Part 1- “Dance is the hidden language of the soul..” – Martha Graham
Jean Constantine De Marsollan DeGeneres
– Dance Master, Philosopher, Entrepreneur, Father
Jean Constantine De Marsollan DeGeneres was my 4th great grandfather. He was born on the 2nd of July in 1778 in Torbeck, on the island of St. Domingue now known as Haiti. He died on the 3rd of October 1854 at Mansura in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.
I will begin with his family because he was one of the first people I was intrigued by when I began researching my ancestry. I will reconstruct his life as best as I can from birth to death and anything I can find in between. His story begins on the island of St. Domingue, now present-day Haiti.
Much has been written about St. Domingue, and especially the revolution there that began in 1791. But, for the purposes of a quick overview, here is a little history of the island. St. Domingue was a French colony created in 1697 after the Treaty of Resyck ceded it from Spain. Vast wealth was generated in the colony primarily from the cultivation of cane sugar on plantations. The French imported African slaves to work the plantations which covered the majority of the island. By the 18th century St. Domingue was the richest colony in the Americas. Sugar was a commodity of unprecedented value, and sugar exports were more valuable to France than all of the 13 original American colonies were to Great Britain! At the time of the revolution in France, there were about 800 plantations in St. Domingue and it was the largest producer of sugar in the world. The amount of wealth produced on this tiny island can not be overstated.
Many plantation owners lived in the French mainland, but for those plantation owners living on the island, there was an excess of wealth which led to absurd extravagance. I found this excerpt in this article https://www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/Birth-of-a-Nation-Has-the-bloody-200-year-2771248.php
describing some of the extravagance:
“Planters and merchants in their splendid imported carriages could visit two resident orchestras, gambling houses, military parades, public fountains, horse shows, a Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, a traveling wax museum with figures of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and, in 1784, the launch of the first large balloon in the Americas, its canopy painted with the coats of arms of prominent colonists. Six towns had repertory theaters.”
There was a multi-tiered social structure on the island. At the top were the wealthy white planters, called the “grand blancs”. At the bottom were the enslaved black people called “noirs”. In between was the mixed-race offspring of white planters and slaves that had been freed. These freedmen called affranchis were often skilled tradesmen. Some Mulatto freedmen inherited land from their white fathers, became relatively wealthy and owned slaves (perhaps as many as one-fourth of all slaves in Saint-Domingue belonged to affranchis owners).
There were “petit-blancs” which were white people that were not plantation owners, and oftentimes held government offices or were merchants. Lastly, there were “marrons”, which were escaped slaves living in makeshift camps and communities. There were many signs of jealousy between the various structures, and many tried to disenfranchise the other.
As all the other wealthy white planters in St. Domingue did, the deGeneres family lived in a life of luxury on a large sugar plantation estate, in the southern part of St. Domingue near the town of Torbeck and Les Cayes.
I actually found these maps many many years ago somewhere online (I have no notes of how to find it again and am embarrassed at my lack of genealogy proof standards) showing the Generes owned land area, it is marked yellow, right next to the red area – in the top picture. Also, right above the name Generes is the area marked Marsollan. Marsollan is the name that Jean Constantine used as the second part of his last name. The Marsollan area coincides with the area also called Savenettes, which is listed in the Indemnity Report.
The estate would have been made up of the grand house, shacks for the slaves, vast planted land of sugar cane and the refinery process area. It would have had many slaves working on it. Sadly, the slaves more than likely lived in very harsh conditions and were probably treated as easily replaceable and dispensable. It is a horrifically sad part of our family history which I will delve into deeper in later posts.
I have found paintings of the inhabitants and scenes of the island by a London-based Italian painter from Rome named Agostino Brunias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agostino_Brunias
These two pictures are good examples of the sugar cane fields and sugar refinery process.
I have also found a google map of the area called Generes in present day Haiti – and I was trying to embed it here, but I couldn’t figure it out after hours of trial and error, so here is the link:
https://goo.gl/maps/1aieXsf7Waqtmesc6
I have also found a photo of ruins of a plantation that were taken by a photographer in 1987 near Torbeck which could very well be our Jean’s plantation.
https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2K7O3RQF8JP
Jean Contstantin de Generes was the third generation to live in St Domingue. His grandfather, Jean Baptiste emigrated from the Toulouse area in France sometime in or before 1720. The first mention in St Domingue of the Degeneres family that I have been able to find is Jean Baptiste’s marriage to Madeleine Van de Horst in Torbeck , Grand Anse, St Domingue on October 29, 1720
The twenty ninth day of the month of October, after the publication of a single bann at the parish mass on Sunday, there having been found no canonic impediment, I have joined in the sacrament of Marriage in the presence of the witnesses who have signed below, a dispensation having been granted for the other two banns, Jean Generes, native of the city of Toulouse, Parish Saint Etienne, now dwelling here, legitimate son of the late Jean Generes bourgeois of the said city and of jeanne Sourillee (sic for Sourvillee) his father and mother with Magdeleine Van der Horst native of the isle of Courrassol (Curacao) daughter of the late Jean Van der Horst and of marguerite Van der Horst her father and mother, in faith of which we have signed the above day and year except the wife who has stated that she does not know how to write, thus signed in the original, de Bellecour cure' Generes, Guard, Pertuis, Guinibert, Bilbert.
I am still researching why they left Toulouse, but possibly because the Caribbean area was beckoning with the possibility of extraordinary wealth.
Jean Constantine’s parents were Jean Laurent and Marie Renette Javerzat. I will share more about what I have learned of them in later posts. They had 7 boys and 1 daughter.
7 boys, Oh Marie!
The equatorial climate was hot and humid, yet as a young boy Jean would have been very smartly dressed in the fashion of his time with white pantaloons that came just past his knees , stockings and maybe a blue ruffled shirt and a straw hat to ward off the sun if he was outside.
Here is another example of Agostino Brunias’ oil painting, titled “Portrait of a Gentleman”. Jean would have been very similarly dressed.
He would have been cared for by the house slaves. He and his brothers were more than likely very spoiled and coddled.
Around the age of 6 or 7 years, he was sent to France to be educated in reading, writing, arithmetic, practical geometry, French history, grammar and trained in the manners of a gentleman of that era. This was very customary for young men to be educated in France. He and his brothers were probably under a Jesuit run boarding school until 1790 when the French Revolution forced all of the Jesuit schools to close. Education then was organized as a republic run institution. I found this info in an old book I found online about the French Education system. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED046810.pdf
The port of Les Cayes, the closest town to his family’s plantation was a very busy port. Jean would have seen many ships docked there, off-loading their slave cargo or consumer goods and refilling with sugar or coffee. Also, ships from the United States would dock there to trade goods much to the dismay of the mainland Frenchmen. The mainland French much preferred the Islanders to purchase French goods. There was a dispute in 1789 between the mainland French and the Islanders resulting in quite a stir and trade dispute. The mainland french doubled the price of flour and demanded that the islanders only buy from them otherwise the Islanders would be deemed unpatriotic. The wealthy islanders refused and there was a short-lived food crisis with a shortage of flour. Sadly, this only resulted in the slaves going hungry. The University of Michigan did an entire study of this grain shortage if you are interested in learning more https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/
According to family lore stated in Uncle Roland’s book, Jean’s mom was traveling from France to St. Domingue with Jean and his brother (possibly two brothers), accompanying them back from school. When she heard of the disturbances in St Domingue she left her two sons in the care of friends. She left for St. Domingue and sadly she, nor her husband and Jean’s younger siblings were ever heard from again.
I have tried to piece together what happened to Jean and his brothers. I do know that he, and his older two brothers, Jean Francois and Jacques Antoine do survive. The older two brother’s make lives in France for themselves, but for reason’s unknown Jean decides to make his life in America.
My next post will delve into Jean’s years in America before and right after he meets his wife Zepherine.
