♀Anne-Marie Thibodeau

Anne-Marie Thibodeau (born about 1665) was an Acadian woman, a daughter of the Port-Royal miller Pierre Thibodeau and Jeanne Thériot, who was newly married in the young settlement of Les Mines^W on the Minas Basin when the census-taker reached it in January 1686, and who raised nine children there with her husband Claude Boudrot. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Michel Boudrot.

Port-Royal

Anne-Marie Thibodeau was born at Port-Royal about 1665, into the large family of Pierre Thibodeau, a farmer and miller on the upper river of Port-Royal, and Jeanne Thériot. When the census of 1671 was taken there, she was six years old, one of the young children in her parents’ household.

Les Mines

In the early 1680s young men from Port-Royal began to dike and drain the salt marshes of the Minas Basin, and her husband, Claude Boudrot, was probably one of the first of them. By January 1686, when the census-taker reached the Minas Basin, Claude and Anne-Marie Thibodeau were entered there, as transcribed, as “jeunes mariés”, newly married, aged twenty-three and twenty, with no children yet. Her sister Catherine Thibodeau and Catherine’s husband, Claude Landry, were most likely their neighbors. The couple are said to have farmed on the river later called the Rivière-des-Habitants, a few miles north-west of Grand-Pré.

In 1693 the couple had five children in the house, Claude, 10, Michel, 8, Jacques, 6, Françoise, 3, and Magdelaine, 1, with eight arpents^W of land in use and a gun; the census-taker wrote her name as Anne Marie Tibaudeau. By 1700 the household counted three sons and six daughters.

Claude and Anne-Marie had at least nine children, born between the mid-1680s and about 1698. Their son Michel was most likely the Michel Boudrot who married Cécile LeBlanc and raised a large family at Grand-Pré, and it is through him that the family’s line descends.

Death

Anne-Marie most likely died about 1700, soon after the census of that year, in her middle thirties. She had died by the summer of 1712: when their son Joseph married Françoise Comeau at Grand-Pré on 27 July that year, the parish register named his mother as dead, and it did so again on 19 September 1712, when two of her daughters, Anne and Marguerite, were married in the same parish on the same day.

Lines of descent

Anne-Marie Thibodeau reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines, both through her son Michel Boudrot and both on Floyd’s mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). On the nearer, through Michel’s daughter Marguerite Boudrot, she is Floyd’s sixth great-grandmother; on the farther she is his eighth great-grandmother. The lines meet again in Ida’s parents, Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), who both descend from her.

Notes

Her age

The census of 1671 gives her six years, which places her birth about 1665; Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens also gives 1665. The transcribed ages of the Minas censuses drift: twenty in January 1686, twenty-four in 1693, and thirty-five in 1700. Léopold Lanctôt, in his compiled Familles acadiennes, remarks of the 1693 entry that she made herself four years younger.

Two daughters named Anne-Marie

Her parents had a younger daughter also called Anne-Marie, born about 1682. The Port-Royal census of 1686 lists both among the children at home: an Anne Marie aged 17 (16 in one transcription) and an Anne Marie aged 4. The elder fits her age, although the census of Les Mines taken the same year already counts her as Claude Boudrot’s wife, so she may have been entered in both places.

The settlement of Les Mines

That Claude Boudrot was among the first settlers of Les Mines rests on the compiled genealogies of Lanctôt and Arsenault. Lanctôt (Familles acadiennes, volume 1, pages 73–76) places the couple on the Rivière-aux-Vieux-Habitants, about seven kilometres north-west of Grand-Pré, and names Claude Landry and Catherine-Marie Thibodeau, with twins a year old, as their neighbors in 1686. The census entries of 1686 and 1700 are quoted from Lanctôt’s transcriptions; the entry of 1693 agrees with the surviving copy of that year’s roll.

Her son Michel

No record names the parents of the Michel Boudrot who married Cécile LeBlanc. The link rests on the households of 1693 and 1700, which include a son Michel of the right age, and on the compiled genealogies of Arsenault and Lanctôt, which make him the son of Claude and Anne-Marie.

Her death

The Grand-Pré marriage records of July and September 1712 describe Anne-Marie Thibodeau as dead; an index of them gives her as “decd. Anne Marie Tibaudo”. Lanctôt places her death about 1700, shortly after the census of that year, which still lists her, and has Claude marry again about 1702. No date or place of her death is known.