Jeannine Belleguic died in Lorient, France, on 18 April 2025, aged 93, a week before her funeral at the Notre-Dame church of Quimperlé, the Breton town where she was born. Her death notice, published by Ouest-France, is the closest thing she has to a biography in the public domain. It is also a family document, and it repays a careful reading.

Two records carry nearly everything verifiable about her: that notice, and the entry France’s national register of deceased persons keeps under her birth name, Jeannine Josephine Annick Bleuzen. The notice and the register agree on the dates, the places, and her age. The agreement fixes who she was without any third-hand retelling.

Who Was Jeannine Belleguic?

Jeannine Belleguic was a French woman from Quimperlé, in the Finistère department of Brittany, whose life is documented mainly by two records: her April 2025 death notice and her entry in France’s national register of deceased persons.

Born Jeannine Josephine Annick Bleuzen on 28 May 1931, she was Jean-Charles Belleguic’s wife and lived out her years in the small triangle of Breton towns her notice lists: Quimperlé, where she was born; Lorient, where she died; and Guidel, between the two. She left three children, and the notice names six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Quimperlé, where the Ellé and Isole rivers meet, anchors the record at both ends: her birth in 1931 and her funeral in 2025 happened in the same town.

No newspaper profile, election record, or business filing attaches to her name.

None of that makes the record thin. A notice written by her children lists the people around her at the end of her life, and that is information no register carries.

The Death Notice of 22 April 2025

Ouest-France published her death notice online on Tuesday 22 April 2025, four days after her death, and the funeral home’s Cybille memorial page gives her years in the plainest possible form: 1931–2025. Both are still live.

This is why the same woman, Jeannine Belleguic, appears under two names in the paperwork. The notice introduces “Madame Jean-Charles BELLÉGUIC, née Jeannine BLEUZEN”, because the French custom for a widow is to announce her under her husband’s full name; her own given name and maiden name arrive after “née”, the marker of the birth surname. The convention explains the odd moment when a reader meets a “Madame Jean-Charles” who is unmistakably a woman.

The ceremony was set for Friday 25 April at 14:30 in the Église Notre-Dame of Quimperlé, followed by burial in the town’s Saint-David cemetery. Visits were arranged from the Wednesday before at the “salon Mer” of the Pompes Funèbres du Pays de Quimperlé, the funeral home on avenue Arthur Krebs in the La Villeneuve Braouic industrial zone. The notice closes with a line many French faire-part carry: “Cet avis tient lieu de faire-part et de remerciements”, the announcement stands as both the card and the thanks.

The register fixes the two places that matter. She was born in Quimperlé, in Finistère, and she died in Lorient, in the neighbouring department of Morbihan; the towns of Guidel and Lorient on the notice are the family geography around her. The notice prints the departmental codes beside the towns, 29 for Quimperlé and 56 for Lorient and Guidel, in the French habit of filing places by number.

The Civil Record: Born Bleuzen, 28 May 1931

The second document sits in the national register of deceased persons that INSEE, France’s statistics office, maintains and publishes online as matchID. The entry reads: Jeannine Josephine Annick Bleuzen, female, born in Quimperlé on 28 May 1931, died in Lorient on 18 April 2025, aged 93. INSEE explains that the file is built from information transmitted by the municipalities, so the entry carries the authority of the civil act behind it.

Cross the register against the notice and one woman emerges. The notice’s Belleguic, née Bleuzen, died on 18 April 2025 at 93; the register holds exactly one Bleuzen born in Quimperlé who died that day, in Lorient, at 93. Same birth town, same date, same age; nothing is left to guesswork.

The register records events, not lives: an act of birth in one municipality, an act of death in another, nothing in between. That is why the civil entry and the notice complement each other, and why neither can replace the other.

The full birth name matters because it is the oldest layer of her identity, the one that never changes after marriage. Records float between spellings: Belléguic with the accent, Belleguic without, Bleuzen as the family name, and the three given names in several orders. All of them describe the same woman, and the fixed points are always the dates and the town.

The Family the Notice Names

Her children are listed in order: Gilles, married to Évelyne; Catherine, married to Victor Coulis; and Pierre-Yves, married to Patricia. Two of the three couples carry a cross, the French sign that one member of the couple is no longer living; the notice gives no dates for either loss.

Six grandchildren are named, Philippe, Marie, Charlotte, Anne-Gaëlle, Camille and Jean-Victor, along with their partners, and then “ses dix arrière-petits-enfants”: her ten great-grandchildren. Her sister Yvette Ollivier is there, and so is a sister-in-law who shares her maiden name, Jeannine Bleuzen. The notice does not explain that coincidence; it simply lists them both.

The closing lines of the document thank the people who carried her through her last months. Marielle Le Romancer is named as her dame de compagnie, her companion; Philippe Gourden as her doctor; then the staff of the Edilys residence and the hospital-at-home service of Lorient. The residence and the Lorient care team quietly explain the geography of the death certificate: her roots stayed in Quimperlé, her final months were cared for across the departmental border. In a document built out of names, hers is the one the family chose to write down.

Other Jeannines Named Belleguic in the Register

The same register holds other women who answer to this name, and the entries are easy to mistake for one another. It records, separately from her:

• Jeannine Gisèle Marcelle Belleguic, born in Bordeaux in 1941, died in 1987 in Férolles-Attilly, at 46;
• Jeannine Le Belleguic, born in Paris in 1927, died in Paris in 2020, at 93;
• Jeanine Odette Marcelle Beleguic, the surname missing its second l, born in 1938, who died in Lorient in 2008.

A note that pairs the name with Bordeaux, or with a death in 1987, is about the first woman in the list; one that pairs it with Paris and 2020 concerns the second. Neither is the woman buried from Quimperlé.

The list has a practical use. When the dates attached to the name do not line up, the birth town settles which woman is which: this Jeannine Belleguic was born in Quimperlé in 1931, and none of the other entries was.

What the Documents Do Not Say

No record of her work, her schooling, or her wedding day has surfaced in either document, and no source for an occupation exists. That absence does not invite invention; the family that wrote the notice chose what to publish, and a notice and a civil entry were never meant to form a biography.

Anything that goes beyond the pair of records, careers, titles, life stories, should carry its own source. Nothing in these two documents supports any of it.

Born in Quimperlé on 28 May 1931, buried from Notre-Dame on 25 April 2025: the edges of the life are clear, and everything in between belongs to the people who knew her. Their notice, down to the companion’s name in the thanks, is the fuller record.