♀Jeanne Marchal

Jeanne Marchal was a woman of the parish of Cheminot, in the diocese of Metz^W in Lorraine, and the wife of Laurent Sigur, the clerk of the ban of Cheminot. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Laurent Sigur.

Her son’s baptism

Jeanne’s son was born at Cheminot on 2 February 1737 and baptized the next day. The register enters him as Pierre Laurent, the son of Laurent Sigu, greffier of the ban, and Jeanne Marchal, his wife. His godfather was a Pierre Laurent, and his godmother was Christine Vincent, the wife of Jean Marchal, a carpenter at Louvigny, who could not write and made her mark. The register does not say how she was related to Jeanne, though her husband bore Jeanne’s surname. The boy was entered under the godfather’s two names but married and lived as Laurent.

Her husband

On 24 July 1741 a Laurent Sigu, “greffier et tabellion du ban de Cheminot”, died at Cheminot aged about forty, the same office the baptism gives to her husband. As tabellion^W he drew up the contracts of the ban, a local jurisdiction, and as greffier he kept its records. A lethargy overtook him; he received extreme unction but could not confess, and he was buried in the parish cemetery in the presence of Pierre Laurent, the name of his son’s godfather, and of Jacque Sigu. He is taken to be Jeanne’s husband, so she was a widow from that day, with a son of four, and eighteen years before that son’s marriage.

Her son’s marriage

On 16 January 1759, at Lay-Saint-Christophe, her son Laurent Sigur married Anne Roche. The marriage act names him as the son of the late Laurent Sigur and of Jeanne Marchal, “de la paroisse de Cheminot diocèse de Metz”, and records that the banns^W were also published at Cheminot. It calls her husband deceased but uses no such word of her, and it does not say whether she was present.

Notes

The burial act names no wife and no child, but the 1737 baptism names a Laurent Sigu, greffier of the ban, and Jeanne Marchal as his wife, and the name, office and parish match the burial; a man of about forty in 1741 also fits the generation. No second Laurent Sigu appears in the Cheminot entries known. The register spells the surname “Sigu”, and Jacque Sigu, a kinsman of unknown degree, witnessed the burial and signed.

The son baptized in 1737 is taken to be the Laurent who married in 1759, because the parents agree by name and office, the parish is the one named in the marriage act, and that act says the groom’s father was dead. A second son named Laurent, born in the years for which no register entry is known, is not excluded.

What is not known

No record of her parents, her birth, her marriage or her death has been found. The Cheminot entries that are known cover October 1736 to November 1737 and the burial of her husband; no entries for the years before and after, in which any other children of the couple would be baptized, are known. The October 1736 to November 1737 pages show no other child of hers.