Georges Marcel Lebrun was born on 2 October 1885 at Saint-Maurice, a commune on the Marne just southeast of Paris — not Boulogne, as an earlier family recollection had it. He was a twin; his brother Ferdinand Julien died in infancy, leaving Georges the survivor of the two. His parents were the Paris insurance agent Marcel Romain Lebrun and Eugénie Vandenberghe, born at Menin on the Franco-Belgian border — the French-father, Belgian-mother pairing the family long remembered without names.
Sometime before 1907 he crossed the Atlantic to Haiti, where, on 16 October 1907 in Port-au-Prince, he married Claire Gaetjens of Léogâne; their son was Serge Lebrun. What drew a young man from suburban Paris to Haiti is still unknown.
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. He died at Port-au-Prince on 2 December 1962.
