Brandon Noble LeClaire

Brandon Noble LeClaire (b. 1995) is the present head of the House of LeClaire and the lineal descendant, through his mother Andrea Michaela Tai-Noble, of the documented LeClaire line of Lorraine, Alsace and the Rhineland.

The House from which he descends was, at its zenith in sixteenth-century Lorraine, among the wealthiest and most influential families of the Duchy. His ancestor Claude Leclerc de Pulligny (c. 1485–1562) was at once merchant of silk and wool to the ducal court, valet de chambre to Duke Antoine of Lorraine, and the first Conseiller and Auditeur of the Chamber of Accounts under Duke Charles III — a fiscal office of the first rank. He held the fiefs of Pulligny, Ceintrey, Voinémont, Malaucourt-sur-Seille, Chamagne, Érize-Saint-Dizier and Saint-Dizier, owned a great house in Nancy decorated with his arms, and endowed a chapel at the Basilica of Saint-Epvre.

Through Claude's marriage to Catherine de Trèves de Xirocourt the family was allied to the financial circle that quite literally underwrote the Duchy: Catherine's brother Gilles de Trèves, canon and dean of Saint-Maxe, was wealthy enough to advance very substantial loans to Duke Antoine of Lorraine himself — the family thus standing as one of the small handful of houses that supplied capital to the sovereign. The Beurges connection (Conseillers and Auditeurs at the Chamber of Accounts), the seigneurial holdings of the Leclerc du Vivier branch, and the 90,000-livres dowry borne by Brandon's sixth-great-grandmother Jacqueline Antoinette Marie Catherine Van der Vyvere into the eighteenth-century marriage with his sixth-great-grandfather Jean Pierre Le Claire, together place the House within the moneyed and office-holding elite of Lorraine, Alsace and the Rhineland across four centuries.

Military distinction culminated in Brandon's fifth-great-granduncle Général de Division Théodore François Joseph Leclaire (1752–1811), Commander of the Legion of Honour, hero of Hondschoote and Commander of Strasbourg — a collateral brother of Brandon's direct fifth-great-grandfather Louis Jean Baptiste Leclaire (1753–1825), through whom the line continues to the present day.

In a deliberate act of recovery, Brandon has adopted the earlier ancestral surname LeClaire — the French form borne by the principal line through the eighteenth century — in place of the Germanised Licklär by which his immediate forebears had been recorded. The restoration is a deliberate return to the documented origins of the House in the Duchy of Lorraine and to the historic line of the Sieurs de Pulligny.

Through extensive analysis of genealogical records, military archives, heraldic evidence and historical sources, he has rebuilt a pedigree spanning more than seven centuries — connecting the Leclaire, Greenland, Van der Vyvere, Molyneux and associated families into a single documented lineage.

On 22 May 2027 he married Abigail Jane Greenland of the English House of Greenland. By that marriage he founded the modern House of Greenland-LeClaire, uniting the French line of the LeClaire with the English line of the Greenland: azure, a lion rampant or. He and his wife now bear the name Greenland-LeClaire, and the new House carries the joint motto De Nomine et Sanguine alongside the Greenland Nec Timeo Nec Sperno.

Brandon Noble Greenland-LeClaire is, in the strictest documentary sense, the present custodian of an eight-hundred-year European family chronicle — and the first generation of a new House.