♀Cécile LeBlanc

Cécile LeBlanc (buried 26 May 1731) was an Acadian of Grand-Pré, the daughter of Jacques LeBlanc and the first wife of Michel Boudrot, whose children included three who married three children of a single household at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia: the family of Antoine Dupuis and Marie Josèphe Dugas. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Boudrot (died before 1769), by two separate lines of descent.

Life at Grand-Pré

The Grand-Pré register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, which runs from 1707 to 1748, records Cécile as the wife of Michel Boudrot. Children baptized there to the couple included Pierre, born 16 December 1720, and Marguerite, born 12 October 1725 and baptized the next day, with Germain Dupuis as her godfather. When their daughter Anne Marie married Abraham Daigle on 5 November 1727, the register named her parents as Michel Boudrot and Cécile LeBlanc. A son Michel was named as a witness and brother at his sister Françoise’s wedding in 1732.

Cécile was buried at Grand-Pré on 26 May 1731. The burial entry calls her about 45 years old, the wife of Michel Boudrot and the daughter of Jacques LeBlanc. Her husband married again within a year.

Her parents

The burial entry names her father as Jacques LeBlanc, and she is given as the daughter of Jacques LeBlanc, born about 1651, and Catherine Hébert. A compiled genealogical dictionary of the Acadian families lists the men named Jacques LeBlanc, and none but this one was old enough to have a daughter born about 1686, the year her age at burial points to. Her daughter Françoise was baptized on 15 January 1712 with Bernard Leblanc as godfather. The only Bernard LeBlanc in the Grand-Pré register is a son of Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert, who married Marie Bourg in 1714, so he was most likely her brother.

The censuses do not list her. The Port-Royal census of 1686 and the Les Mines census of 1693 both give the household of Jacques LeBlanc and Catherine Hébert, and neither has a Cécile. She may have been born after the first count and missed in the second, or she may be the Madeleine, aged seven, of 1693; the records do not say. The same dictionary names a Cécile among their children, born in 1686. Her parentage therefore rests on the burial, on the elimination of the other men of the name, and on the godfather, and not on a census.

Exile

The declaration records Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot, and Pierre Boudrot and Marguerite Dupuis, as “deported to New York”, and says that the younger Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie Dupuis “went to the Mississippi with their families”, that is, to Louisiana. Cécile had died twenty-four years before the expulsion of 1755.

Lines of descent

Cécile is an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne by two separate lines, both on his mother’s side. The nearer is seven generations up, through her daughter Marguerite Boudrot (1725–1769). The farther is nine generations up, through her daughter Anne Boudrot. The two lines meet again in his mother, Ida Serrette, whose parents Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle both descend from Cécile.

Notes

The declaration names the mother of the three Boudrot children three times, always as Anne-Marie LeBlanc, and it is the only Belle-Île declaration that names Michel Boudrot’s wife. The registers do not agree with it: they give the mother as Cécile, and they show Michel Boudrot’s second wife as Anne Prejean, a widow he married at Annapolis Royal on 16 April 1732. No marriage of Michel Boudrot to an Anne-Marie LeBlanc has been found. The most likely explanation is that the deponent, speaking from memory more than thirty years later, ran together the first name of the stepmother, Anne, and the surname of the children’s own mother, but that is an interpretation, not something any record says. The form Anne-Marie LeBlanc is given as an alternate name.

A genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau family compiled by Brother J.-Hervé Béliveau gives an Anne-Marie LeBlanc as the wife, from 1725, of a Michel Boudrot born at Port-Royal in 1706, son of François Boudrot and Madeleine Belliveau. The Annapolis Royal register has that Michel’s baptism in 1706 but no marriage of his to an Anne-Marie LeBlanc, and a man born in 1706 cannot have been the father of a child baptized in 1720, so he appears to be a different man. No act names Cécile’s mother; Catherine Hébert is the most likely one, for the reasons given above.

The Dupuis marriages

A sworn declaration was made on 27 February 1767 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, by Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, widow of Pierre Theriot, before four Acadian witnesses living on the island. She stated that she had been born at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, to Antoine Dupuis and Marie Josèphe Dugas, and listed their children, born at the same place. Three of them had married children of Michel Boudrot: her brother Antoine, to Marguerite Boudrot; her sister Marguerite, to Pierre Boudrot; and her sister Anne-Marie, one of twins, to Michel Boudrot. The declaration was printed in the original French in a collection of documents on Acadia edited by Abbé H.-R. Casgrain, and in English translation in 1983. Because brothers and sisters of one family married brothers and sisters of the other, the children of the three marriages were double first cousins.

The Grand-Pré register has only one Michel Boudrot household, and its children include a Pierre, a Michel and a Marguerite, the three names the declaration marries to Dupuis children. Marguerite’s baptism in 1725 names her mother as Cécile, which is why Cécile is given as the mother of Marguerite Boudrot, the wife of Antoine Dupuis.