♂Amand Godreau

Amand Godreau (born 24 January 1732) was an Acadian born at Grand-Pré and later of Iberville, on the lower Mississippi, two of whose daughters married two different men named Charles Hebert. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Godreau.

Early life

He was born at Grand-Pré on 24 January 1732 and baptized the next day as “Amans Paul Gautrot”, the son of Charles Gautrot and Marie Josèphe LeBlanc; the sponsors were Charles Gourdon and Françoise Leblanc, and his father signed the register. The baptism is printed in the published abstracts of the Diocese of Baton Rouge church registers. A compiled genealogy by Cormier gives him as the elder son of that couple.

Maryland

A compiled genealogy by Cormier gives his exile to Maryland and his marriage there to Marie Landry about 1758.

A census of the Acadians held at Newtown in Maryland, dated 7 July 1763 and printed by J.-Edmond Roy in 1911, lists his household of four as “Amant Gautrot, La Blanche son Epouse, Marie Magdne Gautrot, Magdne Le Blanc, orpheline”. It is entered beside a household of three headed by “Marie veuve de Charles Gautrot”, most likely his widowed mother, Marie Josèphe LeBlanc, with her sons Jean and Marin. The census calls his wife “La Blanche”, while Cormier’s compiled account and the tree name his wife Marie Landry; the records do not explain the difference. The census names the other two members of his household only as Marie Magdne Gautrot and Magdne Le Blanc, an orphan.

Cormier’s compilation says that in 1766 he came to Louisiana with the first group of Maryland exiles and settled at St.-Jacques, moving by the early 1770s to Ascension, and that in the 1790s he was dealing in land on the upper Bayou Vermilion.

Louisiana

On 14 September 1769 a census of the Acadian settlers on both banks of the Mississippi, taken at Cabahannocer, St. James, lists a household headed by “Amant Gautherot”, aged 39, with Marie Landry, aged 31, Anne, aged 4, Margueritte, aged nine months, and Magdelaine, aged 14. A compiled genealogy by Arsenault places the household on lot 83 on the right, or west, bank. A compiled genealogy by Cormier places the household in the Ascension census of 1770, on the right bank, as head of family number 48 with six arpents, and in the Ascension census of 1777, written “Amand Gauteros”, aged 45, with a wife aged 38, four daughters and the same six arpents.

A burial at Ascension on 14 January 1783 names a “Maria Blanche”, aged 45, and is probably that of his wife, Marie Landry; the entry names no husband.

In the Louisiana church registers he and his wife, Marie Landry, are known chiefly from the records of their daughters, as printed in the same abstracts. At the marriage of their daughter Theodosia to Joseph Brasseur on 11 July 1794, the couple were described as “of Iberville”. They were named as the maternal grandparents at the baptisms of grandchildren at St. Gabriel^W in 1796, 1798, 1801 and 1804 and at Baton Rouge in 1802 and 1805, and one of the 1796 entries calls them Acadians and one of 1805 says they were “of Acadia”. His daughters Marguerite and Anne each married a Charles Hebert, one a son of François Hebert and Marie Leblanc, the other a son of Pierre Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc, and the two couples baptized children at St. Gabriel in the same years. The families are told apart by two baptisms printed one after the other on the same page of the St. Gabriel register in 1796: both name Amand and Marie as the maternal grandparents, but each gives the father different parents. His surname is written as Gotrau, Godrau, Godreau, Goudreau and Gautreaux across these entries, and Gautrot in his baptism. None of the Louisiana entries gives his age or the date of his marriage or death. Other men named Amand Gautreau appear in Louisiana registers of the same period, among them the husband of Anastasia Levron; they belonged to other households.