♀Catherine Leblanc

Catherine Leblanc (born about 1683) was an Acadian woman, raised at Port-Royal and Minas, who married Pierre Cormier and kept house with him at Chignecto. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Cormier.

Early life

Catherine was probably born at Port-Royal, where her family was living in 1686. The censuses of Acadia list a Catherine, aged 3, in the household of Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert at Port-Royal in 1686, and a Catherine aged 11 in the same family at Minas in 1693. A compiled history of the Louisiana Acadians names Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert of Minas as her parents, and says that three of their daughters married Cormier brothers from Chignecto. A published abstract of the Grand-Pré register ties the two families together as well: when Magdeleine Leblanc, a daughter of Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert, married Michel Haché, whose parents lived in the parish of Beaubassin^W, on 12 October 1711, a Pierre Cormier was among the witnesses.

Marriage and family

The compiled history gives her marriage to Pierre Cormier about 1702. The censuses show “Pierre Cormier and his wife” at Chignecto in 1703, name Catherine Leblanc with him in 1707 with two boys under fourteen, and in 1714 list her as his wife with six children: Pierre, Marie, Jean-Baptiste, Madeleine, Michel and Catherine. The compiled history counts eleven children in all.

Her husband had died by 17 July 1730, when their son Pierre married Cécile Thibodeau at Grand-Pré and the register named the groom’s parents as the late Pierre Cormier and Catherine Leblanc.

Death

The 1734 marriage of her daughter Marguerite to Jean Sire, at Beaubassin on 26 January, names the bride’s father, Pierre Cormier, as already dead but does not say the same of Catherine, so she was probably still living then.

She had died before 14 November 1740. On that day at Beaubassin her daughter Anne Cormier, aged 25, married Antoine Landry, a son of Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines. The register names the bride as the daughter of the late Pierre Cormier and the late Catherine Leblanc, and the bride’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Cormier, was among the witnesses.

Notes

No act names her parents. The identification rests on the census households, on the compiled history, and on the Pierre Cormier who witnessed the 1711 wedding. The 1686, 1707 and 1714 census entries come from the original census rolls, known here through a later official copy held by Library and Archives Canada, not from a published transcription; the 1693 Minas entry still rests on a published transcription. The 1707 entry gives the household 6 arpents, 9 cattle, 10 sheep and 8 hogs; the 1714 list gives no ages. The death dates rest on the Beaubassin marriage entries of 1734 and 1740, in the register copy held by Library and Archives Canada; the 1734 point is an inference from the wording of that entry, not a statement that she was living.