Eugénie Marie Désirée Vandenberghe was born on 11 April 1856 at Menin — Menen in Flemish — the West-Flanders town that sits right against the French border on the river Lys. She is the Belgian-Flemish root of the Lebrun family: the Vandenberghe surname (“van den Berghe,” of the hill) is a common Flemish one, and hers is the thread that shows up in the family’s Northwest-European ancestry alongside the French Lebrun and Chomet lines.
Her father was Aimé Cyrille Edmond Constantin Vandenberghe, a merchant (négociant) of Moorseele, a few kilometres east of Menin; her mother, Julie Aimée Thérèse Brame, had already died by the time Eugénie married. When she wed the Paris insurance agent Marcel Romain Lebrun at Autouillet on 23 March 1882, her father — still in Belgium — sent his consent by notarial act rather than travelling to the ceremony, as the marriage certificate records.
How a merchant’s daughter from the Flemish border came to be married deep in the Yvelines is not yet known — she was living in the Autouillet–Rambouillet area by 1882, perhaps in service or with relatives. She and Marcel Romain settled at Saint-Maurice near Paris and raised four children there, among them Georges Marcel Lebrun, who carried the line to Haiti.
