Anyone reading my ongoing research into the origins of our La Valade family will have no doubt noticed that everything so far is pure conjecture and that I seem to be going round in circles. This post is more of the same!
From the 14th Century on, the French King began to create titles, issuing a written act called lettres patentes, which had to be registered by the court (parlement) of the region within which the individual lived, and by the Chambre des Comptes, a sort of fiscal auditing department, before the title could be validated.
French titles are a type of fief within the feudal system. which was abolished by the French Revolution.
All titles were attached to a piece of land; if a lord lost or sold a property, therefore, he also lost the title that went with it. The sale of land, and the title which went with the property, was widespread in 16th and 17th century France.
French titles were borne by one person at a time - unlike other north European countries where the title is born by the entire family and is not attached to land ownership. A French family might own several titles at one time and could distribute them amongst his heirs or sell them as he saw fit.
An ecuyer (or esquire) was not a title, but a rank within the nobility - all ecuyers were noblemen, no matter how recently the nobility had been conferred upon them.
Seigneurs were not noblemen nor were they titled - the term, which translates as ‘lord’ merely signified the owner of a certain type of property within the feudal system.
Our Huguenot ancestor, Charles de la Valade, was supposedly the son of the Comte de la Valade, a title which would have gone hand in hand with a territory named La Valade/Lavalade/La Vallade. (The French term ‘comte’ translates as ‘earl’.)
Because there is so little information about Charles de la Valade, I’ve been hunting instead for his father, a Comte de la Valade, who would have been alive in 1670, or thereabouts, when Charles de la Valade would have been born.
In his book ‘Baby on her Back’, William Dubourdieu suggested that the La Valade family originated in the townland of Lavalade, 23 miles south-east of Bergerac, a town strongly associated with the Dubourdieu family.
This particular Lavalade is located just outside the bastide town of Montpazier and was associated with the Pourquery de la Bogotie family. One of their members was named Louis de Pourquery de la Bigotie, Sieur de Roussille, qualifié ecuyer, vicomte de la Valade, comte de la Roque, former captain of the regiment of the Duke de Montauzier, colonel general of the French army, created a chevalier by order of the King, and promoted by the French Minister for War, Louvois.
Louis was present at the marriage of his nephew, Jean Francois de Pourquery, to Marguerite de Vassal in 1658 which would make him conceivably the correct age to have a son in 1670. Unlike other members of this family, no other information is given about this Vicomte de la Valade.
Louis was the only member of his family (which is well-document in ‘Nobiliare de Guienne et Gascogne’) to bear the title of Vicomte de la Valade but there are several reasons why I believe this to be the incorrect family, the first being the fact that the title of vicomte is far superior to that of comte and our ancestor was supposedly a mere comte.
Secondly, this vicomte of La Valade was promoted by Louvois, the man who authorised the use of the Dragonnades to terrorise the Protestant population in 1685 following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It seems, therefore, unlikely that this family would have Huguenot sons and daughters.
Thirdly, the members of this particular family seemed to use ‘Pourquery de la Bigotie’ or ‘Pourquery’ as their nom de famille, and our ancestors used ‘Lavalade’ or ‘La Valade’ as their surname in the surviving records.
Another possibility is the Lavalade family of Saint Georges-Des-Coteaux, near Saintes midway between the Huguenot hotbed of La Rochelle and Bordeaux. This family has several things going for it - the use of ‘Lavalade’ as a nom-de-famille, the recurrence of the name ‘Charles’ and a ‘Comte, Sr. de Lavalade’ present in the genealogy at the end of the 17th century.
From ‘Bulletin de la Societe des Archives Historiques de la Saintonge at d’Aunis’: 1702: ‘Une transaction passee entre Jacques La Vallade, Seigneur de Saint-Georges, comte de La Vallade, Charles de La Vallade, seigneur de la Dorinne, Artus de La Vallade, Noeman de La Vallade, damoiselle Jeanne Tullerand de Grignaud, Francois-Charles de Saint-Martin, Charles de Brilhac, marys de Suzanne et Clere de La Tour, recu le 2 mai 1665 par Tourneur, notaire royale a Saintes.’Some of the published genealogies omit the ‘Comte’ altogether which raises some doubt.
Also, the Comte in this instant actually seems to be a name rather than a title.
The family seems to have baptised most of their recorded children in the parish church which I presume would make them Catholic - Protestants worshipped in temples, rather than churches, at that time. There are no records of any relative fleeing the country in the 1680s, although few of the genealogies mention exiled relations, preferring to brush all memory of them under the historical carpet.
There was, however, a Protestant temple in the nearby town of Marennes with a substantial congregation of 13,000 to 14,000. In the late 1680s the pastor there was Marc Boisbellaud whose uncle, Jean Boybellaud, married Andrée le Valet in Charenton in 1672. Andree le Valet was the daughter of Isaac Dubourdieu and his first wife; her brother, Jacques Dubourdieu was married to the sister of our ancestor, Charles de la Valade.
Is this significant or mere coincidence?
I will add any other ‘Comte de la Valades’ to this list as I find them.
Showing posts with label Valade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valade. Show all posts
More on the La Valade Family and the Valada Family
It is known that the La Valade family intermarried with the DuBourdieu family - the sister of Charles de la Valade had married Jacques DuBourdieu who had been murdered in 1685.
Jacques' father, Isaac DuBourdieu, married three times - his first wife was supposedly a La Valade. The daughter of this marriage was named Andree le Valet/la Valade DuBourdieu.
The Dubourdieu family had their origins in the Bergerac area fifty miles east of Bordeaux and, given the Dubourdieu/La Valade connections, I would expect to find the La Valade family floating around there in the mid-seventeenth century.
Pierre de la Vallade, prior to becoming the pastor of the Reformed Church at Fontenoy-le-Comte, had worked at Bergerac.
I discovered a list of Protestant ministers of the south-west published to the web and there were Valades mentioned....
De la Vallade was pastor at Libourne, Bordeaux in 1620.
Valade was pastor at Bazas, near Bordeaux from 1661 - 1671
Valade was pastor at Salignac/Clerans, Bordeaux from 1677 - 1678.
Valade was pastor at Sauvignac, Bordeaux from 1677 - 1678. (Was this a separate minister from the above?)
Valade was pastor at Tournon (there are many Tournons, most near Lyons) from 1678 - 1683.
Other names of interest:
I. Duboudieu, pastor at Bergerac from 1642 - 1650. This was Isaac Dubourdieu who was the celebrated Huguenot minister at Montpelier from 1650 until his expulsion from France in 1683.
J. Dubourdieu, pastor at Lafitte in 1642. This was Isaac's son, Jean Dubourdieu. It is known that Armand Dubourdieu, the uncle of Isaac, also worked at Lafitte earlier in the century.
Costebadie, pastor at Tonneins-Dessus in 1668. A Marie de Costebadie was one of the three wives of Isaac Dubourdieu - I have no idea if the pastor was related to her however. Lafitte and Tonneins are both south of Bergerac and Bordeaux.
From the Register of the Temple de Begles in Bordeaux town, there is an entry for June 1675 which refers to the baptism of Jean de la Valade, the son of Alain de la Valade.
In 1683, Jean Rocal de la Valade de Saint Paul, renounced Calvinism - he was the son of Jean de la Valade, an equerry and a counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux.
Of interest is the La Valada/La Valata family from Realville, an area 20kms north-east of the Quercy/Languedoc town of Montauban, and extremely close to the Moissac/Castel-Sarrasin town which I had mentioned in an earlier post in relation to the La Valade family.
This was a prominent Huguenot family who also had to leave France at the Revocation and who ended up in London and Dublin. I have no idea if there is a connection between this family and the family of Charles de la Valade in Lisburn, but both end up in Ireland.
From a statement made by a Geraud Rigail: 'Monsieur Valada, my brother-in-law, left for Flanders in 1685, and his wife and children went to join him later, after which his wife had lived in Bordeaux for about a year and a half, and was later thrown into the town prison; they next sailed for Holland in October 1689 by order of the King, along with Mademoiselle Marguerite de Valada, the daughter of Monsieur de Valada de Pui, the uncle of my brother-in-law. The aforementioned Valada, my sister, died in London in October 1697; she had a son named Joseph who died in Ireland on the 14th June 1699 - on the 29th of the same month of June 1699, he had married his eldest daughter Jeanne Valada in Dublin, Ireland, to Monsieur Saint Mesmen, a native of....near Orleans. Their two daughters survive - Marguerite and Paule.'
A Marguerite de Valada married a Gabriel Brassard in Dublin in 1705.
I browsed the registers of the French churches of Dublin - in the National Library, Dublin - and came across the following entries for the Valada family:
The marriage of Mademoiselle Paule Valada to Monsieur Virouleau de la Capelle took place in Dublin about this time. (Date not noted by me.) ) Present at the ceremony were Jeanne de St.Mesmin, Margaret Brassard, Susane Molles, Catherine Molles and Estienne de St.Mesmin.
Estienne de St.Mesmin married Jeanne de Valada on 20th June 1699. M. Severin performed the ceremony. Estienne de St.Mesmin, chevalier, was the son of M.Estienne, seigneur de St.Mesmin; his mother was Dame Benigne de Maumon, from Vienne in the Duchy of Orleans. Jeanne de Valada was the daughter of Joseph de Valada, ecuyer/esquire, captain in La Melonniere's regiment, and of Madame Aldonée de Rigal of Montauban. Present at the wedding were Mademoiselle Paule de Valada, sister of the bride, Monsieur Pierre de Gignoux, ecuyer/captain, M. Japhet Geraud, ecuyer, sieur de Puichemin, and Mr. Albert Prevost, merchant of Dublin.
A daughter of Monsieur de St.Mesmin, aged 14 years, was buried in Peter Street French Church on 8th August 1721.
Gerard Rigail's brother-in-law (see above statement) was Joseph de Valada who had married Adonce Rigail in 1657. He was a lawyer from Realville who had died in 1681 in London.
This de Valada family had been linked to Realville for centuries and intermarried with the Fraisse family and the nobel Dupuy family.
In 1669 the advisor and doctor to the King, Estienne Fraisse married Paule de Valada who was the daughter of a lawyer, Paul de Valada and Marie Dupuy. Also present at the wedding was Jacques Dupuy, advisor to the King. The pastor Jean Barbat blessed the marriage in the Temple d'Albias.
From the register of the French Church in Sohon Square in London, we see Rev. Marc Barbat marrying Jeane de Valada in 1691- another record states that he was the minister at Hadleigh in Essex and that she was from Realville; they were married by Jean Molles.
A Jean Barbat had been the pastor at Realville from 1644 - 1685.
A Monsieur de Valada, a Protestant, was arrested and thrown in jail in Bilbao, Spain, along with 13 other travellers in November 1687. They had been arrested on 10th November 1687 while awaiting to embark on a ship taking them to Holland. Most of the party were from Bearn and Castres.
Jacques' father, Isaac DuBourdieu, married three times - his first wife was supposedly a La Valade. The daughter of this marriage was named Andree le Valet/la Valade DuBourdieu.
The Dubourdieu family had their origins in the Bergerac area fifty miles east of Bordeaux and, given the Dubourdieu/La Valade connections, I would expect to find the La Valade family floating around there in the mid-seventeenth century.
Pierre de la Vallade, prior to becoming the pastor of the Reformed Church at Fontenoy-le-Comte, had worked at Bergerac.
I discovered a list of Protestant ministers of the south-west published to the web and there were Valades mentioned....
De la Vallade was pastor at Libourne, Bordeaux in 1620.
Valade was pastor at Bazas, near Bordeaux from 1661 - 1671
Valade was pastor at Salignac/Clerans, Bordeaux from 1677 - 1678.
Valade was pastor at Sauvignac, Bordeaux from 1677 - 1678. (Was this a separate minister from the above?)
Valade was pastor at Tournon (there are many Tournons, most near Lyons) from 1678 - 1683.
Other names of interest:
I. Duboudieu, pastor at Bergerac from 1642 - 1650. This was Isaac Dubourdieu who was the celebrated Huguenot minister at Montpelier from 1650 until his expulsion from France in 1683.
J. Dubourdieu, pastor at Lafitte in 1642. This was Isaac's son, Jean Dubourdieu. It is known that Armand Dubourdieu, the uncle of Isaac, also worked at Lafitte earlier in the century.
Costebadie, pastor at Tonneins-Dessus in 1668. A Marie de Costebadie was one of the three wives of Isaac Dubourdieu - I have no idea if the pastor was related to her however. Lafitte and Tonneins are both south of Bergerac and Bordeaux.
From the Register of the Temple de Begles in Bordeaux town, there is an entry for June 1675 which refers to the baptism of Jean de la Valade, the son of Alain de la Valade.
In 1683, Jean Rocal de la Valade de Saint Paul, renounced Calvinism - he was the son of Jean de la Valade, an equerry and a counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux.
Of interest is the La Valada/La Valata family from Realville, an area 20kms north-east of the Quercy/Languedoc town of Montauban, and extremely close to the Moissac/Castel-Sarrasin town which I had mentioned in an earlier post in relation to the La Valade family.
This was a prominent Huguenot family who also had to leave France at the Revocation and who ended up in London and Dublin. I have no idea if there is a connection between this family and the family of Charles de la Valade in Lisburn, but both end up in Ireland.
From a statement made by a Geraud Rigail: 'Monsieur Valada, my brother-in-law, left for Flanders in 1685, and his wife and children went to join him later, after which his wife had lived in Bordeaux for about a year and a half, and was later thrown into the town prison; they next sailed for Holland in October 1689 by order of the King, along with Mademoiselle Marguerite de Valada, the daughter of Monsieur de Valada de Pui, the uncle of my brother-in-law. The aforementioned Valada, my sister, died in London in October 1697; she had a son named Joseph who died in Ireland on the 14th June 1699 - on the 29th of the same month of June 1699, he had married his eldest daughter Jeanne Valada in Dublin, Ireland, to Monsieur Saint Mesmen, a native of....near Orleans. Their two daughters survive - Marguerite and Paule.'
A Marguerite de Valada married a Gabriel Brassard in Dublin in 1705.
I browsed the registers of the French churches of Dublin - in the National Library, Dublin - and came across the following entries for the Valada family:
The marriage of Mademoiselle Paule Valada to Monsieur Virouleau de la Capelle took place in Dublin about this time. (Date not noted by me.) ) Present at the ceremony were Jeanne de St.Mesmin, Margaret Brassard, Susane Molles, Catherine Molles and Estienne de St.Mesmin.
Estienne de St.Mesmin married Jeanne de Valada on 20th June 1699. M. Severin performed the ceremony. Estienne de St.Mesmin, chevalier, was the son of M.Estienne, seigneur de St.Mesmin; his mother was Dame Benigne de Maumon, from Vienne in the Duchy of Orleans. Jeanne de Valada was the daughter of Joseph de Valada, ecuyer/esquire, captain in La Melonniere's regiment, and of Madame Aldonée de Rigal of Montauban. Present at the wedding were Mademoiselle Paule de Valada, sister of the bride, Monsieur Pierre de Gignoux, ecuyer/captain, M. Japhet Geraud, ecuyer, sieur de Puichemin, and Mr. Albert Prevost, merchant of Dublin.
A daughter of Monsieur de St.Mesmin, aged 14 years, was buried in Peter Street French Church on 8th August 1721.
Gerard Rigail's brother-in-law (see above statement) was Joseph de Valada who had married Adonce Rigail in 1657. He was a lawyer from Realville who had died in 1681 in London.
This de Valada family had been linked to Realville for centuries and intermarried with the Fraisse family and the nobel Dupuy family.
In 1669 the advisor and doctor to the King, Estienne Fraisse married Paule de Valada who was the daughter of a lawyer, Paul de Valada and Marie Dupuy. Also present at the wedding was Jacques Dupuy, advisor to the King. The pastor Jean Barbat blessed the marriage in the Temple d'Albias.
From the register of the French Church in Sohon Square in London, we see Rev. Marc Barbat marrying Jeane de Valada in 1691- another record states that he was the minister at Hadleigh in Essex and that she was from Realville; they were married by Jean Molles.
A Jean Barbat had been the pastor at Realville from 1644 - 1685.
A Monsieur de Valada, a Protestant, was arrested and thrown in jail in Bilbao, Spain, along with 13 other travellers in November 1687. They had been arrested on 10th November 1687 while awaiting to embark on a ship taking them to Holland. Most of the party were from Bearn and Castres.
More on Pierre and Bertrand de la Vallade
The search continues! I have yet to find any definitive link between Charles de la Valade of Lisburn and any French Huguenot family in the south of France - nor can I find any noble La Valade family anywhere in the Languedoc other than the Viguier de la Valade family of Moissac as mentioned in an earlier post - I'm ruling out the Viguier de la Valade family completely.
I am still fixated on the Pastor of Fontenoy-le-Comte, Pierre de la Vallade, who was possibly of the same family as Bertrand de la Vallade as was the earlier Jean de la Vallade. It is mentioned that this family followed the Princes of Navarre to Poitou; although one text mentions that Pierre de la Vallade was born in the Langudoc, another mentions that he came from a family of Languedoc. (Languedoc being a generic term for the southern area of France.)
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/2011/12/la-vallade-family-of-fontenay.html
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/p/bertrand-de-lavalade-of-nerac.html
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/p/charles-lavalade-timeline.html
Charles de la Valade was supposedly the son of a count, but I've been told that this is merely a generic term for a French noble. I can find no French nobel family of the name of La Valade and of the Protestant religion.
Bertrand de Lavallade of Nérac, however, was granted noble status by the King of Navarre, and this title could have been handed down.
Anyway, here is more information which I've uncovered about the families of Bertrand and Pierre de la Vallade.
In 'La Revue de l'Agenais', I read through 'La Chronique d'Isaac de Peres' who was the Concierge to the royal household at Nerac. He was the secretary there in the early 1600s but kept a simple journal there from 1586 on, in which he noted births, deaths, marriages. The Lavallade family of Bertrand de Lavallade gets a few mentions: a relation of Isaac - Pierre de Peres - married Janne de Lavallade who was related to Bertrand, the president of the cour des comptes in Nerac. Catherine de Lavallade, Bertrand's daughter, married Jan Pinole in April 1596. She died the following year in the town of Bordeaux; Isaac mentions that Jean Pinole was his own brother-in-law - Isaac was married to Jan's sister, who was the daughter of Guillaume de Pinolle. The niece of Bertrand de Lavallade died in August 1596.
(In these journals, Isaac de Peres also mentions members of the duBedat family who later fled France and ended up in banking in Ireland.)
Pierre de la Vallade was the Protestant pastor at Fontenoy-le-Comte from 1603 until his death from either scarlet fever or cholera in 1633. He was married to Loyse (Louise) Billaud. Louise was the daughter of a lawyer of Fontenoy, Pierre Billaud and of Francoise Delespee. Pierre Billaud died about 1621 - his principle heir was his son, Joachim Billaud, the lord of Moulin Billaud in Pouzauges, a townland of Fontenoy. A legal document exists which documents the division of Pierre Billaud's properties amongst his children with the agreement of Joachim Billaud. Their names were Francois Billaud, the lord of Pigasse who lived at Auzay; Louise, the wife of Pierre de Lavallade; Marie Billaud, the wife of Pierre Delafond, living at La Rochelle; Catherine Billaud, the wife of David Poignand, living at La Rochelle.
The properties which the siblings divided up amongst themselves were the house and farm of Moulin Billaud, the territories of Pigasse and de Gallerand, the house and farm at La Berthiniere in the parish of La Parate, Gatine.
Louise and Pierre de la Vallade got the house in Fontenoy, a tenanted farm in the village of Suairie le Mouille and several other plots of land.
Other legal documents exist from Fontenoy. In November 1606, Pierre de la Vallade leased a low room with a cellar for three years to the widow, Jeanne Audayer, in the building he had constructed next door to the protestant church.
In January 1617, Pierre Bernard, the lord of Jauroy, an advisor and secretary to the king in his house of Navarre, and who was living at Cognac, accepted the payment of income due to him by Pierre de la Vallade, the minister of the reformed church at Fontenoy, for half of the noble house and tenanted farm at Parois a la Jaudonniere. (A rural area north of Fontenoy-le-Comte next to Bazoges-en-Pareds which was associated with the Huguenot Hudel family who intermarried with the La Vallades - Saran Udel was the wife of Hanael d'Espee or Hanael Delespee who was a doctor and the brother-in-law of the pastor la Vallade. Later, Jean Hudel of Fontenoy renounced Protestantism in 1686 but engaged in Protestant propaganda at Bazoges-en-Pareds, the area his wife came from, and was subsequently jailed from 1690 till 1717. Not surprisingly he fled the country following his release.)
In June 1622, Louise Billaud, on behalf of her husband, Pierre de la Vallade, took the harvest from their land at Garennes Rondes in La Jaudonnieres to the miller.
In October 1623, Pierre Terras,a judge in the town of Duras in Agen, on behalf of Alain Fillol (who was an advisor to the king ,who was in charge of wages etc, and who worked in the parliament at Guyenne), gave a receipt for 549 livres which Fillol claimed was due him following a contract for transport (?) to Pierre de Lavallade. This archaic French has defeated me here, but there was also mention of Fillol's father who worked in the Parliament at Bordeaux and had something to do with this business deal. The mention of Bordeaux, and La Vallade's connection to it, is of interest - the widow of Jacques Duboudieu who fled France later was the sister of Charles de la Valade. Jacques Dubourdieu, her husband, had been the pastor at Blaye, Bordeaux before his murder in 1685. The town of Duras mentioned above was just south of the Dubourdieu home town of Bergerac, and about three miles from the town of Le Sauvetat where Isaac Dubourdieu had been the pastor in 1637.
Earlier in April 1621, an apothecary of La Rochelle, Pierre Defforgue, sent a bill to Pierre de la Vallade and to Pierre's brother-in-law, Francois Billaud the lord of Pigasse. The bill was for 250 livres to pay for the four or five months of medical treatment given to Pierre de la Vallade's mother-in-law, Francoise Delespee by the apothecary . The Delespee family appear many times in the legal documents of Fontenoy, which record wills and minor business deals in the area. These documents were published to the web by the Conseil General de la Vendee and appear under the title of 'Notaires de Fontenoy-le-Comte: analyses d'un choix de pieces (1578 - 1632).'
Pierre and Louise de la Vallade had four children although I've only discovered references to two of them. Their son, Elysee/Elisee de la Vallade, the maitre d'hotel du Roi, married Marie Genay in 1647, 14 years after the death of his father.
The next references to this family, show them to be under pressure from the Catholic authorities and hint at the conditions the Huguenot population had to contend with in the years leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
From an official list of people who were condemned as false nobles in 1668 and 1670, we see Elisee de la Vallade and Jean de la Vallade, both of the area of Xanton (just east of Fontenoy), and both of them declared to be common peasants. (Roturiers.) Elisee de la Vallade was fined 500 livres, as was Pierre Billaud, the lord of Moulin Billaud.
A later text - incomplete - about the Protestant church of Fontenoy stated 'the revocation of the Edict of Nantes targeted with great cruelty several of La Vallade's grandchildren, some of whom lived in Fontenoy, some in the outskirts of the town....'
Given that Rev. Charles de la Valade's sister was married to Jacques Dubourdieu in Bordeaux in the 1680s, I've kept an eye out for La Vallade connections to the town.
Bertrand de la Vallade's daughter, Catherine, moved there following her marriage to Jan Pinole in 1596, and died there the following year.
Much earlier, in Bordeaux in 4th October 1542 '...a certain Monsieur Helie de la Valade for having said that church candles served no purpose and that it would be better to give them to the poor, and that he didn't want a mass said for him after his death, was condemned to pay a fine and to retract his statement...'
The same Helie de la Valade was held prisoner in Bordeaux in 1542. I found another incomplete reference to Helie de la Valade, which stated that he was a 'licencie es-loi' which I presume refers to the legal profession, and that he was related to Antoine de la Valade. (An Antoine de la Vallade was a co-seigneur along with John Brun de la Vallade at this time in Brive-la-Gaillard but I have no idea if these people have any link to Pierre and Bertrand de la Vallade.)
I also stumbled across a reference to the baptism of a Jean de la Valade, the son of Alain de la Valade of Bordeaux but no date was given for this.
I am still fixated on the Pastor of Fontenoy-le-Comte, Pierre de la Vallade, who was possibly of the same family as Bertrand de la Vallade as was the earlier Jean de la Vallade. It is mentioned that this family followed the Princes of Navarre to Poitou; although one text mentions that Pierre de la Vallade was born in the Langudoc, another mentions that he came from a family of Languedoc. (Languedoc being a generic term for the southern area of France.)
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/2011/12/la-vallade-family-of-fontenay.html
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/p/bertrand-de-lavalade-of-nerac.html
http://alison-stewart.blogspot.com/p/charles-lavalade-timeline.html
Charles de la Valade was supposedly the son of a count, but I've been told that this is merely a generic term for a French noble. I can find no French nobel family of the name of La Valade and of the Protestant religion.
Bertrand de Lavallade of Nérac, however, was granted noble status by the King of Navarre, and this title could have been handed down.
Anyway, here is more information which I've uncovered about the families of Bertrand and Pierre de la Vallade.
In 'La Revue de l'Agenais', I read through 'La Chronique d'Isaac de Peres' who was the Concierge to the royal household at Nerac. He was the secretary there in the early 1600s but kept a simple journal there from 1586 on, in which he noted births, deaths, marriages. The Lavallade family of Bertrand de Lavallade gets a few mentions: a relation of Isaac - Pierre de Peres - married Janne de Lavallade who was related to Bertrand, the president of the cour des comptes in Nerac. Catherine de Lavallade, Bertrand's daughter, married Jan Pinole in April 1596. She died the following year in the town of Bordeaux; Isaac mentions that Jean Pinole was his own brother-in-law - Isaac was married to Jan's sister, who was the daughter of Guillaume de Pinolle. The niece of Bertrand de Lavallade died in August 1596.
(In these journals, Isaac de Peres also mentions members of the duBedat family who later fled France and ended up in banking in Ireland.)
Pierre de la Vallade was the Protestant pastor at Fontenoy-le-Comte from 1603 until his death from either scarlet fever or cholera in 1633. He was married to Loyse (Louise) Billaud. Louise was the daughter of a lawyer of Fontenoy, Pierre Billaud and of Francoise Delespee. Pierre Billaud died about 1621 - his principle heir was his son, Joachim Billaud, the lord of Moulin Billaud in Pouzauges, a townland of Fontenoy. A legal document exists which documents the division of Pierre Billaud's properties amongst his children with the agreement of Joachim Billaud. Their names were Francois Billaud, the lord of Pigasse who lived at Auzay; Louise, the wife of Pierre de Lavallade; Marie Billaud, the wife of Pierre Delafond, living at La Rochelle; Catherine Billaud, the wife of David Poignand, living at La Rochelle.
The properties which the siblings divided up amongst themselves were the house and farm of Moulin Billaud, the territories of Pigasse and de Gallerand, the house and farm at La Berthiniere in the parish of La Parate, Gatine.
Louise and Pierre de la Vallade got the house in Fontenoy, a tenanted farm in the village of Suairie le Mouille and several other plots of land.
Other legal documents exist from Fontenoy. In November 1606, Pierre de la Vallade leased a low room with a cellar for three years to the widow, Jeanne Audayer, in the building he had constructed next door to the protestant church.
In January 1617, Pierre Bernard, the lord of Jauroy, an advisor and secretary to the king in his house of Navarre, and who was living at Cognac, accepted the payment of income due to him by Pierre de la Vallade, the minister of the reformed church at Fontenoy, for half of the noble house and tenanted farm at Parois a la Jaudonniere. (A rural area north of Fontenoy-le-Comte next to Bazoges-en-Pareds which was associated with the Huguenot Hudel family who intermarried with the La Vallades - Saran Udel was the wife of Hanael d'Espee or Hanael Delespee who was a doctor and the brother-in-law of the pastor la Vallade. Later, Jean Hudel of Fontenoy renounced Protestantism in 1686 but engaged in Protestant propaganda at Bazoges-en-Pareds, the area his wife came from, and was subsequently jailed from 1690 till 1717. Not surprisingly he fled the country following his release.)
In June 1622, Louise Billaud, on behalf of her husband, Pierre de la Vallade, took the harvest from their land at Garennes Rondes in La Jaudonnieres to the miller.
In October 1623, Pierre Terras,a judge in the town of Duras in Agen, on behalf of Alain Fillol (who was an advisor to the king ,who was in charge of wages etc, and who worked in the parliament at Guyenne), gave a receipt for 549 livres which Fillol claimed was due him following a contract for transport (?) to Pierre de Lavallade. This archaic French has defeated me here, but there was also mention of Fillol's father who worked in the Parliament at Bordeaux and had something to do with this business deal. The mention of Bordeaux, and La Vallade's connection to it, is of interest - the widow of Jacques Duboudieu who fled France later was the sister of Charles de la Valade. Jacques Dubourdieu, her husband, had been the pastor at Blaye, Bordeaux before his murder in 1685. The town of Duras mentioned above was just south of the Dubourdieu home town of Bergerac, and about three miles from the town of Le Sauvetat where Isaac Dubourdieu had been the pastor in 1637.
Earlier in April 1621, an apothecary of La Rochelle, Pierre Defforgue, sent a bill to Pierre de la Vallade and to Pierre's brother-in-law, Francois Billaud the lord of Pigasse. The bill was for 250 livres to pay for the four or five months of medical treatment given to Pierre de la Vallade's mother-in-law, Francoise Delespee by the apothecary . The Delespee family appear many times in the legal documents of Fontenoy, which record wills and minor business deals in the area. These documents were published to the web by the Conseil General de la Vendee and appear under the title of 'Notaires de Fontenoy-le-Comte: analyses d'un choix de pieces (1578 - 1632).'
Pierre and Louise de la Vallade had four children although I've only discovered references to two of them. Their son, Elysee/Elisee de la Vallade, the maitre d'hotel du Roi, married Marie Genay in 1647, 14 years after the death of his father.
The next references to this family, show them to be under pressure from the Catholic authorities and hint at the conditions the Huguenot population had to contend with in the years leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
From an official list of people who were condemned as false nobles in 1668 and 1670, we see Elisee de la Vallade and Jean de la Vallade, both of the area of Xanton (just east of Fontenoy), and both of them declared to be common peasants. (Roturiers.) Elisee de la Vallade was fined 500 livres, as was Pierre Billaud, the lord of Moulin Billaud.
A later text - incomplete - about the Protestant church of Fontenoy stated 'the revocation of the Edict of Nantes targeted with great cruelty several of La Vallade's grandchildren, some of whom lived in Fontenoy, some in the outskirts of the town....'
Given that Rev. Charles de la Valade's sister was married to Jacques Dubourdieu in Bordeaux in the 1680s, I've kept an eye out for La Vallade connections to the town.
Bertrand de la Vallade's daughter, Catherine, moved there following her marriage to Jan Pinole in 1596, and died there the following year.
Much earlier, in Bordeaux in 4th October 1542 '...a certain Monsieur Helie de la Valade for having said that church candles served no purpose and that it would be better to give them to the poor, and that he didn't want a mass said for him after his death, was condemned to pay a fine and to retract his statement...'
The same Helie de la Valade was held prisoner in Bordeaux in 1542. I found another incomplete reference to Helie de la Valade, which stated that he was a 'licencie es-loi' which I presume refers to the legal profession, and that he was related to Antoine de la Valade. (An Antoine de la Vallade was a co-seigneur along with John Brun de la Vallade at this time in Brive-la-Gaillard but I have no idea if these people have any link to Pierre and Bertrand de la Vallade.)
I also stumbled across a reference to the baptism of a Jean de la Valade, the son of Alain de la Valade of Bordeaux but no date was given for this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The Tutty Family
Our great-great-great grandparents on our mother’s side were John Pennefather and Emily Courtenay who married in St. Mary’s, Dublin, on Ja...
-
In 1788, Richard Grattan the Elder, of Drummin, Kildare, married Elizabeth Biddulph, the eldest daughter of Francis Biddulph of Vicarstown...
-
We descend directly on our mother's side from Rev. John Pennefather of Newport, Co. Tipperary, and from his first, unnamed, wife. http...