C16th research in France

[Phoenix]

Please don't all laugh/groan!

"My" Shapleigh pedigree is shown here:

https://archive.org/stream/visitationcount02camdgoog#page/n277/mode/2up

I descend from Robert the second son.

I am quite content with this little tree: Robert senior mentions his son's wife Johane Englishe when he makes his will in 1590 and I can find this marriage on find my past in Totnes in 1580.

There was clearly a busy, long-standing, trade with France. The 1620 Visitation calls Joan "Anglois" suggesting that the families bounced to and fro.

The waters are only muddied by an American family, the descendants of Alexander Shapleigh.

There are innumerable trees out there, all slavishly copying each other and getting very muddled in the process.

One shows Robert Shapleigh senior marrying Marie Blabon on 18 November 1557 in St Omer, Normandy, France. If Marie were a widow, it would be perfectly feasible for her also to be the daughter of Simmonds of Totnes.

Precise dates are capable of being challenged. Does anyone know how to discover if this is garbage, or whether records exist?

[Olde Crone]

Phoenix

I was quite surprised when my tree went French, to discover that the LDS had transcribed some original records (around 1600s) so the potential is there certainly.

OC

[kiterunner]

St Omer is in the department of Pas-de-Calais and that department does have parish registers online but I can't find St Omer marriages for that date at the moment, though it could be because I'm having trouble getting Google translate to translate the whole page:
http://www.archivespasdecalais.fr/Archives-en-ligne/Etat-civil

[Phoenix]

Thank you, Kite.

If I did my search correctly, there doesn't appear to be anything. Coping with an English search engine is bad enough. I'm not sure whether they did a fuzzy search, based on dates, or the results related to St Omer, but that's a locality, rather than a town.

It makes sense, btw that it is Calais region. The last bit of France held by England.

[Mary from Italy]

It looks as though Saint-Omer wasn't actually French in 1553:

In 1493 the town became part of the Low Countries and under Spanish dominion for more than 170 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Omer

So you may need to be looking for Dutch or Spanish records.

[kiterunner]

There is an online tree that has Marie Blabon as the daughter of Alexandre Blabon and Jeanne Breman:
http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Blabon-13

This page has some information about previous research of this line:
http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Shapleigh-26

[Phoenix]

Well, I've put in a loan rquest for the Berry book that disagrees with the early pedigree.

It might be the case that someone added actual dates to suggest spurious authenticity. I seem to remember on GR years ago someone was inventing census info for enquirers, so nothing new.