06/06/2025
Part 1 of 4: Origin & parentage of Jean Baptiste LeComte ...
BITS OF EVIDENCE NO. 865
Research Strategies:
Finding the Origin of Jean Baptiste LeComte, Part One
Few colonial Europeans at Natchitoches carved their mark so deeply into Cane River as did Jean Baptiste LeComte. Yet, even though his contribution has been seriously studied for decades, his pre-Natchitoches origin remains unproved and his parentage uncertain. The problem is rooted in missing documents, faulty records, and a thousand online trees that assign parents and birth place with no evidence to support any of their claims.
At Natchitoches, LeComte created two documents that identified both birthplace and parents.
• The first document, his marriage contract, disappeared from the courthouse before Winston DeVille published translated abstracts of the Natchitoches marriage contracts in 1961.(1)
• The second document, the church record of LeComte’s marriage, still exists. It was translated and published in 1977—but that translation carries several question marks, a silently waving flag warning us that the document was difficult to decipher. (2)
That translation tells us:
JEAN BAPTISTE LECOMTE
MARGUERITE LE ROY
July 3, 1756, after publication of one ban and dispensation of other two, marriage of Jean Baptiste Le Compte, son of Claude le Compte and Parine Combe, native of the parish of St. Martin de Vecin quainquence?, diocese of St. Glavec [Glanse?] … and … Marguerite LeRoy, daughter of Etienne le Roy and of Marie Louise Gillot, born in this parish. Witnesses: Antoine Desprez (s), de Mersier (x), Louet? (s), Dominique [Monteche] (x), Bourdelle.
Across a half-century since this was published, no one has identified a place in France called “St. Martin de Vecin quainqunce.” Or a diocese called “St. Glavec” (or Glanse). Or a couple named “Claude le Compte and Perine Combe.”
The mystery of LeComte’s origin is solvable. Unlike 60 years ago, when this translation was made, we now have endless geographic tools online to better identify places, even when old script is hard to read. We now have a wealth of parish registers online, whose pages we can examine to extract records and reassemble families.
So how do we tackle this problem?
STEP 1:
RE-EVALUATE WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW
Always, when we use a source with question marks, we should seek and study the original document. (In fact, we should do that *every* time we use a derivative source: Get the original document and study it.) We may see the letter formations differently than did `the translator, indexer, or database entry person. We may have more experience at reading that type of handwriting. We certainly are likely to have more experience today than we did years when we first encountered a record. So, Step 1: we re-examine and re-evaluate.
Today’s image presents that one surviving marriage record for Jean Baptiste LeComte. On this document, I have flagged three problem areas.
Problem 1: Parents
Underlined in BLUE is the phrase “Fils de Claude le Compte et Parine Combe.” Or, at least, that’s the way I read it when I did that translation a half-century ago. The father’s name appears clear enough, but there are other ways to read the mother’s name. Specifically:
• “Parine” might also be “d’Anne.” That is, “of Anne …,” as in “son of Claude LeComte and of Anne …” In retrospect, the additional 50 years of experience under my belt makes me more inclined to read it as Anne rather than Perine.
• Combe might also be misread. That first letter is large, rounded, and closed—more like an O or a D. The closest equivalent is the “C” as in Claude on the line above. But it’s not the same, and it does not look like any other capital-Cs in that document. Other letters with a large closed loop above the line would be the handwritten “J” (which can’t be made here in Facebook—you’ll have to envision it) or “B.” But it does not match either the “j” or the “b” in “Jean Baptiste” on the line above. In short, as we go forward we must be open to a variety of possibilities for his mother’s name.
• With regard to the mother’s surname: also note that above and to the right of the final “e.” there appears a dark mark—which might be stray ink but might also be the scribe’s hurried attempt to put a diacritical over that “e.” If so, then the five letters of that surname (say Combé or Jombé) would become a two-syllable word—the equivalent of Combet or Jombet, pronounced Com-bay or Jom-bay. (Are you confused yet?)
Problem 2: Parish of Birth
Underlined in red is the phrase “la paroisse de St. Martin de Vecin quainquence?” While St. Martin appears likely, “Vecin quainquence” is highly problematic. Vecin might also be read as Vaux or Veau. The two “q” letters in “quainquence” might be g’s. Beyond that, the word has a number of short letters that are often misread one for the other: u for v, r for v, n for u, v or r for s, etc. Almost anything seems possible for that part of the name!
Problem 3: Diocese of Birth
Underlined in green is the phrase “diocese de St. Glanse.” Or is it “Glause? Or Glavec? Or Glaude? Or perhaps CLAUDE, a phonetic equivalent of Glaude?
So: where do we begin?
Many people across France had the same name. That’s why so many online trees assign a variety of parents to Jean Baptiste, all from places that have no parish named St. Martin. Ancestry or FamilySearch has feeds hints for some “Jean Baptiste LeComte” or “Claude LeComte” or “Perrine” somewhere, and tree builders naively grab them assuming that “it must be right or the database would not have pushed it.” That assumption creates garbage trees.
Our emphasis must be on PLACE. When Jean Baptiste Conte dit LeComte(3) arrived at Natchitoches, he know where he was from. But he could only write his surname. The priest created the marriage record and spelled (or scrawled) an unfamiliar place name the way it sounded to him. Standardization of spelling did not tthen exist. Bear in mind, too, that immigrants from different parts of France had widely different accents.
So, next question: How do we find the right PLACE?
There are many parishes in France, but there are far fewer dioceses. That, then, is our logical beginning point. Using that wonderful tool called the Internet, to identify historical French dioceses, I posed a challenge for myself: CAN I FIND A DIOCESE, EXISTING IN 1756, WHOSE NAME WAS SIMILAR TO ST. GLANCE, GLAUSE, GLAVEC, GLAUDE OR CLAUDE?
Google delivered one option: Saint-Claude in the modern department (state) of Jura. Wikipedia tells us that the diocese was current to LeComte—established in 1742,(4) just a few years before he would have left for the colonies.
And so, a new and obvious question: DID THE DIOCESE OF ST-CLAUDE HAVE A PARISH NAMED ST. MARTIN (SOMETHING-OR-OTHER)?
The archives of the department of Jura has a website that answers that question. Drilling through the menu at Archive39.fr > Rechercher > parmi les documents numérisés, we arrive at recognizable words: “Registres paroissiaux et état-civil” – parish registers and civil-state registrations of births, marriages, and deaths. There, the menu identifies one and only one parish that begins St. Martin:
Saint-Martin-de-Vaugrineuse.
Compare that option to the original 1756 marriage act. Yes, indeed, that phrase might easily be read as “St. Martin De Vaux graingneuse.” More correctly, by modern spelling, St. Martin de Vaugrineuse.
We now have a LIKELY birthplace. If so, then we should find our family in the records of that locale. Specifically, we should find:
• a baptismal record for Jean Baptiste Comte dit LeComte (or “Conte” as he signed his name at Natchitoches).
• a baptismal record that names his parents as Claude Comte/Conte and Perine (or Anne) Combe/Jombe/etc.
Our next Bits of Evidence will chronicle that search.
SOURCES
(1) Winston DeVille, MARRIAGE CONTRACTS OF NATCHITOCHES, 1739–1803 (Nashville: Privately Printed, 1961). The one-time existence of the contract is documented by two original sources:
• First, the courthouse “Index to French Archives,” created by an American official in 1820 so he could find things in the courthouse’s trove of colonial notarial records, cites the contract between “Jean Baptiste Conte alias [dit] LeComte” and Marguerite LeRoy: Doc. 174, bundle dated 1750–1760.
• Second, an inventory of those same douments compiled by the commandant and the post clerk in 1785 and submitted to Louisiana’s governor, survives today as folios 522–87, in legajo [bundle] 198-A of the Papeles Procedentes de Cuba, held by the General Archives of the Indies, Seville. That inventory lists the document, without a number, and cites the date as 10 July 1756.
(2) Elizabeth Shown Mills, NATCHITOCHES 1729–1803: Abstracts of the Catholic Church Registers … (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1977), entry 738.
(3) Note that “Conte,” “Comte” and “Compte” were pronounced the same. Even today, we see this in the American word “comptroller” which is pronounced as “controller.”
(4) “Roman Catholic Diocese of Saint-Claude,” WIKIPEDIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Diocese_of_Saint-Claude : accessed 30 May 2025).
HOW TO CITE:
Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Forgotten People: Cane River Creoles,” FACEBOOK (https://www.facebook.com/ForgottenPeopleCaneRiverCreoles/ : posted 4 June 2025), “Bits of Evidence No. 865: Research Strategies: Finding the Origin of Jean Baptiste LeComte, Part 1.
