♂Laurent Sigur

Laurent Sigur (died 24 July 1741) was the greffier et tabellion du ban de Cheminot, the clerk and notary of the ban of Cheminot in Lorraine. A ban was a local seigneurial jurisdiction, and the tabellion^W was the officer who drew up its contracts. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Laurent Sigur.

Death

Laurent died at Cheminot, in the diocese of Metz^W, on 24 July 1741, aged about forty. A lethargy, a coma or stupor, overtook him; he received extreme unction but could not confess, and he died in it. He was buried in the parish cemetery in the presence of Pierre Laurent and Jacque Sigu, who both signed the register. The register spells his surname “Sigu”, and the second witness bore the same name; the act does not say how the two were related.

Family

Laurent married Jeanne Marchal. Their son was born at Cheminot on 2 February 1737 and baptized the next day as Pierre Laurent, and the register already names his father as clerk of the ban. The godfather was a Pierre Laurent, the same name as the man who witnessed Laurent’s burial four years later. The godmother was Christine Vincent, the wife of Jean Marchal, a carpenter at Louvigny; the register does not say how she was related, though her husband bore Jeanne’s surname.

The son, known as Laurent, married Anne Roche at Lay-Saint-Christophe, near Nancy, on 16 January 1759, and the marriage act names the groom as the son of the late Laurent Sigur and of Jeanne Marchal, of the parish of Cheminot, diocese of Metz. The younger Laurent and Anne later left Lorraine for Spanish Louisiana, where their daughter Anne married in 1782. Laurent’s own parents are not known, and no record of his birth or of his marriage has been found.

Notes

The burial act names no wife and no child, but the 1737 baptism at Cheminot names a Laurent Sigu, clerk of the ban, and his wife Jeanne Marchal as the parents of a son, and the name, office and parish match the burial. The son baptized in 1737 is taken to be the Laurent who married in 1759: 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 by 1759. A second son named Laurent, born in another year of the Cheminot register, is not excluded; only some years of that register are known. A Jacque Sigu, a blacksmith (maréchal ferrant) of the parish, had a son baptized on 10 February 1737; his name matches the second witness at the burial, but the registers do not say how he was related to Laurent. The register gives no birth date or place for Laurent himself. An online family tree gives him a birth at Louvigny in 1701, which agrees with the age at death, but no register has been found to confirm it.