♀Anne Doucet

Anne Doucet (born about 1661) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and later of Les Mines, the eldest daughter of the mason Pierre Doucet and the wife of Jean Hébert. She was a mother by the age of about sixteen, and by the census of 1693 seven children were living in her household. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Hébert.

Early life

Anne was the eldest child of Henriette Pelletret and her husband, Pierre Doucet, a mason at Port-Royal. At the census of 1671 she was ten, the eldest of five children in a household that kept seven cattle and six sheep on four arpents^W of land.

Marriage and family

Anne Doucet and Jean Hébert married, probably at Port-Royal, about 1676. In both 1678 and 1686 the census-takers wrote the young couple’s household beside those of Antoine Hébert and of Jacques LeBlanc and his wife, Catherine Hébert, most likely Jean’s parents and sister. In 1678 Jean and Anne, written “Marye Doucet”, had a son of one year, twenty cattle and ten acres of land.

In 1686 Jean was thirty-two and Anne twenty-two, with five children: Jacques, nine, Pierre, seven, Jean, five, Jeanne, three, and Joseph, two months. The census of 1693 lists seven children, Jean, Matieu, Jacques, Pierre, Genevieve, Anne and Christophe, but neither Jeanne nor Joseph, and the two lists do not agree on the children’s names and ages. The couple are said to have had fourteen children in all, eight sons and six daughters, born between 1677 and the early 1700s.

Joseph, said to have been born at Port-Royal in November 1685, was most likely the Joseph Hébert who married Anne Boudrot and farmed at Beaubassin^W, and the line descends through him.

Les Mines

In 1693 the census counted the family at Les Mines, the settlement on the Minas Basin, with twelve cattle, twelve sheep, six hogs, eleven arpents and a gun. The family most likely moved there in the early 1690s and is said to have settled at Grand-Pré.

Death

The compiled genealogies agree that one of the couple died at Grand-Pré in November 1710 but not on which: one gives the burial, on 3 November, to Jean, the other gives the death to Anne and has Jean dead about 1707.

Notes

Birth and ages

Her ages in the censuses, ten in 1671 and thirty-two in 1693, put her birth about 1661, the year Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives; the twenty-two of 1686 would put it about 1664. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled Acadian genealogy calls her Marie-Anne, and the roll of 1678 writes her “Marye Doucet”.

Marriage and children

The marriage about 1676 is the reckoning of Arsenault and Cormier; no record of it survives, because the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. The son of one year in 1678 fits Jacques, whom Arsenault places in 1677. Arsenault lists the children as Jacques, 1677; Pierre, 1679; Jean, 1681; Jeanne, 1683; Joseph, 1686; René, 1688; Christophe, 1689; Augustin, 1691; and Madeleine, 1694. Cormier counts fourteen, eight sons and six daughters, born between 1677 and the early 1700s, and the birth of Joseph in November 1685 is his.

The two censuses cannot both be complete as they stand: the eldest child in 1686 was Jacques, nine, yet the list of 1693 opens with Jean, fifteen, and Matieu, thirteen, both older than the Jacques, eleven, and Pierre, nine, who follow them, and it leaves out Jeanne and Joseph. Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres prints the 1686 household with a Mathieu, four, as well.

The census of 1693

The household is placed at Les Mines in 1693, the census listing it under “A list of the inhabitants of Mines”. Cormier has the family counted at Minas in the early 1690s, and Arsenault writes that Jean “s’est établi a Grand-Pré”.

Joseph Hébert

The census of 1686 lists a Joseph, two months old, in the household, and the list of 1693 does not. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens has Joseph, born in 1686 and “fils de Jean et d’Anne Doucet”, settling at Beaubassin, and names him in the same work as the husband of Anne Boudrot; Cormier has him born at Port-Royal in November 1685 and married to Anne-Marie Boudrot about 1707. The compilers do not agree on her parents, and another passage of Arsenault gives Joseph a first wife. No act names the Beaubassin Joseph Hébert’s parents, so the link is probable, not proved.

Death

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 3, page 1183) says of Jean, “Il fut inhumé a Saint-Charles-des-Mines, le 3 novembre 1710”. Cormier has Jean dying probably at Minas about 1707, in his fifties, and Anne dying at Grand-Pré in November 1710.