Georges Marcel Lebrun was born in Boulogne, France — the channel-coast city facing Dover across the strait — to a French father and a Belgian mother, sometime in the late nineteenth century. At some point he crossed an ocean and landed in Haiti, where he married Claire Gaetjens of Léogâne; their son Serge Lebrun is Alex’s maternal grandfather.
The Lebrun surname on this side of the family is French — Le Brun, “the brown one,” common across the French-speaking world. Georges’s emigration to Haiti is the point at which the Lebrun line enters the Caribbean record, and through Serge’s eventual move to New York, the line would re-cross the Atlantic two generations later.
