♂Laurent Sigur

Laurent Sigur (born 2 February 1737) was a Lorrainer^W from the parish of Cheminot, in the diocese of Metz^W, who married Anne Roche at Lay-Saint-Christophe in 1759 and by 1778 had settled with his family at St. Gabriel on the Mississippi, in Spanish Louisiana, where the clerks wrote his name as Lorenzo. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Sigur (died 1797).

Early life

Laurent was born at Cheminot, a village between Metz and Pont-à-Mousson, on 2 February 1737 and baptized there the next day. The register enters him as Pierre Laurent, the son of Laurent Sigu, clerk of the ban of Cheminot, and Jeanne Marchal. His godfather was a Pierre Laurent, and the child was entered under the same two names; he married and lived as Laurent. His godmother was Christine Vincent, the wife of Jean Marchal, a carpenter at Louvigny. She could not write and made her mark. The register does not say how she was related to the family, though her husband bore the mother’s surname.

His father died when Laurent was four. A Laurent Sigu of the same office was buried at Cheminot on 24 July 1741, aged about forty, and a Pierre Laurent was one of the two men who signed the act. The marriage act of 1759 calls Laurent’s father the late Laurent Sigur.

Marriage

On 16 January 1759 Laurent married Anne Roche at Lay-Saint-Christophe, a village just north of Nancy. The act names him as the son of the late Laurent Sigur and Jeanne Marchal, of the parish of Cheminot in the diocese of Metz, and his bride as the daughter of the late Claude Roche and Jeanne Guedon, of Lay. The banns^W were read in both parishes, and the curé of Cheminot certified that no impediment had been found there. Laurent signed the register himself, and a second Sigur signed with him.

The couple’s first known child, Jeanne, was born at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 6 December 1759 and baptized three days later. Her godfather was a Jacques Sigur, and her godmother was Anne’s widowed mother, Jeanne Guedon. The register does not say how Jacques was related to Laurent. A second daughter, also named Anne, was born on 3 July 1761 and baptized two days later. Their son Pierre François Sigur, whose birth date is not known, was probably born between 1761 and 1772. An abstract of his marriage contract dated 13 November 1788 at the Attakapas post, as published in Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records, gives his origin as Pont Amonsson in Lorraine and names his parents as Laurent and Anne Roche; the abstract spells the mother’s name “Poche”, a slip taken for Roche.

Louisiana

A daughter, Anne Françoise, was baptized at Pont-à-Mousson on 2 March 1772, so the family was still in Lorraine then. It next appears in the Spanish records of Louisiana. At the baptism of a daughter, Luce Laurence, born on 8 November 1777 and christened on 4 January 1778 at Donaldsonville, the couple are described as “of St. Gabriel”, and two more children followed: Juan Lorenzo Martin in 1781 and Gil in 1785. Gil’s godparents, baptizing him in March 1786, were a Pedro Francisco Sigar and an Anrriqueta Rosche, as the Spanish clerk wrote their names, so people bearing both parents’ surnames were in the colony too; the register does not say how they were related. The godfather was probably this son, Pierre François; Pedro Francisco is the Spanish form of his name. Laurent himself stood godfather at St. Gabriel on 26 February 1786, his last known appearance. The same abstract calls Laurent himself an officer of the militia.

When their daughter Anne married Jean Serrette in 1782, the Spanish clerk recorded her parents as “of San Christoval, Province of Lorrena”, a rendering of Lay-Saint-Christophe. Anne is described as “of Nantes, France” at her own burial in 1797. The records do not explain when or why the family left Lorraine, or how it came to Louisiana.

No record of Laurent Sigur’s death has been found.

Notes

The Cheminot baptism of 1737 is taken to be his because the parents match by name and office and the parish is the one named in the 1759 marriage act. A second son named Laurent is not excluded, though the Cheminot register from 1727 to 1742 names no other child of this couple; it has no entries for February to April 1739.

Laurent Sigur was a well-known name in New Orleans in this period, and records matched on the name alone have been attached to him in online trees, among them an 1818 Orleans Parish probate and an 1830 census entry for Iberville Parish. Neither has been shown to concern him, and the two cannot both be the same man, since a man whose estate was probated in 1818 would not be counted in the census of 1830.

Edna Freiberg’s Bayou St. John in Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1803 (1980) names a Laurent Sigur of New Orleans: St. Maxent sold him a house below New Orleans in 1777 and, on 12 August 1789, the former DuBreuil plantation near Esplanade for $72,000; he sold that property to Pierre de Marigny in 1798, and he was a defendant in New Orleans suits begun in 1810 and judged in 1811 and 1814. The book gives him no age, wife, parents or place of origin, and it is not known whether he is the same man as the Laurent Sigur of Cheminot and St. Gabriel.

An online family tree gives a birth at Cheminot in 1730, which the register does not support, and a death at New Orleans on 17 November 1816, which has not been found in a register.