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FOCUS ON PHILANTHROPY
Jeanne Williams
Jeanne Williams’s family tree is like a magnificent live oak, one she’s explored with tireless curiosity and prideful ownership. She knows, for instance, that her ancestor Louis de la Ronde accompanied Iberville on his 1699 voyage up the mouth of the Mississippi River—it says so in Iberville’s own journal from the expedition. In the parlor of her uptown New Orleans home are impressionist paintings by her great-great-aunts, Emilie and Marie de Hoa LeBlanc, who were among the first Newcomb Pottery artists and whose faces and hands were immortalized in plaster by Ellsworth or William Woodward (only the signature “Woodward” is inscribed on the back). In The Collection’s Counting House hang the two oldest known portraits of French colonists in Louisiana history, her relatives Pierre Denis and Marie Madeleine Broutin de la Ronde. Williams’s love of family and history suffuses her work, home, and recreation; she sees herself as a bearer of the knowledge gathered and preserved by previous generations.
“Learning my roots, for me it’s a very visceral thing,” Williams said. “I feel attached to the earth, I feel that history, and I think it’s my purpose to carry that on.”
Williams’s affection for history and genealogy started in childhood. One of 14 children—she’s number seven—she was born in New Orleans and grew up
primarily in the Carrollton neighborhood. Her paternal grandmother, Fabiola Pilie, lived one block away, and she was a font of genealogical knowledge. “I grew up with the history of my family,” Williams said. “My grandmother would share stories with me, and I absolutely loved it.”
Pilie gave her children carefully researched family trees, written out in a tabular format with generations extending left to right. There, one can see the names of Ignace Broutin, who came to Louisiana in 1725 as a royal surveyor and designed the original Ursuline Convent, and Pierre Denis de la Ronde, fils, one of the signers of Louisiana’s first constitution.
Williams’s pride in the de la Ronde branch of the family led to a formative experience following her graduation from Loyola University, where she majored in history and education. Knowing that she wanted to become fluent in French, she decided to learn the language in the country itself, in the town of her de la Ronde ancestors, Tours. She arrived with little more than “the name of a school where foreigners could learn French,” and, after staying in a hostel for a while, met an older couple, Jean and Ginette Blanc, who, though extremely formal in manner, instantly felt like family. “From the first moment, it was a match made in heaven,” said Williams, who still keeps in touch with Jean, as Ginette has passed on.
The experience prompted Williams to become a tour guide when she returned to New Orleans. “I came from Europe really
wanting to learn more about my city and state,” she said.
Her love of history abided through the busy years of getting married, moving to Hawaii, Washington, DC, and back home to New Orleans, and raising four children— Emilie, 34, Conrad, 33, Courtney, 29, and David, 27, all of whom she discusses with the same excitement and pride she has for her forebears. Williams has been and is still active in many historical and literary organizations, including the Daughters of 1812, which has commemorated the Battle of New Orleans with a wreath-laying ceremony for over a century, most recently this January, with British diplomats in tow for the 200th anniversary of the battle. “I was one of the youngest when I joined [the Daughters], but I loved it because I love learning,” she said. “Every meeting I went to, I’d learn something about my family history or New Orleans history.”
Williams brought her zeal for learning to The Collection when she became a volunteer, in 2006. Common Routes: St. Domingue—Louisiana was her first exhibition, and she quicklv fell in love with the institution. “I love working with The Collection,” she said. “The people are wonderful. They do everything first class, and they are exceptionally good stewards of everything they have responsibility for.” “History is a series of links in a chain,” she said. “It’s important that someone in each generation makes sure that the chain isn’t broken.” —MOLLY REID
Fall 2015	15