Recently my nephew, Ian de Minvielle-Devaux wrote, in the french language, a history of the Devaux family in the West Indies. In these pages I shall summarise, in english, the particulars of that history which councern the male line of our branch of the family and which are likely to be of direct intrest to my son John Edward Devaux.

During the second World War Paris was not destroyed but St. Lô in Normandy was. From the old archives of the colonies still preserved in the French Capital Ian was able to obtain a great deal of interesting information, particularly from some of the original cpoies of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registers of St. Lucia, Martinique and Gaudeloupe before the French Revolution, from the old Census Reports of these Islands and a host of ancian manuscripts. This was fortunate, for some of the Registers and other papers in the West Indies had perished owing to fire, revolution, hurricanes, the ravages of insects, the volcanic eruption at St. Pierre in Martinique and other causes.

On the other hand, the archives of Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, which had been assembled at St. Lô, perish when this town was bombarded by the Allied Forces liberating Normandy from the Nazi occupation. Yet, through an oversight, a few of the archives of the village of Flammanville had not been sent to St. Lô, as they should have been, and these few have been preserved. They are of interest since it was from Flammanville that came the first member of our family to settle in the West Indies during the middle of the seventeenth Ceentury.

There was in Normandy, from very early times, the Rolland or Rouland or Roland Family of the « noblesse » or gentry. Documents exist to show that members of that family held positions of rank as far back as the fifteenth century and perhapd before. About the sixteenth century one branch came to be known, after certain lands they had, as the Rolland, Sieurs Desvaux or de Vaux or Devaulx or Deveaux, the name having been spelt in many different ways. Guillaume Rolland, Sieur des Vaux, was a member of this branch of the family whose arms were: « D’Azur au Chevron d’argent accompagné en chef de deux étoiles d’or et en pointe d’une ancre du même. » (azur, a chevron argent between two mullets and anchor, all or). He was a land-owner at Flammanville. In 1670, he contributed « a horse and its harness » to transport materials for the construction of the new church then being built at Flammanville. He married Françoise du Chevreuil.

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