♀Catherine Thibodeau

Catherine Thibodeau (born about 1665 – died before 10 November 1721) was an Acadian woman of Les Mines, a daughter of the miller and pioneer settler Pierre Thibodeau and Jeanne Thériot. She and her elder sister Marie both married sons of René Landry, called le jeune — Marie to the elder brother Antoine, and Catherine, styled Marie-Catherine in some records, to Claude — joining two already-connected Acadian families more closely still. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Landry (1708–1764).

Family

Catherine’s father, Pierre Thibodeau, had come to Acadia in 1654 and built a mill on the Rivière-au-Dauphin above Port-Royal before going on, in his sixties, to found the Acadian settlement of Chepoudy on the Bay of Fundy; her mother, Jeanne, was a daughter of Jean Thériot and Perrine Rau. About 1684, at Port-Royal, Catherine married Claude Landry, according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana. The couple settled at Les Mines, the Grand-Pré district of the Minas Basin, where they were later styled “habitans de Mines.”

Children

Cormier’s compilation credits Catherine and Claude with thirteen children; the Grand-Pré parish register, which survives only from 1707, documents eight: sons Claude, René, Jean Baptiste and Joseph, and daughters Marguerite, Marie, Claire and Marie Magdeleine, born between 1707 and 1708 in the surviving record and married between 1712 and 1727. One daughter and two sons married into the neighboring Comeau family (Comot in the register): Jean Baptiste in 1718, Claire in 1721 and Joseph in 1727. Catherine did not live to see her son Joseph’s marriage in November 1727: her daughter Claire’s own marriage act, at Grand-Pré on 11 November 1721, already named her mother as deceased.

Notes

Cormier’s compilation states the marriage to Claude Landry took place at Port-Royal about 1684 and counts thirteen children; the Grand-Pré register, which begins only in 1707, gives no date or place for the marriage and documents eight children, not thirteen. No baptism, marriage or burial record of Catherine’s own has been found on this project’s shelf; her death is fixed only as before 10 November 1721, from the marriage act of her daughter Marie Magdeleine on that date, which calls her deceased, and her birth year is estimated from her marriage.