León de María (1912-2007) is a Brother who should need no introduction. Luis Aurelio Antonio Aroz Pascual, such was his full name. He is the author of 24 volumes in the Cahiers Lasalliens collection.
He has offered us the fruit of his research in archives and public and private libraries in France: baptismal certificates, birth, marriage and death certificates… accounts, inventories, accounts… a whole notarial and administrative world which allows us to discover the human side of our Father, John Baptist de La Salle, of his family and of other people connected with him such as Father Roland.
This restless, passionate, methodical, precise, erudite, fundamentally consecrated man studied education, canon law, Romance philology and missiology. He taught in Luxembourg, Belgium, England, Catalonia, Italy and the Vatican. In addition to these Lasallian studies, he published several books, including 7 volumes of sylography of the cathedrals of Aragon and Leon.
The three volumes we are publishing allow us to reconstruct the family tree of the de La Salle family from the 15th to the 18th century: from their origins as merchants to their ennoblement, including the positions that many of them held in different fields of social life. They present notarial and parish records, wills and inventories divided into three series: the family before settling in Soissons; the period in Soissons; and the Reims period.
A series of valuable indexes occupy an important part of the publication. It is also supported online.
Br. Santiago Rodriguez Mancini
Director of the Office of Lasallian Heritage and Research