Home    Search    Print    Add Bookmark

• Gender	Male
  Person ID	I3843	McKinney and Stewart of Clarion County, Pennsylvania
  Last Modified	30 Mar 2010 09:46:55
  Children	1. Jacob Balliet, b. 1642, France
  Last Modified	26 Jan 2008 16:06:07
  Family ID	F1182	Group Sheet

• Notes

  Unless otherwise noted, all information and photos on the descendants of Isaac Bailliote were furnished by Jean Polliard Cannassa. Jean advises that a good portion of the work was done by others including, Lulu Stewart Polliard and Cheryl McDonald and that she was the compiler. The information that Jean furnished includes extensive information on the first five generations of the descendants of Isaac. Information on the descendants of Joseph Balliet, born 1783, grandson of Paulus Balliet, was furnished by Dan Stewart unless otherwise noted. No living descendants are included. (Note to File - JP Rhein) From, "The Balliet, Balliett, Balliette, Balyeat, Bolyard, and Allied Families," by Stephen Clay, Published by Thos. J. Moran's Sons, Inc., Baton Rouge, La. 1968. Call No. RG 929.2 Bal Library of Congress #68-23012 pg 33 "Isaac Bailliote of Burbach had a son Jacob Baillet. This Jacob Baillet was the progenitor of the pioneer immigrants of the three known founders of the families in America - PAULUS, JOSEPH, and JOHANNES Balliet. pg 32 and 33 " During the Religious Wars many of the Huguenot families were separated and individual members of a family would be taken in and protected by relatives and friends sympathetic to the Huguenot beliefs. One of these refugees was an Isaac Bailliote, who was a resident of Burbach as early as 1625, Burbach is a village about six miles from Schalbach, and before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, it appears to have been, with neighboring villages, a part of the Sovereignty of Saarwerden, which had become an asylum for the Huguenot refugees, among whom were the Baillets. Local records at Saarwerden inform us that the Baillet family had settled there before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), but because of the frightful conditions that prevailed were forced into exile, returning after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to Schalbach, where the family became firmly established. The various homes of the Balliets, their relatives and friends, many of whom also later settled in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, lie in a small area between the River Saar and the Vosges Mountains, with boundaries between extreme points of over thirty miles, lying partly in Alsace and partly in Lorraine. Schalbach being located about thirty-five miles southeast of Metz, France and forty miles northeast of Nancy, France. This part of Alsace and Lorraine like all other sections of the old German, or more properly, Holy Roman Empire, was split up into numerous petty sovereignties. In 1700 the Empire was a loose confederation of some three hundred states and some fourteen small territories belonging to petty knights, who exercised a power and jurisdiction as absolute as that of a prince. The maps of this period were crude and unreliable and the boundaries of the numerous states or sovereignties constantly changed, making it impossible to determine in which state a particular village or town was located. pg 29 "Pierre Durand, a Huguenot pastor was hanged at Montpellier Languedoc in 1732 for preaching the Gospel. He may have been a relative of Margaretha Durand, wife of Johan Nicholas Baillet (1680-1745). To study for the ministry of the Reformed Church in those days of persecution was to 'qualify for the gallows'. The ministry became the vocation of martyrs. The gallows for the Reformed ministers, and the galleys for those who listened to them. To break the bones of Huguenots on the wheel, or cutting out his tongue before hanging or burning him was accounted a great service to the Roman Church. The Huguenot families who lived on the Lorraine side of the border, in the villages of Finstingen, Helleringen, Schallback, Pistorf and Lixheim, among whom were the Baillets and their kin, had neither churches nor pastors of their own. They were visited by pastors of the 'Desert' as they called the caves, valleys, woods and old quarries in which they met and worshipped. At the present time, located between Miallet and Anduze is a 'Museum of the Desert' with a unique collection of Huguenot momentos." pg 30 "The fact is that for many years before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Germany and Switzerland had become the chief asylums of the Huguenot Refugees. For a time they lived in hope the French Kings would restore their religious freedom, and that they would be permitted to return to France. That hope never realized, they became gradually absorbed by the Germans and Swiss, among whom they had settled. Thousands lost their Huguenot identity when their names became Germanized or corrupted. This effacement was continued when they came to America in the great German and Swiss emigration between the years 1700 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War." (see Laux's "Fusion of Races in Lehigh County" P of L.Co.H.S., V.6, p 3-11) pg 34 "The surname Balliet is no doubt a corrupted form of the old French 'Baillet', meaning sorrel or light colored when the word is used in referring to a horse of that color." "In the French tongue, Balliet, as the name is spelled in America, and Baillet as it is mostly written in France, has practically the same pronunciation, Ba-yea, and will account for some of the vagaries of its orthography in the early French and Alsatian-Lorraine records. (Association) with the Germans in Alsace and Lorraine eventually gave the name a German sound, the double 'l' losing its characteristic French sound and the name pronounced Ball-yet or Bal-yet at the present time in Alsace-Lorraine and in Pennsylvania. Paulus, Joseph, and Johannes, the three immigrant pioneers signed their names Balliet, with a few exceptions when the Baliet spelling is found. The name in Pennsylvania has been firmly established as Balliet and has remained unchanged since the days of the pioneers. Some of the second and third generation of Joseph's line who migrated to Richland County, Ohio and what is now Preston County, West Virginia, adopted the spelling of Balyeat and Bolyard. In several instances, later generations have used Balliett or Balliette. One family in California has given the name an Irish touch, O'Balliet." pg 35 "Dr. Louis B. Balliet, a great-great-grandson of Paulus, published a 28 page brochure in 1873, in which four pages were devoted to the 'Race of the Balyards' (claiming knights and archbishops as ancestors and even included a coat of arms). . . "It is quite safe to say that this claim is mythical. . . I am convinced that he was imposed upon by a genealogical and heraldic fakir at Vienna, where it was drawn up."