Family heritage
Our Family Crest and the French Church du Saint-Esprit
The crest at the top of every page on this site was not invented for it. It is drawn from the arms of the family as they are displayed today at a church in New York City founded by French Protestant refugees like our ancestor Gedeon Merlet.
The arms
The arms are simple and old in style: a red shield bearing three silver five-pointed stars, two above and one below. In the language of heraldry, red is gules, silver is argent, and a star of this kind is a mullet. Above the shield is a knight’s closed helmet, topped by a twisted wreath of red and silver and a rearing silver beast. Flowing red and silver mantling, the cloth that once protected a knight’s helmet from the sun, frames the whole design, and a scroll beneath carries the family name.
The crest used on this site was created from three photographs taken at the French Church du Saint-Esprit, shown above: a hand-painted coat of arms under the name Marlatt, the Marlatt shield hanging beneath its nameplate on the church wall, and a brass Huguenot cross. It follows the painted arms closely, with the scroll changed to read Malott, one of the many spellings of the same family name.
The French Church du Saint-Esprit
L’Église Française du Saint-Esprit stands at 109 East 60th Street, New York (opens a map in a new window), between Park and Lexington Avenues, just east of Madison Avenue. It traces its history to the first French-language communion in New Amsterdam, recorded in 1628, and was built up by Huguenot refugees who fled France for the New World. Today it is an Episcopal church that still worships in French and describes itself as united by the spiritual values of tolerance, freedom and liberty. Learn more on the church’s website, stesprit.org.
The church’s own records reach back to New York’s earliest Huguenot refugees. Writing in 1908, Colonel James Tompkins Watson quoted from the archives of “the old French church called L’Eglise de St. Esprit, or the Church of the Holy Ghost, on Pine street in New York City” an entry for one refugee couple: “Pierre Bontekoe and Margaret Collinot, his wife, fugitives from the Isle of Re, near the city of LaRochelle, in 1684 fled to England, came to New York in 1689.” The same records show that the church paid a pension to Pierre’s wife, known as “Madame” Bontekoe, for several years, a glimpse of how the congregation looked after its own.
Gedeon Merlet, a Huguenot from Roucy in Champagne, reached New Amsterdam in February 1663 and joined the Reformed Church there that April. The Huguenot cross, with its four arms, its heart-shaped openings and the dove hanging below, is the emblem of Huguenot descendants everywhere; The Huguenots: Why Our Family Left France explains what each part of it means.
350 years in the New World
In May 2012, a very generous group of Gedeon’s descendants hosted a celebration at the French Church du Saint-Esprit, marking 350 years since the family set out for the New World. Gedeon, his wife and four sons had sailed from Amsterdam aboard De Purmerlander Kerck in October 1662; that story is told in Across the Atlantic in 1662.