At last! Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille system of reading and writing for the blind, has long had a profile on WikiTree, but he was not connected in spite of a rather full set of ancestors.
The breakthrough came after reading an obituary of Jean Panhard, late director of the Panhard firm. I had known for some time that the Panhard family (of the Panhard & Levassor automobiles) were distant cousins of Louis Braille, but had put off working on them. But Jean Panhard's obituary mentioned that he was married to Jeanne Chodron de Courcel, who, with such a name, was sure to be related to Bernadette Chirac (she is her aunt).
The first common ancestor of Louis Braille and Jean Panhard is Pierre Braille (1667-1727), Louis's great-great-grandfather, and the great-grandfather of Geneviève Adélaïde Braille, great-grandmother of René Panhard, co-founder of Panhard & Levassor, and 3xg grandmother of Jean Panhard.
