♀Anne Richard

Anne Richard (born 1671) was an Acadian settler of Port-Royal and Grand-Pré. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Thériot (born 1709).

Early life

Anne was born in 1671 at Port-Royal, Acadie, a daughter of Michel Richard and Madeleine Blanchard. The Port-Royal census of 1671 lists her at the age of five weeks, a twin with Magdeleine.

Marriage and family

Anne married Germain Thériot, a son of Claude Thériot and Marie Gautrot, evidently in the mid-1680s; no marriage register survives for the couple, since it predates the earliest Grand-Pré register still on the shelf, which opens in August 1707. By 1709 the family was established at Grand-Pré, where a daughter, Marguerite, was born and baptized on 8 June of that year. The Grand-Pré register records a second daughter, Marie, who married Paul Melançon, son of Sieur Pierre Melanson and Marguerite Mius, on 8 November 1712, in a double wedding with René Landry and Marie Magdeleine Melanson.

The census counted the household at Les Mines in 1693, with the children Claude, Jean and Jacques, and again in 1703, 1707 and 1714. Their son Jacques married Marie LeBlanc at Grand-Pré on 2 October 1713; the register describes the groom’s parents as settlers of Grand-Pré. Jacques, left a widower, married Marie Robichaux at Port-Royal on 3 June 1726, and on 11 March 1727 Anne stood godmother at Grand-Pré, with Claude Thériot, to their daughter Marguerite.

Marguerite married René Blanchard, fils, son of René Blanchard and Anne Landry, at Grand-Pré in July 1726, at the age of seventeen. Germain signed the register as a witness to this wedding; it is the last record found of him. The Grand-Pré register records Anne’s burial on 10 May 1745, aged 75, as the wife of Germain Thériot. Marguerite’s own household was exiled to Maryland in 1755 and did not reach Louisiana until 1767, when the family was counted among the Acadians who settled at St. Gabriel.

Notes

The Grand-Pré register writes her husband’s name as Germain Terriot; no death or burial record has been found for him. This Anne, married to a Germain Thériot aged about twenty-three in the 1686 Port-Royal census, is distinct from a different Anne Richard who later married Joseph Granger; the two are separated by their husbands, not by the name “Anne Richard” alone. Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians of Louisiana names Paul Melançon’s parents as Jean Melançon and Marguerite Dugas; the register names Pierre and Marguerite Mius, and the register is followed here. Cormier’s compilation also gives Marguerite’s marriage date as both 9 July and 27 July 1726, and records her in the 1763 Baltimore list of exiled Acadians under the surname “Thevreaux.”

The 1693 census gives Anne’s age as 20, a few years more than the 1671 birth would give (22); the 1686 Port-Royal roll gives her 15. The 1707 census transcriptions disagree on the children, and WikiTree’s reading of the 1714 census gives three daughters where the census shows two. A list of the Mines pioneers by Brun places the couple at Grand-Pré in 1693; the census is followed here. The marriage date of about 1685 is a compiled one, from Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 3, page 1293) and Beliveau’s dictionary, which gives about 1685 as well; no act survives. The 1727 godmother entry names her as Anne Richart, wife of Germain Terriot.