♀Anne Landry

Anne Landry (born about 1732) was an Acadian who married the widower René Landry in Spanish Louisiana and raised children of three marriages at Ascension, until his estate papers of 1781 described her as having lost her reason. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Valentin Landry.

Acadia and exile

She was born about 1732, probably at Pisiguit^W in Acadia, and is said to have been a daughter of Abraham dit Chaques Landry and Marie-Isabelle Blanchard. Her first husband is thought to have been Jean Broussard, and with him she was most likely exiled to Maryland in 1755. She is reckoned to have reached Louisiana in 1766 a widow, pregnant, with young Broussard sons.

Louisiana

Around 1768, presumably at Cabanocé, she married René Landry, a widower of Marie Thériot. In September 1769 they held lot 140 on the east bank at Cabanocé, Anne aged 37, with two of René’s sons; by August 1770 they were on the east bank at Ascension, on 12 arpents^W of land, six of them fallow, with four of his sons and two of hers.

Her own Landry children followed: Valentin, baptized at St. James on 15 January 1771, Pierre Baptiste, at Ascension on 7 February 1773, and a daughter, Apollonia. In April 1777 the Ascension census listed René, 62, and Anne, 44, with their sons Valentin and Baptiste, an infant daughter, two of his sons by Marie, Jean Broussard, 16, Anne’s son by her first marriage, and René’s older brother Joseph Landry, 67; the household held 6 arpents and three enslaved people, whose names the abstract does not give.

Widowhood

René was buried at Ascension on 3 June 1781. Anne had been guardian (tutrice) of the children, but the inventory of his estate on 7 and 8 June and the sale of all his movables from 17 June were both at the request of the guardians of the minor children of his first and second marriages. A published abstract of the parish’s civil records gives the reason: she had since “fallen entirely into madeness and has lost use of her good sense”.

As at her sons’ baptisms, she is named with René at the marriages of Valentin at St. James in 1792, Pierre Baptiste in 1797 and Apollonia in 1799, and at the baptism of her grandson Adelard in 1800. A compiled Louisiana record places her death before 7 April 1823, the day her son Valentin married; that day’s marriage entry calls her deceased.

Notes

Her early life

Her birthplace, her parents, her first marriage, the exile and the 1766 arrival come from Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis. It makes Jean Broussard a son of Claude Broussard and Anne Babin of Sainte-Famille, Pisiguit, places Anne at Port Tobacco, Maryland, in July 1763, and dates her second marriage to the late 1760s, and places it, perhaps, at Cabanocé. One passage of the same work calls her first husband Joseph Broussard, says she came with two sons aged 14 and 6, and has a son born at New Orleans the following November. No record names her parents.

Her age

A published transcript of the 1769 census gives her age as 37, which puts her birth about 1732; the census abstracts give 38 in 1770 and 44 in 1777.

The censuses and the estate

The census entries are known from Cormier’s abstracts. In Anne’s entry he calls Joseph Landry the husband’s “uncle”, and in René’s he corrects this to René’s “older brother”; this account follows the correction. The estate abstract is Eileen Larré Behrman’s Ascension Parish, Louisiana, Civil Records 1770-1804, page 21, a published secondary work, known only through a quotation of it in an online family tree.

Name

The registers give her as Anne or Ana Landry, a Landry who married a Landry, as was common among the Acadian families.

Her death

The date rests on Rev. Donald J. Hebert’s compiled Southwest Louisiana Records, which gives the marriage of Valentin Landry on 7 April 1823 as calling his mother deceased. A burial at Ascension on 28 November 1816 of an “Anna, age 78, widow Landry” is not assigned to her.