before I knew that the book had been published; when I contacted the author to ask a question about it, he directed me to the finished work, which is accessible to me online via my alma mater’s library.

The book is about just what the title suggests, and it included some information about Pedro Gautier and his plantations in Puerto Rico. It also includes information about many other plantation owners in the Ponce area during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the appendices is a table containing a list of “hacendados” in the area and information about their national origins, if known, year of arrival in Puerto Rico, as well as references to where the information was found.

When I first looked at this book, I was just searching for anything about Pedro Gautier. Over time, the scope and breadth of my research has expanded, and I have studied anyone I could find who was in his network, and anyone I could find in Louisiana who had documented connections to Puerto Rico during this time period. Scanning over this list again, I realized that there are now many familiar names in here. I zoomed in on these people not because they were in this list, but because my research into these familial and social networks led me to them. Some of them I researched because of the information I found in this book; others I found on my own independently.

José Nazario Gutiérrez del Arroyo was Pedro Gautier’s boss when Pedro first arrived in Puerto Rico. Pedro managed his plantation, Hacienda Quemado. I wrote an entire post about José because he was interesting, and because I found extensive documentation about his family in Louisiana records. His brother, Francisco, married a woman from New Orleans and lived in Louisiana for many years and had many children born there.

Alexandre Harang leased Pedro Gautier’s plantation from his estate after Pedro died in 1823. Harang was from Louisiana, and even had connections to Lafourche Parish. Most of the large Harang family stayed in Louisiana, but for a time at least, Alexandre was living in Ponce. He moved there in 1815 and seems to have stayed until 1835 or so.

I noted this Pedro Arce while looking at this table again. I don’t know anything about him, but I do know that the Darce family of Terrebonne Parish appears to have a common Puerto Rican ancestor with my Gautier family, and this guy is likely not unrelated to our mystery.

I noted a Fortier on this list. I don’t know who this particular Fortier was at the moment, but I do know that Alexandre Harang’s wife was Celeste Fortier of New Orleans. Celeste’s brother, Honoré Fortier, is someone I recently did a deep dive on because I found that he had connections to Ponce. I found his son, Jean Fortier, whose mother was a free woman of color named Adelaide Lalande, in probate documents related to his inheritance from his mother’s estate. In those documents, I found letters written from Jean to various relatives and associates from Les Cayes, Haiti, and Ponce, Puerto Rico. In 1819 he wrote from Ponce:

Deign my dear sir, as being deprived of making the trip to New Orleans, to receive my power of attorney made by a notary and certified by the mayor of this commune, to receive from the houses of my guardians or curators the successions of my mother Adelaide Lalende and my grandmother Marie Terese Lalende, in order to send to my father Honore Fortier, domiciled in Ponce, island of Puerto Rico, I urge you to receive the said successions without inspection, in cash or in papers, as it is difficult for me to find an opportunity from New Orleans to here, from the front to Mr. Rio & Deville, merchant in St. Thomas who will take care of them wholeheartedly upon delivery

So Honoré Fortier was living in Ponce at this time as well. I found a deposition by Alexandre Harang describing a slave he was allowing Honoré Fortier to bring to Puerto Rico in 1817. Alexandre said that Honoré was going with his family to Puerto Rico. Honoré had several children by Adelaide Lalande besides Jean.

I looked into Honoré Fortier more after finding this, and found that he was apparently a part of the Barataria smuggling operation from no later than 1808, when he was charged by the United States government with violating the Embargo Act by engaging in deliberate actions to get around paying customs at New Orleans via Lake Barataria. The case file doesn’t mention any Laffites at all, but it’s very clear that this was a part of the same operation they were later documented as being a part of. Honoré was also mentioned in 1811 as being among the pirates disturbed at Barataria at that time.

I also found Honoré named as master of a ship bound for Puerto Rico in 1816.

Several other names on the list in this book are familiar to me more generally, from researching the wider network of people connected to all of these people and, especially, from my work documenting the connections between various groups that came from Saint-Domingue.

I want to look now and see who else is noted as having origins in Louisiana in this list.

I’m also particularly interested in those from France and Saint-Domingue, but I need to do one thing at a time. :-) These two names are the only other ones noted as coming from Louisiana.

On Napoleoni, this book doesn’t have anything else to say (although I do intend to locate the source given related to him). When I searched for Dubocq, I was immediately taken to the section that included information about Harang and Gautier as well.

An excellent example of a plantation established with a sizable infusion of capital, Hacienda Pampanos was founded in the early 1820s by the successful manager of Quemado, the Frenchman Pedro Gautier. Upon his death in 1823 half of the estate, including 61 slaves, was leased to his son-in-law, Juan Bentura Pedro Blanchereau, for 1,500 pesos in the first year and 2,000 pesos during each of eight successive harvests.*’ Blanchereau’s sudden death in 1826 resulted in the leasing of the entire property to Alejandro Harang, an emigré from Louisiana who had resided in Ponce since 1818 and who owned Los Meros, a large cattle-raising and cotton-growing farm in the westernmost and driest part of the valley.

…

Harang’s expertise and his rather unusual financial resources were decisive in converting Pampanos into a flourishing and profitable enterprise. In the early 1820s, although he lived in Ponce, he was reportedly the owner of a sugar plantation in Louisiana, where all of his family resided. By 1831, when he wrote his will, he had apparently sold the Louisiana estate, but continued to have mercantile interests in Charleston, South Carolina, which he undoubtedly used to the advantage of the Ponce plantation. Inclined, perhaps, to concentrate his property in Pampanos and Los Meros, Harang invested heavily—as much as 40,000 pesos in five years—to provide the former with a steam-driven mill, more land and additional slaves. In 1831 he subleased half of Pampanos and leased half of Los Meros to a French merchant who had recently arrived from Saint Thomas, Guillermo Dubocq; shortly afterward Harang transferred the rights to one-fourth of the Pampanos lease to Juan Lambert for 7,500 pesos.°’ By the time of Harang’s death in 1836, the improvements effected in Pampanos over the preceding nine years (half of which were attributable to Dubocq) were valued at more than 51,000 pesos, and Harang’s capital was inventoried at 8,188 pesos.

Juan Bentura Pedro Blanchereau was the husband of Pedro Gautier’s daughter, Juana. It seems that Juana was born outside of Pedro’s marriage to Marie Rumeau. I only know of Juana’s existence because a descendant of hers contacted me directly from Wikitree. It’s unclear who Juana’s mother was, but the fact that she existed is interesting, given that my best guess for my ancestor’s identity is that he could have been an illegitimate son of Pedro Gautier. I haven’t managed to learn a whole lot about the Blanchereau family, but I did find a few people by that name in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue.

I found some more information about Dubocqs in this book.

One notable exception to the pattern of the later immigrants was Estevan Julio Dubocq, whose career resembled more that of the earlier migrants in that he had close connections with the Saint Thomas merchant establishment and expressly intended to engage in planting upon settlement in Puerto Rico. He was the son of Guillermo Dubocq, a French exile from Saint Domingue who had sought asylum in the United States and later moved to Saint Thomas, where he was engaged in commerce and had frequent contacts with planters in Puerto Rico. The elder Dubocq arrived in Ponce in 1831 or 1832, already part owner with Alejandro Harang of the Los Meros cotton and sugar estate, and co-lessee of the Pampanos plantation. In 1836, after Guillermo and Harang had died, Estevan Julio purchased Harang’s share in Los Meros, and soon after acquired the neighboring Hacienda La Union in partnership with a Spanish merchant, Esteban Domenech. Since he sold his share in La Union to Domenech in 1839, it is not clear which of the two estates that were listed as belonging to him in the 1845 census was the one he held in association with David Laporte; with capital of 116,000 pesos and 119 slaves, it might have been Pampanos, the larger of the two he had owned.”

Pedro Gautier appears to have married in St. Thomas in 1814. It seems I should learn more about the people of St. Thomas (Virgin Islands).

My goal now is to learn more about the people I’ve highlighted here, especially:

• the Dubocqs

• David Laporte

• Blanchereau

• Juan Lambert

• Manuel Antonio Napoleoni

I searched newspapers for Dubocq first and found the son, Julius, traveling to Puerto Rico in 1841 from New York City.

I also found the father, Guillaume, “of St. Thomas”, traveling from Philadelphia to St. Thomas in 1829.

There are a few references to Dubocqs in New Orleans papers, but none who I can immediately connect to these two. Most references to Dubocqs are in New York, Philadelphia, or Puerto Rico.

In an 1848 Philadelphia paper I found Guillaume Dubocq’s wife’s obituary:

This is exactly the type of thing I would hope to find, because now I can research his wife as well. Who knows, maybe she will lead me to yet more threads to pull to unravel this story. I see she was Marie Anne Francoise Trochon de Lorriere, of Saint-Domingue.

I didn’t find any Dubocqs when I searched for that name in the Haitian indemnity records, but I did find Marie Anne Francoise. She was paid money for the lost property of one Pierre Guerin, who must have been a close relative. The property was in Croix-des-Bouquets.

I see from this indemnity entry that Marie Anne Francoise was first married to a man with the surname Robion de Laubinière, and when widowed remarried to Guillaume Dubocq. Now that I know what part of Saint-Domingue her family had property in, I can try to find more about them in the Croix-des-Bouquets registers, which go back all the way to 1693 (!!).

…and the records of her baptism and first marriage are indeed in those registers! Happy day. Time to start building this family out in earnest on Wikitree.

I located her baptismal record in the 1774 register.

She was born on 8 November 1773, the daughter of René Trochon de Lorriere, a governmental official, and Marie Hoguet. Her godparents were Jean Francois Penin de l’Epine, captain in the militia, and Marie Anne Duchenne, wife of Jacques René Ballan.

This is a pretty good start! By looking through the other entries for this family, I learn her father died in 1780, and her mother remarried in 1782 to Pierre Guerin, the person who Marie Anne Francoise inherited under in the Haitian indemnity records.

At this point I stopped writing this article & took a few a days exploring the connections branching out from this couple. I’m not actually finished with this at all, but I found something so ridiculous that I need to just step back and write it out.

So, Guillaume Dubocq and Marie Anne Francoise Trochon had a daughter, Marie Antoinette Uranie, born in Port-au-Prince in 1800, we’ll just call her Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette married one Eugene Sheridan in Kentucky in 1820. Eugene was also a native of Port-au-Prince. His parents were Eugene Sheridan McMahon and Marie Genevieve St. Martin.

They eventually moved to New Orleans, which is where both of them died.

When Eugene died, his maternal aunt’s daughter filed for control of his estate, claiming to be his sole legal heir. His aunt was described as “Mrs. Peter Randolph Beverley, born Lovely St. Martin, maternal aunt of [Eugene] and her four children, viz.: Mrs. Eglantine Randolph, Miss Euphrasie Beverley, Lewis S. Beverley, and your petitioner.”

First of all, of course his aunt married into the Randolph clan (yes, it’s those Randolphs).

But wait, there’s more!

The parents of Marie Genevieve St. Martin were Laurent St. Martin and Marie Anne Aucoin.

Now, the name “Aucoin” immediately makes me think Acadians, and in this case, that assumption turned out to be 100% correct. I couldn’t find the marriage record for Laurent and Marie Anne, even though it’s listed in the 1770 index for Port-au-Prince. It appears some of the records for that year were not digitized or were put in the wrong place, because it wasn’t where I thought it would be and I can’t find it.

However, I did find a marriage record for Marie Anne’s sister, Marie Thérèse, who married in Port-au-Prince in 1781. On that record, her parents were named as Simon Pierre Aucoin and Anne Thibodeau, and her birthplace was recorded as St. Charles, Acadie. She was also noted as residing at the habitation of her brother-in-law, St. Martin. So Marie Anne Aucoin’s parents were indeed Acadians.

I found her parents on Wikitree, and it seems nobody knows what happened to them after 1755. Well, it seems we have found an answer for where to find them. I noted another potential sister, Marie Josephe, on another record as a witness or godparent as well. I didn’t find much else about the Aucoins, but I didn’t exhaustively search either. They weren’t the only Acadians in Port-au-Prince at this time, although there weren’t tons of them, either.

What really blew my mind about this is that Anne Thibodeau was the sister of Alexis Thibodeau, the guy who is supposed to have been Henry Schuyler Thibodaux’s dad.

And that, my friends, is how I start off trying to learn more about the French creole network with connections to Puerto Rico to figure out my mystery ancestor, and somehow end up back at Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, yet again, oh my god what is happening right now please send help

Some stories, however, are so big or so complex that they defy my efforts to tidy them up and put them into a nice narrative with all the loose ends tied up. Every time I think I’m starting to “get it” something new comes up that makes me think I’m probably still missing something big. Or I can’t clearly see where the boundaries are between different groups at all, and generalizing becomes near impossible. It seems that the story gets more and more complicated the more I learn, instead of becoming clearer. I am not sure what the larger point is because it keeps shifting and transforming into something different every time I look at things from a different angle. The rabbit hole appears bottomless.

One such story for me is that of the Laffite pirates. I have written about them before, but the “point” I got from that earlier deep dive is that there is much we don’t know and much historians disagree about. It clarified more what is not known than what is. While I was working on that, I did some work on their Wikitree profiles, which were lovingly made by others long before I showed up, but which need a lot of TLC to separate facts from rumors and fiction. I ended up becoming co-manager of Jean Laffite’s profile with the intention of cleaning it up more once I had finished collecting all enough evidence to feel confident saying anything about them at all.

Since then, I have added notes to that profile to clarify what is truly known and what is not, and I’ve dropped various sources there as I’ve come across them so I (and others) could find them again later, but I haven’t yet felt capable of really doing the profile justice. But I come back to these pirates over and over again, and every time I look I find something new to complicate things. It’s always fascinating, but man, they might just be the grandaddy of all rabbit holes. No wonder so many researchers have been interested in them for so long.

I’m just going to take y’all along with me on a spiral I recently found myself in regarding the Laffites & co. This happens semi-regularly.

It didn’t start with me just deciding to research the Laffites that day. (It rarely does.) It started with me looking at my Puerto Rican DNA matches and doing different combinations of filters to see if I noticed anything interesting. One of the things I did, just to see, was filter the shared matches of one of my PR matches with whom I had many pages of people in common, by who had someone from Louisiana in their trees. (This is because it’s not possible, as far as I know, to enter multiple places into the main match list page filter. By using shared matches with someone from PR, I basically could take a subset of all my matches with PR in their tree and then filter those people by Louisiana.)

I did not find much, probably because the relevant ancestors lived a long time ago, too distant for most casual DNA test takers to have their trees built back that far. But I did find at least one person born in Louisiana who appeared in a couple of my Puerto Rican cousins’ trees. (This doesn’t imply that that person is our shared ancestor at all, by the way. I am simply trying to better understand the network of people who may have had connections to both places back in the Spanish period.)

The person I noticed was one Mathias Brugman Duliebre, apparently born in 1811 in New Orleans. He died in Puerto Rico. His father was named Pierre Brugman, and he was from Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela. His mother was from Port-au-Prince. This was the information I got from these matches’ trees, and I was able to confirm it by finding Mathias’s baptismal record in New Orleans.

So I went to see what else I could find about Mathias Brugman, and what do you know? He’s famous.

Mathias was an important figure in Puerto Rico’s fight for independence from Spain. He and his son were actually eventually executed for their revolutionary activity by Spanish authorities.

Wikipedia bios are often a good starting point for figuring out where to look for more information. This is what they have to say about Mathias’s early life:

A lot of trees also have Mathias’s mother from Puerto Rico, but the several church records in New Orleans that I’ve found all agree she was from Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue, not Puerto Rico. Her surname suggests French ancestry. Mathias’s eventual wife also had a French surname—Laborde. The church records in New Orleans agree about Pierre Brugman having been from Curaçao. Pierre Brugman’s parents were named Mathias Brugman and Louise Levy; his mother’s surname lends credence to Wikipedia’s claim that he had a Jewish background.

So then I started Googling various permutations of “Mathias Brugman” and “Pierre Brugman”. Imagine my surprise when the first result that came up on Google for “Pierre Brugman” was… Renato Beluche’s Wikipedia page.

Renato Beluche was one of the few famous Laffite pirates besides the brothers themselves. He was born in New Orleans and was a privateer/pirate ship captain for decades. He worked with the Laffites at Barataria and served in the Battle of New Orleans with the Baratarians. However, for most of his adult life, Beluche was heavily involved in the Colombian and Venezuelan independence movements along with the likes of Simon Bolivar. He was still captaining privateer ships and cruising for prize vessels, but with all the legitimacy and public veneration of a freedom fighter. 🤣 I could see how he may have had some connection to people from Curaçao. But why is Pierre Brugman mentioned on Beluche’s Wikipedia page?

This is funny because I worked out Beluche’s family connections using church records a long time ago. They’re definitely not the same guy. But, apparently, there have been serious attempts to prove that they were the same dude, and at least some people still believe it. What on Earth led to that conclusion?

A Beluche descendant wrote up a blog post that goes into this Beluche/Brugman theory.

Perhaps the most debated, if not necessarily famous, argument for Renato Beluche quite literally being someone else comes from the family of Puerto Rican freedom fighter Mathias Brugman. As an example, some Brugman historians offer the comparison signatures of Pierre Brugman (top) and Renato Beluche (bottom) above. They note that the bold, looping Bs of both signatures seem too similar to have been written by different hands.

The signatures in question:

This is in no way convincing to me. The article continues:

The real confusion begins with a French letter of marque issued in March of 1810 for the brig L’Intrepide. The owner of the ship is listed as Joseph Sauvinet, a prominent New Orleans merchant and Laffite associate from the earliest days of Barataria. Her captain, according to Dr. De Grummond who is taking her information from legal documentation of the U.S. Navy, is named as Pierre Brugman. A description of Brugman, also in the ship’s papers, shows him to be a virtual twin of Beluche: He is thirty years old, five feet three inches tall and has brown hair. Probably the most arguable point in favor of this Captain Brugman being the revolutionary Mathias’s father is the birthplace he gives: Curacao.

This is hilarious. We are basing a theory that two different men were one dude on non-photographic, generic physical descriptions that would have applied to a multitude of people. About thirty years old, short, and brown hair. Must be the same guy! (The author of this article did not buy into this theory, either.)

I would suggest that if you are going to theorize that two people are one person, you first make sure that the other person didn’t have his own entire separate life.

I can shed a bit more light on some of the other connections drawn between the two. I dug around in the newspapers archives, and it appears that Pierre Brugman was also a privateer captain out of Barataria. At one point, he was the captain of l’Intrepide, which Beluche also captained. This does not imply they are the same person. Brugman and Beluche both captained many vessels throughout their lives. But they did probably know each other, and it would make sense if Brugman, too, was involved in South American revolutionary activities. His son, Mathias, certainly went on to become a revolutionary. Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

In 1805, “Capt. Brugman” was in charge of the Creole, a French privateer. Apparently, he treated his prisoners well enough.

Another blurb about the same capture was less generous.

In 1810, a newspaper article mentioned that the Duc de Montebello, a vessel of the “French freebooters”, was commanded by a “Broughman”. This article also mentions l’Intrepide and another vessel, la Petit Chance. It also mentions that Broughman had commanded l’Intrepide at times, a vessel known to have been commanded by Beluche at other times.

In 1816 “Pedro Brugman” commanded La Popa, a Carthagenian privateer.

The Laffites were known to have obtained letters of marque (permission to act as privateers) from the fledgling Carthagena (Colombia) government, who were interested in help from anyone willing to work against the interests of Spain. This gave at least a veneer of legitimacy, as the only difference between a privateer and a pirate was whether or not some government sanctioned your actions against another government with whom they were currently at war.

Back in 1813, Beluche was in command of la Popa.

Beluche appears in various articles throughout this time period and the decades following it with regularity, always as a privateer captain, and increasingly in his capacity as an important leader in the Venezuelan military. He almost certainly knew Brugman in some capacity; they captained the same vessels at different times. Neither ever captained the same vessel for extended periods; there’s nothing weird at all about different people having served in that capacity on the same vessels over time. Brugman and Beluche were likely hired to perform the duty of captaining these vessels for some set period of time.

So, switching gears a bit, let’s go back to that 1810 article. It had some interesting information in it other than the brief mention of “Broughman”.

“A system of iniquity which has heretofore been unparalleled to this country.”

“There appears to be a regularly connected chain of villainy…”

“We suspect extremely many persons being engaged who now share our hospitality and all the rights of American citizens…”

Sure, this is absolutely newspaper catastrophizing because it likely sold papers. However, the more I dig into these people, the more those statements start to feel like they aren’t really exaggerating very much at all. Just bear with me…

This particular article goes into quite a lot of detail about this “chain of villainy”. I think that the places called out are particularly illustrative.

The Duc de Montebello was fitted out at Baltimore, purchased by a Captain White, cleared out with French passengers for St. Bartholomews, was called the Amiable, put into Savannah (Georgia) armed, shipped part of her crew, sailed and received the rest from on board a vessel commanded by Capt. Kuhn. She assumed off the bar of Charleston the French character and name she now wears; sailed on a cruize, robs, sinks, burns and destroys every American, Spanish and English vessel she falls in with until glutted with plunder, she is compelled to put into this port [meaning New Orleans] under pretense of distress; her captain’s name is Basson; her apparent owner’s name Brouard—one Menton, and a certain John de Loupe, make conspicuous figures on board of her.

Remember the Gaultiers and the O’Duhiggs from Saint-Domingue that I spent so much time following? This paragraph quite literally hits every city in the U.S. they went through. Baltimore, Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans. And perhaps this is neither here nor there, but their home in Saint-Domingue was even specifically mentioned in the context of privateering next to Beluche’s name. This is one of the previous articles from above:

“Tiberon” is where the Gaultiers had previously lived, at the westernmost extreme of the island of Hispaniola, just a stone’s throw from Jamaica. They didn’t live there anymore by this point; they would have been in either Savannah or New Orleans by then. But still.

Later on in that article it says:

We hear of a vessel that was purchased at Norfolk by some Frenchmen and sailed for Savannah, but stopped at Hampton where it was equipping in every respect for a privateer: this circumstance joined to the circumstance of the Montebello's having been equipped by a certain Mr. Jerome at Savannah. We are induced to believe New Orleans and Savannah are intended as the two principal places of rendezvous.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

In 1818 a batch of documents relating chiefly to the issues faced by the governmental authorities regarding the Laffites and their men, who were by this time operating out of Galveston, were published. The first items are extracts from letters written in 1817 by Beverly Chew, collector of the Port of New Orleans, to the federal Secretary of the Treasury. Beverly Chew was a close associate of Daniel Clark while he was still alive. He was one of the men named to administer Clark’s estate and embroiled in the interminable legal disputes over it with Clark’s daughter, Myra.

This letter is long, so I am just going to pull out some particularly juicy bits. He is essentially telling the secretary of the treasury that the pirates are out of control in Galveston, there’s nothing he can really do about it, and they can’t say he didn’t let anybody know about the problem.

The establishment [at Galveston] was recently made there by a commodore Aury [Louis Aury], with a few small schooners from Aux Cayes [Saint-Domingue], manned, in a great measure, with refugees from Barrataria, and mulattoes. This establishment was reinforced by a few more men from different points of the coast of Louisiana, the most efficient part of them being principally marines, (Frenchmen or Italians,) who have been hanging loose upon society in and about New Orleans, in greater or smaller numbers, ever since the breaking up the establishment at Barrataria.

*******
Since they have been denied shelter in Port-au-Prince, they have no other asylum than Galveston.

******

I have lately sent an inspector of confidence, to examine La Fourche from the Mississippi to the sea, and he reports it as thickly settled for 80 miles from the river, has 8 or 10 feet water, and 6 feet on the bar, at the month or entrance in the sea: there is no obstacle whatever to craft entering it from the sea, and ascending to the Mississippi, and trading freely as high up as they please.

******

Bartholomew Lafon of this place (who acted as secretary to the meeting of 15th April, copy of deliberation forwarded in my last) is mentioned as the governor of the new establishment near the Sabine [where the gang intended to hold illegally imported slaves as they thought it was out of the reach of American federal authorities].

It’s clear that although the base of operations may no longer have been Barataria, the goal was the same as ever: smuggle goods into Louisiana. Profit.

A list of people who signed a letter to Commodore Daniel Patterson complaining about the depredations against the vessels they owned was also published.

Commodore Patterson was the same naval officer who led the breakup of the Barataria encampment, before the Battle of New Orleans. I recognize more than one name on this list. Richard Relf was the other executor of Clark’s estate. Laurent Millaudon was a Plaquemines plantation owner whose unhappy business dealings with Jean Joseph Coiron, the husband of one of the Saint-Domingue Gaultiers, produced hundreds of pages of court documents.

Now, you would think that this list could be used as a way to sort of get an idea for who was with the pirates and who was against them. But…

In 1824 a dinner was given in honor of Beluche in New Orleans.

So here’s a whole group of people singing Beluche’s praises, and that group includes both Richard Relf, who was on the list of complainers in 1818, and Commodore Patterson, who had been tasking with breaking up the Barataria operations way back in 1814! Apparently, much can change in ten years. However, what did not change is Beluche’s occupation. Beluche was arrested and tried for piracy in Jamaica in 1818. (He was acquitted, of course.) He was accused at times of not doing what he did out of any sense of justice or passion for the revolution, but to enrich himself. His response seems to have basically been “So what if I’m in it for the money? I’m getting results, aren’t I?”

As late as 1848 Beluche seems to have been considered someone you call when you need some dirty work done.

That Spanish quote says: “Do you want me to be an assassin? Fine, I’ll be an assassin.” Apparently, to fulfill that promise, this general went for help from Beluche.

And yet all of these people who knew him or knew of him and his whole sordid past, and even actively worked against him or his comrades, decided to… throw him an honorary dinner for assisting the Venezuelan army? 🤣

I wanted to make sure that Commodore Patterson in 1814 and Commodore Patterson in 1824 would have been the same person. They were. His Wikipedia entry is perhaps conspicuously silent on any of his activities between the Battle of New Orleans and 1828, but after that he was still doing naval officer stuff.

But what really jumped out at me on Patterson’s Wiki profile was this:

Patterson’s grandfather was a 1C1R of Edward Livingston, whose plantation was next to Daniel Clark’s and Pierre Gautier’s in Plaquemines Parish. Their common ancestors were a Livingston who married a Schuyler. Edward Livingston, the one who orchestrated the pardon of the Baratarians for their War of 1812 service. The one whose wife was from Saint-Domingue.

Something something Henry Schuyler Thibodaux.

I can draw no conclusions from all of this. It truly often feels like everyone I look at is playing both sides in some way or masking their true motivations. No wonder I can’t stop trying to figure them out. 🤣

I like to use examples, so for this I’m going to select a (mostly) random family noted on church records in Louisiana as having come from Saint-Domingue. This is quite literally how I often get started when I want to work on this. Inevitably, I soon find myself looping back around to familiar people. Look in the New Orleans, Baton Rouge, or St. Landry church records between about 1790 and 1820, and you’ll find plenty of them. I want to do a family I’ve not yet worked on, both because it will further my own research and because I want to genuinely be learning new things as I write this post to illustrate that it is possible to just pick someone and go. Most of these people are findable if you want to find them. From the Archdiocese of New Orleans records, volume 11:

I picked this one solely because it has so much detail included. There are a whole lot of names and specific places in here, and I’m bound to find a ‘hook’ somewhere to begin building on. Another good reason for picking a family from Léogâne:

Yes, they have records going back that far on ANOM. The records in Saint-Domingue were not destroyed by the revolution in many, maybe most cases. The records available to us are also generally of a far higher quality than anything you can find for New Orleans prior to 1800. So let’s find an index and look for Binau. Set the record type:

That means “ten year table of all acts”. Sometimes they include more or less than ten years, but this is how you locate indexes on this site (although sometimes they are organized a bit differently, it’s always worth poking around to see what is available). I picked the one labeled 1778, because I’d guess our target person Charles Binau’s family would have been around during the 1770s-1780s. It’s worth checking all of the indexes for the names you’re interested in.

Looks like a Louise Josephine Binau was born in Léogâne in 1783. Let’s go find that record and see what else it contains.

Aha! Her father was Pierre Cesar Jean Baptiste Constance Binau, an infantry captain. Looking back at our New Orleans baptism from several decades later, Charles Binau’s father was also named Pierre Cesar Jean Baptiste Constance Binau. That mouthful of given names is a blessing here, because it’s far less likely to be coincidental that we’ve found another person by that name. This is either Charles’s father or perhaps his grandfather.

A rough translation of the rest of this record:

On the 30 Jul 1783, I baptized Louise Josephine Olive, daughter of the legitimate marriage of Pierre Cesar Jean Baptiste Constance Binau, captain of the infantry of his majesty’s troops in this colony, and Dame Marie Anne Elisabeth Fauché, his wife, the father and mother. The godfather was Louis Joseph Binau, uncle of the infant, captain of dragoons of the dauphin regiment, represented by Antoine Pierre Louis Germain, lieutenant of the regiment in Port au Prince; the godmother was Marie Olive Elisabeth Binau, sister of the infant…

What a wealth of family information to work with off just this one record, right? So many possibilities. Now that I’ve located this family, I’m going to go ahead and check the other New Orleans volumes I have access to for any other clues about this family once in New Orleans. They could be useful while looking at Saint-Domingue records.

and:

Well, I dunno who Juan Binau is, but I know who Maria Oliva Isavel Bineau is! She’s the sister of the baby who was baptized in this Saint-Domingue record. She apparently married Lorenzo (Laurent, perhaps) Cruise in New Orleans in 1812. I didn’t find any other Bin(e)aus, but I don’t have the volumes beyond number 11 available at home. Okay, putting them in my back pocket for now. At this point I consider myself to have found my ‘hook’, and I generally start adding people to Wikitree. I can’t keep track of all of this if I don’t.

I found Marie Olive Elisabeth’s baptism as well, in 1779.

This record is messy but well worth reading. I got lazy on the military/government titles, so forgive any inconsistencies there, but the rest is definitely correct & we get the point:

Baptized 25 May 1779, born 30 Jan 1779, Marie Olive Elizabeth, legitimate daughter of Pierre Cesar Jean Baptiste Constance Binau, former musketeer of the second company of the king's guard, captain of infantry troops of his majesty for this colony, and Marie Anne Elizabeth, his wife. Godparents were Pierre Cesar Binau, her grandfather, former major commandant for the king in Léogâne, major honoraire of the colony and former consul of Petit Goave, Léogâne, and Port au Prince; and Marie Elizabeth Berson [?], her grandmother, wife of Jean Baptiste Fauché, conseillier honoraire au consul superieur du Port au Prince.

So we learned the names of 3/4 grandparents just by reading the entire baptism including the godparents.

I checked the index for even earlier records from this parish. There are lots of Binau variants, including what appears to be the birth record for Pierre Cesar Jean Baptiste Constance Binau, in 1754.

That’s him, all right! His mom’s name was Marie Olive Haran. I found her burial record next, and it has tons of details in it.

[At this time I’d like to note that her maiden name was Haran, a variant of Harang, and the baptism I started with in New Orleans refers to Plaquemines Parish, where some of my Saint Domingue Gaultiers eventually lived; there are known connections between these people and the Harangs that connect to the Puerto Rico Pierre Gautier. I doubt anyone else will follow that tangled logic too closely, and there’s no need to, but these are the types of things I notice. Is that a definite connection? Not yet. But like, bet. It is relevant, this stuff is not typically ever coincidental working with this group. I chose a random name I’ve never heard of before today. It’s wild.]

Marie Olive’s burial includes this information:

On 11 Jul 1777, the body of Olive Marie Haran, born in the neighborhood of la grande riviere of Léogâne, parish of Ste. Rose, in 1718, was buried at the cemetery of the old church. She died today at her residence; she was 59 years, six months, and one day old. She married on 19 May 1734 to Pierre Cesar Binau, ecuyer ancien mayor for the king, commandant of Léogâne and honorary sovereign consul of Petit Goave.

Well, hot dog! That makes finding other records for them real easy. (They aren’t indexed in the same way before 1736 in this parish so it requires a bit more digging sometimes.) Her baptism was right where it’s supposed to be:

And extremely legible. There are no legible documents from Louisiana in 1718. 🤣 An exaggeration, but not really. A selection from 1770s New Orleans:

Yeah. Anyways, Marie Olive’s baptism. And the 1712 marriage record of her parents, which includes their parents’ names as well:

So from Charles in New Orleans we’re now able to go back three more generations in Saint-Domingue. This isn’t always possible but it’s also not the first time I’ve found such a wealth of information. 🤣 I won’t belabor the details here; there are more relatives and more records, I’m filling them in on Wikitree as I go. Let’s look at another source I always use for these families: the Haitian indemnity records.

I found Pierre Cesar Binau on there. The indemnities claimed by his descendants were worth an astronomical sum.

He was definitely a sugar planter.

So I guess she was the only one left by the time the indemnity paid out and inherited from every relative she ever had.

The properties were in many locations. Sugar & cotton.

I tend to just keep going until I stop finding information when I work on these families. I use FamilySearch’s full text search feature extensively—probate records, especially, are often goldmines. I search newspaper archives. I also use Google and often find information in French-language trees on Geneanet (although I never use the info I see there unless I can back it up with sources). A Saint-Domingue newspaper is digitized here as are a large number of notarial records from Jeremie.

I consider myself “done” when I exhaust all the sources I can find on a person/family, and ideally after I have managed to connect them to the world tree on Wikitree, as well. In this case, I did that by going back to the baptism of Charles Cesar Binau I started with. His godmother was Genevieve Vinet, a first cousin of one of his parents. As it turns out, Genevieve Vinet was indeed a first cousin of Genevieve Billiot. This Billiot family lived in Plaquemines Parish and are related to the Houma Indian Billiots; that group descends from Genevieve’s uncle. Plaquemines Pierre Gautier bought his property there from her dad. This is a perfect illustration of why I research everybody. It always comes full circle somehow. 🤣 And now these Binaus are connected to the world tree. I’m sure I’ll land back on them in the future somehow.

I’ll end with this: If you have any brick wall ancestors who look to have been French and arrived in Louisiana in the 1790s-first couple of decades of the 1800s but you can’t find any mention of their specific birthplace or a baptism record for them anywhere, look in Saint-Domingue (and other Caribbean islands like Martinique, why not; their BMD records are on the same ANOM site). Just search the indemnity site for the surname. If it comes up, it’s definitely worth looking into those people. I have seen this so many times at this point that I think many, many brick walls that look like this are solvable by searching in Saint-Domingue. This applies even more if they went through Baltimore or Charleston or Philadelphia or Norfolk, Virginia or New York on the way.

The OSL has produced some instructions related to these documents which can be found here. I’m going to actually work through these because I never have. When I’ve attempted to located particular peoples’ land I’ve sometimes been successful, sometimes not, but I always glossed over a lot of stuff I didn’t really understand doing it, and I’d like to understand better.

The first instructions are related to locating a particular plat by township and range. This is useful when you have something like a land patent issued for bounty land that describes the property in terms of section, township, and range. I’m going to use one such patent I’ve worked with before, the one issued to one Aaron King for his service in the Mexican War.

The property we want to locate is “the west half of the west half of section two, in township fourteen north of range eight east, in the District of Lands subject to sale at Ouachita, Louisiana containing one hundred and fifty one acres and two hundredths of an acre.” I chose this example because I think it’s likely to be one that works with the default instructions for “official” government plats—there’s definitely a lot more we need to consider beyond those, but we’ll start there.

So the instructions tell us to select “plats, official” as the document type and then enter the township, range, and land district. Of the options in the “land district” dropdown, none of them seems to coincide with anything in my description clearly, so I left that option blank. I got one result back.

This result is a zoomed-in map of only that parcel, township 14N range 8E. This map shows the sections that this parcel was further divided into at the time it was surveyed.

So if you are like me, this seems to make intuitive sense at first glance, but I realized that I needed a bit more context than just what I’ve said to really feel like I understand what’s going on here. So let’s back up… what is a township? What is a range?

This terminology is part of the standardized way that land is identified and located by the U.S. government. It’s a grid system. We start out using baselines and principal meridians as reference points. Baselines run east/west, while meridians run north/south. For Louisiana, this map shows the relevant baseline and the two relevant meridians.

So you can see the relevant baseline in Louisiana is partly concurrent with the state’s modern border. It’s the horizontal line. There are two meridians in Louisiana, the Louisiana meridian and the St. Helena meridian. I’ll come back to why there are two systems and how to know which one to use later. Let’s just consider the Louisiana meridian for now.

So the point at which a baseline and a meridian intersect is called the “initial point”. That point is the one from which townships and ranges are measured. A township is a square measuring 6 miles by 6 miles, running north and south of the baseline. A range is the same concept, but it goes east/west and is relative to the meridian being used. You need both to locate a particular parcel of land. It’s similar to the x/y coordinate system you learn about in high school math. Each square identified by township/range is then further divided into 36 equal sections.

So the simplest possible representation of this system, made by me in Paint:

This is what those township/range values mean, and the two axes are the baseline and the principal meridian being used. We have to already know what the reference lines are for the system to have any meaning at all.

So let’s go back to the plat map I got back in my results earlier. The label on top says “district north of Red River, Louisiana.” I went looking for information about that district and found this map from 1845.

(Very) roughly, it’s this area. You can see Catahoula Lake represented on both maps as a good reference point. The Mississippi River, the Red River, and the northern state line serve as boundaries.

This is consistent with what I’d expect for a piece of land subject to sale in the Ouachita district. The meridian being used is the Louisiana principal meridian, not the St. Helena. So the parcel I’m looking for is 14 units above the baseline and 8 units east of the principal meridian. Knowing that each unit is 6 miles square, we can derive that the parcel is about 80 miles north of the baseline and 50 miles east of the meridian.

I used a Google Earth application to find the parcel on the map relative to the baseline and meridian. It’s near Winnsboro, Louisiana.

I zoomed in on the point I made and applied the overlay of townships/ranges and indeed it’s exactly where it should be. Huzzah!

I got confused by this at first because I don’t see any rivers or lakes in this square, like there are on the plat map. Then I realized that the square I zoomed into is just one of the sections in T14N, R8E. Zooming out was really enlightening; the square contains exactly the same numbered squares as are on the plat map, going from 1 to 36. Now I can see there are rivers in there.

So back to our description of the parcel from the land patent. “The west half of the west half of section two, in township fourteen north of range eight east, in the District of Lands subject to sale at Ouachita, Louisiana containing one hundred and fifty one acres and two hundredths of an acre.” So Aaron’s land was in section two, in the northeast corner of this plat. Specifically, it was the westernmost quarter of section two. I can reconcile this with the rivers on the plat map, although it’s still unclear to me what “Old Hurricane” is meant to represent. Putting the coordinates I selected for the western part of section 2 into Google Maps shows me it’s now part of Crowville, Louisiana, in Franklin Parish. Franklin Parish was formed in part by land that was originally considered part of Ouachita Parish. This place is still extremely rural, forests and farmland and not a whole lot else.

This doesn’t answer any burning genealogical questions in itself, of course, but I’m excited that this exercise has really clarified my understanding of this system. I feel confident that I can locate a given parcel and know I’m looking at the right place and why it’s right.

The plat map also tells us when the borders of this parcel were surveyed and by whom. That can be important. I didn’t include it in the original screenshot, but it’s at the bottom right corner of the map.

There’s also a table of contents on the right of the image which shows acreage available in each section for public land sales as well as the names and locations of private claims (if applicable; apparently for this plat, it was not applicable by the time the land was surveyed by the federal government).

This is great! We can find properties. Let’s continue, as there are more parts of this site explained in these instructions. The next part is related to locating a property in a U.S. tract book. This is where the transfers of land from the public, federally-owned domain to other parties are documented. This time, I changed the dropdown for document type to “Tract books, U.S.” and included the section number (2) as well as the township and range. I got one result back which is labeled as being part of the “Monroe District”.

The tract book contains information about who bought various pieces of land from the federal government, when, and for how much. It’s organized in numerical order by section. I looked for section two, and bam! I’m now 100% certain I’ve found the land in Aaron’s patent.

It’s hard to read. But there are two entries in this section for land located by Eldridge Sisson via bounty land warrants. Eldridge was the “assignee” for Aaron’s land, meaning Aaron sold it to him. One has the same patent number (22978) as the one on Aaron’s patent. We are definitely in the right place!

Now that I understand this system better, I also understand how to use the BLM (federal land office) site.

I’ve entered the state, township, range, section, and meridian and clicked search. What I get back makes perfect sense.

These are all the same entries I saw on the tract book page for section two. Eldridge Sisson has two, one is Aaron’s bounty land, and the other is also bounty land sold by one Robert N. Walton. Clicking into the specific entry will bring you right to the land patent document I started my exercise with today. You can also get to information about the land surveying and even to the same plat map I found on the state website. I can even see a list of all the people who were in this plat, which feels likely to perhaps be genealogically useful at some point. From the detail link for Eldridge and Aaron’s parcel:

Click “Original Survey” and go to the “related documents” tab.

All the patents related to sections in T14N, RE. A list of potential neighbors, when they claimed the land, all tied in to exactly where they were relative to everyone else. You can sort by date to see who claimed land in the same place around the same time and which sections they claimed. It’s fantastic. It looks like Eldridge Sisson had most of section two, and the rest went to one Edmond Corey. 🤷‍♀️

Now that I actually took the time to understand what I am looking at on these land records sites, I even realized it’s possible to have the federal site just tell you where the freaking place is. I had tried to figure out how to do this a few times and never had any success, but now that I know what is going on with this system it was intuitive to find.

So it turns out I had no need to do all that legwork myself to locate the plat, but I’m still glad I did because if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t really understand or know for sure I was correct in my mental model of how all of this works. I love how everything fits together and all the parts confirm all the other parts so neatly.

One loose end I’ve not really tied up is related to the “districts”. The land patent I started with mentioned the Ouachita district, the tract book mentioned the Monroe district, the plat mentioned the “district north of Red River”. What are these districts? I found another helpful document from the Louisiana state land office with definitions for important terms. (It also includes descriptions of each “document type” on the website, which is very useful.)

So, that’s good to know. This particular district has three accepted names, and I encountered each one. 🤣 Honestly, I have been vaguely confused about these districts for a long time. Particularly the New Orleans district and the ones on the Mississippi River, given where I’m normally researching. The Greensburg district is actually what used to be Spanish West Florida; it’s also the part where the St. Helena meridian becomes relevant.

What I have described in this post so far is the standard system used by the federal government for administering land and how to navigate that on both the state and federal land office websites. It is fairly simple and straightforward.

Now we need to talk about what makes all of this a lot more complicated in Louisiana. Many of the “rules” don’t really work for parts of the state that were surveyed and divvied up during the colonial period. People had already owned this land for years under France and then Spain (…and then France; and also sometimes Britain) by the time the U.S. took over, and the land administration wasn’t organized according to this system. The Americans couldn’t really come in and say “sorry, your property lines are going to have to change, we need the grid to be composed of equal squares.” There was in no way a clean slate to start from in New Orleans and along the Mississippi and main bayous, which had by this time been thickly settled for decades.

So there can be more than 36 sections in a township, and the townships may not look anything like those nice, identical squares. If you do research in southeast Louisiana, you are familiar with these long lots which were laid out along rivers and bayous, normally a narrow rectangle extending 40 arpents back from the water. This was the only land anyone was interested in at all for a long time. These areas look like this on a map:

Not really easily reconcilable with the square grid system.

I haven’t even gone into what the other meridian is for, or why it exists, or why there is a federal tract book and a state tract book, or what all the other document types on the state land site are about, and this post is already long. 😭 I learned a lot writing it. Future posts will cover those topics, and they will be coming soon, because I’m writing them as I figure it out. I want to understand for my own research and there’s no better way to understand something than by making sure you can explain it to someone else, in my opinion. 🤣

So I had found some claim documents from Henry S. Thibodaux relating to some land he received as part of a Spanish land grant in 1798 in the Baton Rouge area. I wanted to see if I could find the original Spanish documents, maybe there’d be more information about how and why Thibodaux received 400 arpents from Spain.

I have use the State Land Office website before when trying to figure out where exactly people had their land. There are plat maps on there and you can often figure out who the original owner of a property was and then work out where they were using that information. Even as I have looked at this website many times, I never clicked into this dropdown. I always just searched by name on the first page.

I was MISSING OUT! There is so much stuff here, and it’s not all boring stuff about land transfers. Thousands of pages of documents from the French and Spanish periods forward. There are also historical analyses by WPA workers. Some of it is indexed, some not. It’s a bit disorganized in some ways but, honestly, I don’t even care. It’s digitized. I can look through it page by page at my own pace whenever I want. It is awesome!

I don’t think I’ve found everything there is to find re: Thibodaux in here, but I did find some stuff. It’s going to take me a long time to get a good handle on what all is in here and how to navigate the collections. But as I have been browsing these various record sets, I have found a ton of other very interesting things. I might never get out of this rabbit hole, y’all.

I learned that many of the Spanish records are included as part of the Pintado papers, which were created by Vicente Sebastian Pintado, one-time surveyor in Spanish Louisiana and West Florida. These papers were once believed lost—until they were eventually found in Rezin Bowie’s estate papers after his death. Pintado’s widow had sold these valuable documents to the highest bidder after being refused the $15,000 she asked of the American government for them. The Bowie brothers were land speculators and engaged in a lot of schemes that exploited the confusion around Spanish and French land grants in the early years of Louisiana’s statehood to make a lot of money. I’m sure it helped them a lot to literally be in possession of the very documents the government needed to be able verify all of their claims. 🤣🤣🤣

The Pintado papers are largely available on this website today. I did not know they were accessible to me at all until now. I only ever find bits and pieces of this stuff searching on FamilySearch.

I found documents related to a case brought by Paul Bouet Laffite of Natchitoches that should have disproved claims that he was the father of the Laffite pirates many years ago. There’s a lot more than just what’s mentioned in this synopsis in here that could be used to settle that matter, if it’s not already settled.

There’s also a letter in there that was written in 1814 and goes into details complaining about the “banditti” (Laffite pirates) menacing trade in Louisiana. Super interesting stuff.

I found many documents relating to the claims of Indians made in central and southwest Louisiana. These are mostly related to complaints of their land being stolen. These documents are particularly gutting to read. These various tribes were screwed out of their land in unique and creative ways, and we can know exactly who got which tribes’ land. It’s really dark, but it’s super interesting. And I think there may be answers in here somewhere about how the Houma ended up in, well, Houma. I saw mentions of Indian tribes “agreeing” to move to the interior after having sold all their prime lands (including their villages and often the villages of totally different tribes, because that makes sense…) to European settlers.

There are hundreds of pages like this. The systematic way that the native Americans were forced off their land and into remote areas is on full display here. It’s fascinating and horrifying.

There are documents listing out the names of those Choctaw Indians who received “scrip” as part of their removal to wherever the government wanted them to go.

I knew this stuff happened, but seeing how it happened in detail, with names and receipts, is something else. I could spend months or years just analyzing these records. I might just do that…