Pierre-Nicolas Le Clerc

Parents. Son of Nicolas Le Clerc (c. 1665 – after 1705).

Children. Father of Pierre Leclaire.

Pierre-Nicolas Le Clerc (1692–1762) is the earliest figure in the post-Pulligny line for whom dates can be stated with confidence. He lived through the long reign of Louis XV, the loss of the independent Duchy of Lorraine (formally absorbed into France in 1766, four years after his death) and the consolidation of the family in the borderland between Lorraine and Alsace.

Timeline note: the family surname undergoes its most visible transition during his and his son's generations. Parish registers and notarial acts of the period record the same household variously as Le Clerc, Leclerc, Le Claire and Leclaire — the spellings drifting through clerical hands towards the single-word Leclaire form by which the next generation is consistently known.

He is the link between Nicolas Le Clerc (c. 1665) and Pierre Leclaire, through whom the line continues to Louis Jean Baptiste Leclaire and ultimately to the modern House.

Surname timeline during this generation: c. 1690 Le Clerc / Leclerc dominant in Lorraine parish hands · c. 1720 Le Claire and Leclaire begin to appear in mixed Alsatian / Lorraine registers · by c. 1750 Leclaire is the form most consistently recorded for the household.

Pierre-Nicolas is the first generation after the seventeenth-century gap for whom the family's continuity into the documented eighteenth-century Leclaire branch can be plainly traced.