♀Anne Josèphe Thériot

Anne Josèphe Thériot (born about 1749) was an Acadian exile, born in Acadia and deported from Île Saint-Jean^W in 1758, in the Expulsion of the Acadians; four of her siblings died that year. She married three times. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Anne Landry (born 1768).

Île Saint-Jean

Anne was one of eleven children of François Thériot, a plowman, and Françoise Guérin, both natives of Acadia. The family had moved to Île Saint-Jean about August 1751, and a government census taken there in April 1752 found them at Baye de Mordienne with seven oxen, nine cows, eleven sheep, a mare, three pigs and four fowls, though they had “not made an inch of clearing” on their new land. Anne, aged four, was the second youngest of the eleven children listed with her parents; the others were Marie, Marguerite, Pierre, Madeleine, Isabelle, Perpetue, Theodose, Cyrille, Gertrude and Joseph, the last aged two.

Deportation and loss

When the British deported the family from Île Saint-Jean in 1758^W, François Thériot died at sea on the crossing to France, according to Stephen A. White’s dictionary of the Acadian families, as quoted on a published family tree; the same source lists four other children, Isabelle, Perpetue, Joseph and Jean-Baptiste, as dying in 1758. Françoise Guérin brought Anne and five other children into Saint-Malo on 1 November 1758 aboard Le Duc Guillaume; an arrival record describes the widow, then about forty-two, as “without profession, ill,” admitted to hospital on 4 November and discharged a month later.

The General Roll of 1762 for the parish of Saint-Malo lists Anne, aged thirteen, under the heading of the Duc Guillaume, as the daughter of Françoise Guérin, widow of François Thériot. The family settled at Saint-Servan, where a 1772 roll of Acadian exiles still found Françoise, then sixty-two, spinning for a living alongside two of her grown children.

Three marriages

Anne married Pierre Landry, himself a minor whose father had died, at Saint-Servan on 1 June 1767; the register named her as a native of Acadia and the daughter of the late François Thériot and Françoise Guérin. Their daughter Marie Anne was born the next year. Pierre was dead by September 1772, when a roll of Acadian families named Anne, aged twenty-three, as his widow, a seamstress and spinner living at Saint-Malo.

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Anne remarried in 1776 to Joseph Granger the younger, himself a widower, and crossed to Louisiana as his widow in 1785, sailing on La Ville d’Archangel with her daughter Marie Anne and five Granger children; the Spanish authorities issued the household a hatchet, knives, axes, hoes and shovels on landing. Her third marriage took place at Pointe Coupée on 16 May 1790, to Antoine Barbero, son of Joseph Barbero and Antoinette Margano of Messina, Italy — an Acadian exile’s widow married, in Spanish Louisiana, to an immigrant from Sicily. The act calls her an Acadian and the widow of Joseph Grandjait (Granger); Cormier’s compilation gives Bayou des Écores or Baton Rouge as the place.

Burial

Anne was buried at Baton Rouge on 12 February 1808. The St. Joseph register there names her as “Anna”, wife of “Anthonio Barber”, a spelling that most likely stands for Antoine Barbero, whom she had married in 1790. The entry gives her age as fifty-six, out of line with her earlier ages.

Notes

Cormier’s compilation gives her death as 12 February 1808 at Baton Rouge, aged fifty-six, and the Diocese of Baton Rouge register for 1804 to 1818 records a burial on that date, on printed page 764. Her birth year is given as both about 1748, from her age on the 1752 census, and about 1749, from her age on the 1772 roll; the two are a year apart, as is usual for ages given from memory, and this page follows the 1772 figure. The burial age of fifty-six points to about 1752 and is the outlier among her ages (four in 1752, thirteen on the 1762 roll, twenty-three in 1772). Her own mother, Françoise Guérin, sailed to Louisiana on the same ship in 1785, as a separate household two families behind Anne’s.

The 1790 marriage and the burial name

The Pointe Coupée act of 16 May 1790, printed in the Diocese of Baton Rouge volume 2 (pages 63 and 763), names the husband as Antoine Barbero of Messina, son of Joseph Barbero and Antoinette Margano, and the bride as an Acadian, widow of Joseph Grandjait. It places the marriage at Pointe Coupée; Cormier’s compilation gives Bayou des Écores or Baton Rouge. The burial entry gives the husband’s name as “Anthonio Barber”. That name is the only link between the burial and the 1790 marriage, which is why the body says “most likely”.