52 Ancestors: #3 Marie Eleque (? - ca.1737)

I'm writing about my ancestors for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge.  Please join me in taking a moment to appreciate some of the people who helped me be here today!

The existing records for my New Orleans colonial ancestor Marie Eleque are rather sparse, so I'm going to cover what is known from existing sources first and then my proposed hypothesis regarding the origins of this particular ancestor.  I consider this one a research project still in progress.

What is known about Marie:

1. She was born in France, not New Orleans;
2. Her surname spelling in New Orleans records is extremely inconsistent.  Variants I've seen are Elecq, Eleque, Eleg, Elceq, Helceq, and Elee.  In my hypothesis is my theory on what her last name actually was.
3. The following entry in the Records of the Superior Council seems to be her first appearance in the New Orleans records: "Petition to Marry. May 5, 1725. Jean deDelmas alias St. Jean asks leave to marry one Marie, landed by LaLoire. Granted." (Records of the Superior Council, Louisiana Historical Quarterly, v. 2)  (LaLoire could have several meanings: it could refer to people in the area named La Loire, including one who was clerk of the company of the Indies who was killed at Natchez, or perhaps even more likely the ship LaLoire, which left France in 1724 with 19 girls aboard sponsored by the Company.)  This gives us 1725 as Marie's probable year of arrival in the colony. (19/5/2015 - CONFIRMED: Marie ELLECQ listed as a passenger aboard the Loire, which departed from Lorient, France on 9 June 1724.  Lorient is also located in the Morbihan département of Brittany, as is Bubry, Marie's likely hometown.)
4. That marriage appears to have taken place on 15 May 1725, when "Jean De Belmast, sailor of the Company [of the Indies], m. Marie Eleg".  (Woods, Earl C. and Charles Nolan, Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, v. 1.)
5. She was widowed by St. Jean and married again 13 November 1731 in New Orleans to François Brunet, a blacksmith from Plancoët, Bretagne.  In their marriage  record published by the Diocese of New Orleans, her parents are given as Pierre and Marie Tandie, and it says she's a native of "Bibri, Diocese of Vannes" and that she is the widow of "Jean Belmar, surnamed St. Jean Patron, dec. at Natchez" (this could be a very significant clue - I'll explain below).  (Woods and Nolan, Sacramental Records, v. 1)
6. She owned land on what is now Bourbon Street.  The chains of title for the earliest records on the particular properties contain a marginal note: "To Mary Elee, widow of Jean De Belmart, called S. Jean, whom Francois Vinnet has married. She has a granddaughter".  The property owner is given as "St. Jean" in 1728 and "Brunet" in 1731, consistent with the marriage date of Marie and François Brunet.  I don't know who the granddaughter referred to in the note is, as it seems to have been written during Marie's lifetime, yet the only grandchildren I have records of were born after she had died.  At the time of her remarriage, she and St. Jean had at least one child: a daughter, Marie Jeanne.  It could be the daughter the note is actually referring to, not a granddaughter, or that portion of the note could be from a later date.

My working hypothesis (disclaimer again: obviously, still a work in progress):

Now, as I said above, the reference to Natchez could be an important clue.  Given the lack of any other embellishment other than "at Natchez", it could well be a reference to the Fort Rosalie massacre that occurred in November 1729.  Many of the surviving widows were remarried in New Orleans, and it's possible that Marie was one of them.  In order to attempt to find Marie's place of origin, I first did some research on the Diocese of Vannes.  Learning that the Diocese of Vannes is located in the Morbihan département of the region of Brittany, I next consulted a Breton geography website that I had discovered while searching for her husband's hometown to find a place that resembled the "Bibri" of the New Orleans document.  The closest to that spelling is a town called Bubry, or Bubri in Breton.  Thanks to ongoing archiving projects by the French départements, the Bubry church records are online.  Unfortunately there is a significant gap in the records for the years between 1698 and 1709 - right where I had estimated Marie's birth year as likely to fall.  I found no Eleques or Tandies present in the Bubri records... but there were a lot of Hellecs and Tanguys, names that might be pronounced similarly enough to confuse a New Orleans priest.  If Marie Eleque was really Marie Hellec, it might explain the difficulty in finding any reference to the Eleque surname.  With the crucial eleven years of records missing, my Hellec hypothesis remains just that, for now.

Online Resources:

• GeoBreizh (in French or Breton) - this site is an excellent resource for searching the place names of origin for Breton settlers in New Orleans, as the available records often mangle the names of their hometowns.  For instance, the New Orleans registers record François Brunet's hometown as "Planquezit" rather than the actual Plancoët.  (His baptism in 1695 can be found among the Plancoët records online). 
• The Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey - contains histories of addresses in the French Quarter along with chains of title for the lots going all the way back to the earliest French settlement.
• Morbihan archives online (état civil) - records of the Morbihan département including parish registers dating back to the 16th century.