♀Anne Bourgeois

Anne Bourgeois (about 1660 – 28 December 1747) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and Grand-Pré, a daughter of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan and the wife of Rene LeBlanc, who lived to about eighty-seven and died in 1747, eight years before the British deported the Acadians of Grand-Pré. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), by two separate lines of descent, through her sons Jacques LeBlanc (born about 1679) and Rene LeBlanc.

Life

She appears at ten in the Port-Royal census of 1671, one of the eight children at home in the household of Jacob Bourgeois, surgeon, and Jeanne Trahan. About 1678 she married Rene LeBlanc at Port-Royal, and the Port-Royal census of 1678 lists the couple there with no children yet. By 1686, aged 25, she had her own household with her husband Rene LeBlanc, and on the same roll her younger sister Marie appears as the wife of an Antoine LeBlanc; an Antoine was among Rene’s brothers in their father’s household in 1671. In 1693, at Les Mines^W, Anne, aged 30, and Rene had seven children at home, including twin sons.

The census of 1701 lists the household at Grand-Pré, with her husband Rene LeBlanc, seven sons and two daughters, ten arpents of land and eighteen cattle. The censuses of 1703 and 1707 list the couple at Les Mines. She and Rene are named as the parents of the groom, “habitants de la Grand Prée”, when their son Rene married Elisabeth Melancon at Grand-Pré on 30 July 1709.

She outlived her husband. The register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines records the burial of “Anne Bourgeois, age ca 87, widow of Rene Leblanc” on 29 December 1747, the day after her death, in the parish cemetery; Jacques and François LeBlanc were among the witnesses.

Lines of descent

One line runs through Rene LeBlanc the younger, who married Elisabeth Melancon in 1709, and Desire LeBlanc (born about 1717), to Floyd Amatus Delahorne’s father, Jeffrey Delahorne; a compiled genealogy (White’s dictionary, quoted online) and a 1736 godparent entry make Desire LeBlanc their son. A second runs through Jacques LeBlanc, another brother, who married Catherine Landry, and their daughter Marie Josèphe LeBlanc, who married Charles Gautrot at Grand-Pré in 1725; it continues through their son Amand Godreau (born 1732) to Ida Serrette’s father, Pierre Anatole Serrett. That this Jacques, the husband of Catherine Landry, was a son of Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois rests on a 1767 declaration made at Belle-Île-en-Mer rather than on an act; the censuses of 1686 and 1693 show a son Jacques at home. The two lines meet only in Floyd himself, whose father descends from Anne Bourgeois and Rene LeBlanc by the first and whose mother, Ida Serrette, by the second.

Notes

Her parentage rests on the censuses rather than an act: she is the only Anne Bourgeois on the 1671 roll, and her ages agree with it through her burial.

Marriage and the later rolls

The marriage year of about 1678 comes from the Port-Royal census of 1678 (Duchesneau’s roll, as translated in Casgrain and Rameau’s Collection de documents inédits), which lists “Renee Le Blanc & Anne Bourgeois” with no children and no stock, beside her parents Jacob Bourgeois (written Jacques on that roll) and Jeanne Trahan. The marriage at Port-Royal is given by a 1767 declaration; a compiled genealogy (White’s dictionary, quoted online) also gives 1678. The rolls of 1701, 1703 and 1707 list the couple at Grand-Pré and at Les Mines; two transcriptions of the 1703 roll count the children differently, and the 1707 children rest on one transcription, so no counts are given for those years.