♀Anne Hébert

Anne Hébert was an Acadian woman of Petitcoudiac and the mother of Anne Saunier, who died in exile in Spanish Louisiana. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Saunier (1741–1772).

Life

Nothing is recorded of her birth. She was probably a daughter of Jean Hébert and Jeanne Doiron, who appear in the census of 1693 at Les Mines, the settlements of the Minas Basin, as a young couple with a baby son, in the entry just before the household of Louis Saulnier, where Jacques was then a boy of eight. About 1740 Jacques Saulnier, then a widower of about 55, married a second Anne Hébert. By the reckoning of the genealogist Stephen A. White, Jacques Saulnier’s two wives were two different women of the same name. Their daughter Anne Saunier was born about 1741. No parish register survives from Petitcoudiac for those years, and no other child of the marriage is known.

In 1767 Marguerite Dupuis, an Acadian exile at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, declared that her son Basile Babin had married at Halifax “Marie SOIGNIEV, daughter of Jacques and Anne HEBERT of Petkoudiak”, that is, Anne Saunier, and had “left for Mississippi with their family”. The records do not say when or where Anne died.

Notes

Her parents and the two Annes

The 1767 declaration, quoted from a published English translation of the Belle-Île-en-Mer declarations, names Anne Saunier’s mother only as Anne Hébert. Jacques Saulnier’s first wife, married about 1724, bore the same name, and the older genealogies of Bona Arsenault and Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau know only one wife. In his corrections to the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (2011), Stephen A. White separates them: two mitochondrial DNA tests on Anne Saunier’s female line rule out the first wife, a daughter of Jean Hébert and Marie-Anne Doucet, and match the line of Jeanne Hébert, wife of Augustin Guédry. He therefore makes Anne Saunier’s mother a second Anne Hébert, married about 1740, who “devait être la fille” (must have been the daughter) of Jean Hébert and Jeanne Doiron. No baptism, marriage or census entry of her own has survived to confirm it.

Arsenault lists five sons of Jean Hébert and Jeanne Doiron, Charles, Michel, Jean, Etienne and Paul, and no daughters. One of them, Charles, is said to have married about 1732 a Catherine Saulnier who was most likely Jacques’s sister, so the two families were already joined. The 1693 census entry reads “Jean HEBERT 33, Jeanne DOUERON his wife 18, Charles 8 months”.