♀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 eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son 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. By 1686, aged 25, she was married to 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 Anne and Rene had seven children at home, including twin sons.

The family later lived at Grand-Pré, and she and Rene are named as the parents of the groom, “habitants de la Grand Prée”, when their son Rene married Elisabeth Melancon there 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.

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.