♀Anne Babin

Anne Babin (born 1688) was an Acadian woman of the Minas Basin who married Clément Benoist about 1704 and raised their children at Pigiguit^W, in the years after France gave up the colony to Britain. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Alexis Benoit.

Early life

Anne is said to have been born in 1688, the eldest daughter of Charles Babin and Madeleine Richard, who had married about 1686, when he was 22 and she 15. By 1693 her parents had moved from Port-Royal to Grand-Pré, one of the new settlements of the Minas Basin, and that year Anne, aged five, was at home with her sister Marguerite, three, and her brother René, one.

Pigiguit

About 1704 Clément Benoist married Anne Babin, then about sixteen, and the couple made their home at Pigiguit, south of the Minas Basin. The census of 1707 counted their household at Les Mines with one boy and one girl. On 21 June 1709 their son Charles was born; he was baptized on 20 July, with Charles Babin and Marguerite Landry as his godparents, and the entry stands in the register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines.

France ceded the Acadian peninsula to Britain in 1713, and at the end of 1714 a general census of its settlements listed Clément, aged 37, and Anne on the river of Pigiguit with two sons and three daughters. Children were still being born to them in the early 1730s, when Anne was in her forties. Their son Alexis, through whom the family line descends, was probably one of the younger children.

Clément died before 23 June 1748. That day their daughter Brigitte died, aged about sixteen, and when she was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles, the register named her father as deceased.

The family

Their daughter Catherine married Michel Rivet at Pigiguit in 1741, as his second wife. The British later carried Michel and his whole family off to Maryland, where he and Catherine both died.

Notes

Sources

Anne’s birth year and parents rest on Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens: “ANNE BABIN, 1688, fille de Charles et de Madeleine Richard, épousa Clément Benoit, de Pisiguit, fils de Martin et de Marie Chaussegros”. No baptism is known. Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres gives the census entries: in 1686 “Charles Babin, 22 ans, fils d’Antoine, est marié a Madeleine Richard, 15 ans, fille de Michel Richard”; in 1693 the move to Grand-Pré, and Charles, 29, and Madeleine, 22, with René, 1, Anne, 5, and Marguerite, 3; and in 1714 “Clément Benoit, 37 ans, fils de Martin, marié a Anne Babin. Enfants : Deux garcons et trois filles, dont: Charles, 5 ans.” Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes prints the 1707 household count (“Clément Benoît et sa femme, 1 garçon de moins de 14 ans, 1 fille de moins de 12 ans”). Charles’s baptism (SGA-1, 8) and Brigitte’s burial (SGA-3, 50b) are those of the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, as abstracted by the Diocese of Baton Rouge. Catherine’s marriage and her death in Maryland come from the declaration her sister-in-law Marie-Rose Rivet, widow of René Landry, made at Bangor on Belle-Île-en-Mer on 22 February 1767, printed by Casgrain and Rameau in 1890, which calls her “Catherine Benoist, fille de Clément Benoist et d’Anne Babin”. The 1748 burial names Anne without calling her deceased; no record of her death is known.

Her parentage

Some online family trees make Alexis’s mother the Anne Babin born about 1674, a daughter of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier. Arsenault gives that Anne as the wife of Abraham Doiron, and Clément’s wife as the daughter of Charles Babin and Madeleine Richard; a daughter born about 1732 also fits a mother born in 1688, not one born in 1674.

Marriage and children

No marriage record survives. Arsenault has Clément marry Anne Babin about 1704, and Lanctôt dates the marriage to 1704 at Pigiguit; the census of 1707 is the first to show them married. Arsenault names three of their children, Charles (1709), Catherine (about 1712) and Brigitte (1732). Lanctôt identifies the 1714 household as Charles, 5, Catherine, 3, and Brigitte, a few weeks old, but Brigitte’s burial in 1748 at about sixteen fits Arsenault’s 1732.

Her son Alexis

Alexis is not on Arsenault’s list. Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (1999), as quoted in an online family tree, places him among the children of Clément and Anne Babin, “listed before a sibling born probably around 1722”, and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana cites the same page of White for Alexis and his wife, Hélène Comeau. No baptism of Alexis is known.