♀Anne Babin

Anne Babin (died before 5 February 1777) was an Acadian woman of the parish of Holy Family at Pisiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, who married Jean-Baptiste Landry, had seven known children with him and was driven into exile with her family by the expulsion of 1755. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Josephe Landry (born about 1737).

Pisiguit

Anne was probably a daughter of Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot, and is said to have been called Nanette, a familiar form of Anne. She is believed to have married Jean-Baptiste Landry about 1731, and the couple made their home in the parish of Holy Family (Sainte-Famille) at Pisiguit: when their daughter Marie-Madeleine married in Louisiana in 1769, the register called her a native of “Holy Family Parish, Acadia”. The couple had seven known children, born between about 1737 and about 1754.

Exile

In the fall of 1755, when the British expelled the Acadians of the Minas Basin, the family was most likely among those shipped to Maryland. Anne seems to have died in those first years of exile: when colonial officials counted the Acadians at Oxford, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in July 1763, Jean-Baptiste was there as a widower with their children.

In 1767 Jean-Baptiste took five of the children on to Spanish Louisiana and settled with them at St. Gabriel, on the Mississippi; their elder son, Hyacinthe, came too, with a wife of his own. Their daughter Marie Josephe, through whom the line descends, had married Joseph Braux, and she came to Louisiana with her own family early in 1768. The entries for the weddings of three daughters in Louisiana, in 1769, 1770 and 1777, name Jean-Baptiste Landry and Anne Babin as the bride’s parents; the entry of 1770, for Marie-Rose’s marriage to Simon Richard, calls them “Acadians, res. of Post Manchac”. By the last of these weddings, Marie-Perpétue’s to Michel Breaux at St. James, downriver from St. Gabriel, on 5 February 1777, both parents were dead.

Notes

Parentage

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, names her “Anne dite Nanette, daughter of Jean BABIN & Marguerite BOUDREAUX” and dates her marriage about 1731. Online family trees give the same parents, citing Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, and one gives her birth as about 1713. Bona Arsenault’s list of the children of Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot, in his Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, names only Marguerite (1708), Germain (1711) and Marie (about 1720), and does not include her. No record of her baptism or her marriage survives: the registers of Pisiguit are lost, and the Grand-Pré register, which records the baptisms of Marguerite and Germain, has neither.

Records

The deportation of 1755 and the counts of the Acadians at Oxford in 1763 and of the settlers of St. Gabriel in 1767 are known from Cormier’s abstracts of the contemporary lists, and the arrival of Marie Josephe’s family in 1768 from a Spanish report that Cormier summarizes. The three weddings are known from the published abstracts of the registers (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vols. 1b and 2).

Her death

Her death is dated only by the entry of 5 February 1777 for Marie-Perpétue’s marriage, which names the bride’s parents as “Jean Baptiste & Anne Babin, both decd.” Cormier’s abstract of the Oxford count of 1763 lists “wife Anne” in his entry for Jean-Baptiste, but his entries for the children place them there “with widowed father”, and he takes the Anne of the list to be the youngest daughter, Marie-Perpétue. The Spanish report of 1767 calls Jean-Baptiste a widower. An online family tree gives her death as 1763.

Her daughter Marie Josephe

Marie Josephe is not among the children counted with Jean-Baptiste in 1763 or 1767, and Cormier gives her no parents. She is placed in this family by the dispensation^W of January 1796 for the marriage of her son Carlos Braud, written Carlos Brand, to Rosalia Landry. The calendar of the Archives of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas, at the University of Notre Dame, summarizes the Spanish file: “That Maria Joseph Landry, Carlos’ mother, is the legitimate daughter of Juan Landry and Ana Baben.” Juan and Ana are the Spanish forms of Jean and Anne, and the Spanish report of 1767 names Jean-Baptiste as Juan Baptista Landri. An online family tree places her in the same family.