♀Catherine Hébert

Catherine Hébert (born about 1656) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and later of Les Mines, the wife of Jacques LeBlanc and the mother of a large family. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Cécile LeBlanc (buried 1731), by three separate lines of descent.

Life

No record of her baptism or marriage survives, because the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. She was most likely the daughter of Antoine Hébert and Geneviève Lefranc. The 1671 census, as transcribed, lists Antoine, a cooper, and Geneviève at Port-Royal with a daughter Catherine aged fifteen. No record names her parents, and another compiled genealogy makes her the daughter of Étienne Hébert instead; the reasons are in the notes.

The census of 1686, as transcribed, lists the household at Port-Royal as “Jacques LEBLANC 35, Catherine HEBERT 23” with nine children, from Jean, twelve, to Rene, one month old; among them was Catherine, three. By 1693 the family had moved to Les Mines, where the census, again as transcribed, lists “Jacques LEBLANC 42, Caterine HEBERT his wife 32” with ten children, from Jean, nineteen, to Ignace, one, and Catherine now eleven.

Four of their children married at Grand-Pré, and the register abstracts name Jacques and Catherine as the parents each time: Magdeleine on 12 October 1711 to Michel Hache, whose parents lived in the parish of Beaubassin^W; François on 19 September 1712 to Marguerite Boudrot; Bernard on 7 February 1714 to Marie Bourg, when his parents were described as inhabitants of Les Mines; and Pierre on 15 November 1718 to Marie Landry. The abstracts write Catherine’s surname as Hubert in some entries and Hebert in others. Among the witnesses at Magdeleine’s wedding were a Jacques Leblanc, who made his mark, and a Pierre Cormier.

Another daughter, Cécile, married Michel Boudrot and was buried at Grand-Pré on 26 May 1731, aged about 45; her burial entry names her father as Jacques Leblanc. Her brother Bernard stood godfather to her daughter Françoise in January 1712.

The compiled history says that the couple had thirteen children and that three of their daughters married Cormier brothers from Chignecto: Marguerite married François Cormier, Marie married Alexis Cormier, and Catherine married Pierre Cormier.

Lines of descent

Catherine is an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne by three separate lines, all on his mother’s side. The nearest is eight generations up, through her daughter Cécile LeBlanc, who married Michel Boudrot, and her daughter Marguerite Boudrot. The other two are ten generations up: one through her daughter Catherine Leblanc and Pierre Cormier’s son Pierre Cormier, and down the Cormier family; the other again through Cécile LeBlanc, by way of her daughter Anne Boudrot. The lines meet again in Floyd’s mother, Ida Serrette, whose parents Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle both descend from Catherine, and in Amelia Pennison Daigle, whose parents Melia Thibodeaux and Jean Baptiste Daigle both descend from her.

Notes

Parentage

No record names her parents, so the identification is probable, not proved. Cormier’s compiled Acadian genealogy gives her as the daughter of Antoine Hébert and Geneviève Lefranc, and a FamilySearch tree gives the same couple. In the 1671 census, as transcribed, the couple’s Port-Royal household lists a Catherine aged fifteen. That age fits her eldest children: in 1686 Jean was twelve and Marguerite eleven, so their mother must have been born by about 1656. Antoine and Geneviève are listed in the 1686 census two households after Jacques LeBlanc, and in the 1678 roll the LeBlanc couple is written straight after them; adjacency in the rolls proves nothing on its own.

The other identification is Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres, which calls her “fille d’Etienne Hébert”, although his Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 2, page 600, and volume 3, page 1216) names Antoine Hébert as her father. The 1671 census of Étienne Hébert’s widow, Marie Gaudet, lists a Catherine aged nine, and the compiled sources assign that Catherine to Philippe Pinet, whose wife is listed in 1686 and 1693 as Catherine Hébert, aged 24 and 32. The census ages cannot separate the two women. Against Antoine’s daughter stand this Catherine’s own ages in the rolls, 23 in 1686 and 32 in 1693, which would put her birth about 1661 to 1663, too late for a son who was twelve in 1686.

No act in the Saint-Charles-des-Mines registers names her parents; the Grand-Pré marriages of her children name Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert as the parents. Her daughter Catherine’s place in the family rests on the compiled history and on the censuses, which list a Catherine of the right age in her household; no act names her parents. Her daughter Cécile’s place rests on her burial entry, on the elimination of the other men named Jacques LeBlanc, and on Bernard’s standing godfather; neither the 1686 nor the 1693 census lists a Cécile in the household, and the burial does not name the mother, so Catherine is the most likely mother.