♂Antoine Babin

Antoine Babin (born about 1626) was an Acadian farmer at Port-Royal, the husband of Marie Mercier and the father of eleven children. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by six separate lines of descent, through five of his children.

Port-Royal

Born about 1626, Antoine Babin is thought to have come from La Chaussée, in what is now the department of Vienne in France. He is said to have married Marie Mercier about 1661. She was some twenty years younger, and by their ages in 1671 she was about sixteen when their eldest child, Marie, was born.

In 1671 he was a farmer of 45 with two arpents^W of land under the plow, six cattle and eight sheep, and five children, from Marie, aged nine, down to Marguerite, aged one. Fifteen years later the stock had grown to ten cattle, twelve sheep and eight hogs, though the land was put at only an arpent and a half, and the family owned a gun. Eight children were still at home, the youngest Jean, aged two. The three eldest, Marie, Charles and Jeanne, had married, by the compiled genealogies to François Rimbault, Madeleine Richard and Michel Richard, and kept households of their own; Catherine, then fourteen, presumably married Jean Comeau that same year. Between them the two censuses name all eleven of the couple’s children.

Death

He was not counted in the census of 1693, so he seems to have died after the 1686 count, at a place not recorded. Marie Mercier married again, in all likelihood after his death, to Guillaume Lejuge, a man about twenty years her junior. When she died is not known. In 1767, at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, where a group of exiled Acadians was then living, the widow of their grandson Claude Babin declared that Antoine and Marie had both died at Port-Royal.

Lines of descent

The six lines of descent run through five of his children: Charles, Catherine (twice), Vincent, Marguerite and Jean. Five come down the mother’s side, through Ida Serrette, and one, through Vincent, comes down the father’s side, through Jeffrey Delahorne. The nearest runs nine generations up, through Charles. The lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux both descend from him, and once more in Floyd himself, both of whose parents, Ida Serrette and Jeffrey Delahorne, descended from him. Two lines rest on compiled genealogies and a wedding’s witnesses: no surviving act names Marie Josèphe Comeau or Marie Comeau as Catherine’s daughters.

Notes

Records

The census entries are known from modern transcriptions of the rolls. His recorded age drifts, 45 in 1671 but 55 in 1686; Marie’s, 25 and 40, give a birth about 1646. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives his birth as 1626, matching the 1671 age, the marriage as 1661, and La Chaussée as his probable origin. The baptismal register of La Chaussée, which survives from June 1626, has no baptism of an Antoine Babin through November 1632. The spouses of the three eldest children and the date of Catherine’s marriage come from the compiled genealogies.

The second marriage

The 1693 census counts Marie as Guillaume Lejuge’s wife, but no record names her as Antoine’s widow; the identification is an inference. Against it, the 1767 declaration says that both died at Port-Royal and does not mention a second marriage.

His wife’s family

Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes makes Marie Mercier the daughter of Francoise Gaudet by a first marriage, about 1643, to a Mercier whose given name is unknown and who died before 1648, after which Francoise married Daniel LeBlanc. No register of the period survives; the argument rests on church dispensations^W for blood kinship between her descendants and those of Daniel LeBlanc and Francoise Gaudet. If Lanctôt is right, Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from both of Francoise Gaudet’s marriages, through Marie Mercier and through her LeBlanc half-siblings Jacques, Rene and Francoise. The 1767 declaration does not agree: it says Antoine came from France “avec sa femme Marie Mercier” (with his wife Marie Mercier).