Émile Edme Lebrun was an architect — a fact fixed by his son Marcel Romain’s 1882 marriage certificate, which records him, then aged fifty-one and living at Rambouillet, giving verbal consent to the match. Working back from that age puts his birth around 1830; the family genealogy places it precisely at Meaux, in the Brie country east of Paris, on 13 December 1830.
He married Clotilde Anastasie Chomet (of Villecresnes, southeast of Paris), and their children were born in Paris and its immediate communes — the generation in which the Lebrun line moved from the Brie countryside into the capital. The eldest was Marcel Romain Lebrun, who would carry the line, by way of his own son Georges Marcel, across the Atlantic to Haiti.
Émile Edme was still alive at his son’s 1882 wedding and had died before 1892; the exact date is not yet known. His wife Clotilde Anastasie outlived him, dying in Paris in 1915 — the last anchor of the Lebrun branch in France, by which time her grandson Georges Marcel had already crossed to Haiti.