♀Catherine Thériot

Catherine Thériot (born about 1654) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of Pierre Guilbeau and the mother of at least seven children. She was one of four children of Jehan Thériot and Perrine Rau from whom Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends; her brothers Claude and Germain and her sister Jeanne are also his ancestors. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines of descent, through three of her children.

Family

No baptism survives for Catherine: the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost, and her parentage rests on the first nominal census of Acadia, taken in 1671. The roll itself lists Jehan Terriau, a farmer of seventy, and his wife Perrine Rau, sixty, with their married children Claude, Jehan, Bonaventure, Germain, Jeanne and “Catherinne aagée de vingt et un ans”, and their unmarried son Pierre, sixteen. A few households further on, the same roll records Pierre Guillebau, a farmer of thirty-two, “sa femme Catherinne Terriau aagée de 20 ans”, and their daughter Marguerite, two, with six head of cattle, five sheep and fifteen arpents^W under the plow. She is the only married Catherine Terriau on the roll.

Port-Royal

Catherine and Pierre stayed at Port-Royal. In the census of 1686, as transcribed, Pierre is forty-seven and Catherine thirty-three, with seven children: Marguerite, Jeanne, Hugues, Isabelle, Charles, Marie and a second Jeanne, an infant. The transcribed census of 1693 has Hugues, Charles, Marie and Jeanne still at home. On the roll of 1700 Pierre is sixty-one and Catherine forty-six, living with Charles, Marie and Jeanne. Their daughter Marie is taken to be the Marie Guilbeau who later married Abraham Landry of Pisiguit^W, on her name and age, as drawn together in Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families; it is through her that the line continues.

She died before 21 July 1713. The Port-Royal register spells her name Teriot and records her burial that day in the cemetery of the chapel of St-Laurent, up the river, as the widow of Guillebaud, aged over sixty; the register omits the date of her death.

Lines of descent

Four separate lines of descent run from Catherine to Floyd through three of her children: Marie Guilbeau, Jeanne Guilbeau (born about 1670) and Charles Guilbeau (born about 1677). Two run through Marie, one through Jeanne and one through Charles. Two of the four come through Floyd’s father, Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), and two through his mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990); the nearest is nine generations up, through Marie. At least one line on Floyd’s father’s side passes through a link that is probable rather than recorded. The lines meet again in Emilie Croker (born 1834) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), and finally in Floyd himself, whose parents, Jeffrey Delahorne and Ida Serrette, both descend from her.

Notes

The later censuses give ages that place her birth about 1653–54. Her ages on the 1671 roll, twenty-one under her parents’ names and twenty under her husband’s, point to about 1650.