♂Jean Le Gentilhomme

Jean Le Gentilhomme (born 2 March 1671) was the son of a farming family at Tourlaville, a parish just east of Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, where he was born and married. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Scholastique Le Gentilhomme (baptized 1700). He was born on 2 March 1671 and baptized the next day, the son of Bernardin Le Gentilhomme, a laboureur, and Marguerite Picot. In the France of the time a laboureur was a farmer who worked the land with his own plow and team, as distinct from a day laborer.

On 7 July 1695, after the publication of the banns^W without opposition or impediment, Jean Le Gentilhomme married Anne Le Rivager at Tourlaville. Anne signed the register in her own name. The parish called the groom “Jean le Gentilhomme fils de Bernardin”, Jean son of Bernardin, and still named him “Jean fils Bernardin” five years later. The couple are said to have had six children, born between 1696 and 1705. Their daughter Scholastique was baptized at Tourlaville on 16 January 1700 by the vicar Julien, and was named by her godparents, Scolastique Fournet and François Fournet. She was probably the Scholastique Le Gentilhomme of Cherbourg who married Thomas Holley at Tourlaville on 22 April 1727, by leave of the curé of Cherbourg; a Jean le Gentilhomme signed that act among the relatives present.

Notes

The year of the marriage

The last digit of the year in the marriage act could be a 5 or an 8. A table of the register’s folios by year places the page in 1695, and the facing page agrees. A WikiTree profile for the couple gives 7 July 1698; the same profile’s son Jean, born in 1696, fits the earlier year.

The children

The count of six children, born between 1696 and 1705, comes from a member-contributed WikiTree profile; of these, only Scholastique’s baptism is given on this page.

Scholastique of Cherbourg

No act names the parents of Thomas Holley’s wife, so the link between the girl baptized in 1700 and the bride of 1727 is probable rather than proven. It rests on the rarity of the name; on the 1727 wedding being held at Tourlaville, her parish of baptism, by permission of the curé of Cherbourg; on a Jean le Gentilhomme signing among the “parents” present, though that signature is faded and hard to make out; and on the WikiTree family listing only one Scholastique among the six children.