♂Anselme Blanchard

Anselme Blanchard (18 May 1741 – 25 November 1799) was an Acadian exile who became a militia captain, settlement commissioner and district commandant in Spanish Louisiana. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Ozite Barbe Blanchard (1764–1799).

Early life and exile

He was born and baptised on 18 May 1741 at Grand-Pré, in the Minas district of Acadia, the son of René Blanchard and Marguerite Thériot. The baptism is the only one for a man of his name in the surviving Grand-Pré registers, and his godparents were Antoine and Claire Leblanc. His father’s family descended from Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, among the earliest settlers of Port-Royal, through two separate lines.

The deportation of the Acadians carried the family to Maryland. A return of the Acadians held there, made in July 1763 for the French ambassador in London, lists him at Baltimore as a household of two, himself and his wife Esther Leblanc. His parents were listed with a daughter in the household just above.

Louisiana

The couple reached Spanish Louisiana with the Maryland exiles and settled at St. Gabriel, on the Mississippi in what became Iberville Parish. On Governor Ulloa’s roll of July 1767 he appears, aged 26, as head of a household with Esther, two small children, and an orphan girl of ten; the roll does not say whose child she was. His parents are on the same roll. A modern study of the Acadian settlements names him among the pioneer families of St. Gabriel, and a tract of thirteen arpents fronting the river there was later recorded as originally granted to him by the Spanish government. An infant son, Louis, was buried at Ascension in 1779.

He rose in the colonial administration. The registers call him commandant of Valenzuela, the Acadian settlement on Bayou Lafourche, in 1784. In 1785 Governor Navarro chose him to settle the Acadian exiles whom Spain was bringing from France, with a pension of 500 pesos, and he placed families on Bayou des Écores, near Thompson’s Creek. Church records of 1788 and 1790 call him commander there and “Don Anselmo Blanchard, Captain of the Militia of Bayou DeEscours”. In 1792 he was captain of the Third Company of the New Feliciana militia, and a biographical dictionary of Louisiana records him as commandant of the district from 1794. He stood godfather to many children of the district, Acadian and English-speaking alike, and witnessed their marriages.

The 1793 census of New Feliciana lists him among the older men of the district, with twenty-nine enslaved people in his household: sixteen men and boys and thirteen women and girls, counted by age group and not named.

Death and estate

A cemetery card for St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans records the death of “Don Anselmo Blanchard”, husband of Esther Leblanc and son of René Blanchard and Marguerite Thériot, on 25 November 1799, aged 64. It is the only record found that names his parents. His estate was divided under the Spanish government. His son Jerome Blanchard had died by then, and a curator appointed for Jerome’s three young children received their share of “the succession of the late Sieur Anselme Blanchard, their grandfather”. The couple had at least four children: Ozite Barbe, born at Baltimore about 1764; Jerome, born about 1766; Antoine; and the infant Louis.

Notes

The cemetery card’s age of 64 would place his birth about 1735, against the Grand-Pré baptism of 1741 and his age of 26 in 1767. The baptism is preferred. The biographical dictionary gives a different death, on 1 April 1800, with burial near Thompson’s Creek, and gives his birthplace as France; the New Orleans card, which names his wife and parents, is followed here. The records of his estate have not been read.