♂Charles Babin

Charles Babin (born about 1664) was an Acadian farmer who left Port-Royal for Les Mines^W, on the Minas Basin, and raised a family of eleven children at Grand-Pré, where in 1708 a seigneur of Acadia stood godfather to his infant son. He was probably the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Babin (born 1688).

Port-Royal

Charles was the eldest son of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier, and the census of 1671 counted him at Port-Royal aged seven, the second of their five children. By 1686 he had married Madeleine Richard, a daughter of Michel Richard and Madeleine Blanchard: the census of that year lists the couple in a household of their own, he 22 and she 15, with two cattle. The same roll lists Madeleine’s widowed father, Michel Richard, then 56, with a second wife aged eighteen, Jeanne Babin, most likely Charles’s younger sister, so that the two families were tied twice over.

Les Mines

Within a few years the couple had left Port-Royal for Les Mines, the settlements on the Minas Basin, where the census of 1693 counted them with three small children: Anne, aged five, Marguerite, three, and René, one. They had six arpents^W of land, six cattle, four sheep, five hogs and a gun. On the roll their household came directly after that of his brother Vincent, which in turn followed that of Guillaume Lejuge and his wife, Marie Mercier, in all likelihood Charles’s widowed mother, who had married again.

The farm grew quickly. By the census of 1701 the family had settled at Grand-Pré, with four sons and two daughters at home, fifteen arpents, fourteen cattle, twenty-two sheep and thirteen hogs, and the roll of 1703 counted five sons and two daughters. Anne, the eldest, most likely married Clément Benoist of Pigiguit^W about 1704 and made her home there.

Grand-Pré

The register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré, which opens in 1707, records the births of the couple’s youngest children. On 13 February 1708 Madeleine gave birth to twins, Charles and Marie, who were baptized the same day. The boy’s godfather was “Mr. De Latour, of a company of the naval detachment and Seigneur de l’Acadie”. A seigneur held land and the rights over it from the French crown under the seigneurial system^W, a rank well above that of the farmers of Les Mines. None of the couple’s other children baptized there had a godparent of title: the girl twin was held at the font by Guillaume Hébert and Marguerite Richard, and the two daughters who followed, Madeleine in June 1710 and Isabelle in June 1711, by Babins and Dupuis.

Later life

Between 1712 and 1729 five of the children married at Grand-Pré, each named in the register as a child of Charles Babin and Madeleine Richard; at René’s wedding, in November 1714, the register calls the parents “habitants de la Grand Prée”, inhabitants of Grand-Pré. The census of 1714 counted Charles and his wife at Les Mines with six sons and two daughters still at home. The couple had eleven children in all, born between about 1688 and 1711. When and where Charles and Madeleine died is not known.

The family

The expulsion of 1755 scattered the children’s families. By the account of Claude’s widow, Marguerite Dupuis, given in exile at Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, in March 1767, Marie, widowed in 1744, was deported to Virginia with her family, as were the widows of Joseph and of the younger Charles, both of whom had died at Les Mines. Jean’s wife died at Southampton, in England, in August 1756, and in 1767 Jean was living at Saint-Malo with his family.

Notes

Records

The census entries are known from modern transcriptions of the rolls. His ages, 7 in 1671, 22 in 1686 and 28 in 1693, give a birth about 1664, the year in Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens; Madeleine’s, 15 and 22, give about 1671. The 1701 roll places the household under the heading “Dans la Grand Pré”, and the 1703 and 1714 rolls under Les Mines. A 1707 roll of Les Mines has an entry “Charles BABIN, his wife” with no children, which does not fit this household. No record of the marriage survives, since the Port-Royal registers begin only in 1702; Arsenault dates it about 1686. The Grand-Pré entries are known from the published abstracts of the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a). The baptism of 1708 gives the godfather no forename; the godmother was Cécile Landry.

Kin on the rolls

Antoine Babin’s household of 1671 has a daughter Jeanne aged three, the right age for the Jeanne Babin of eighteen with Michel Richard in 1686, and Arsenault names Antoine’s daughter Jeanne as the wife of a Michel Richard. One of his entries makes her the elder Michel’s second wife and another the wife of his son of the same name; the census couple, with a two-year-old son Michel, is the elder man. Guillaume Lejuge’s wife Marie Mercier, aged 50 in 1693, is taken to be Antoine Babin’s widow: her household stands among those of her Babin children, and a church dispensation of 1738 for the marriage of a granddaughter fits that identification. No record names her as Antoine’s widow.

The 1767 declaration

Marguerite Dupuis made her declaration at Sauzon, on Belle-Île-en-Mer, on 8 March 1767; it is printed in English translation in the Attakapas Gazette (vol. 17, 1982). It says that Claude was born at Mines “to Charles Babin and Magdelaine Richard of Port Royal”, and that “Charles Babin was the son of Antoine Babin who had come from France with his wife, Marie Mercier”. It names the couple’s children born at Mines, in the parish of St. Charles, as René (1692), Pierre (1694), Claude (1698), Jean (1700), Joseph (1702), Marie (1712) and Charles (1714). The register gives Marie and Charles as twins born on 13 February 1708. The declaration does not name Anne, Marguerite, Madeleine or Isabelle; Anne and Marguerite are named in the 1693 household, Marguerite again at her marriage, and Madeleine and Isabelle at their baptisms.

His daughter Anne

The 1693 household names Anne, aged five. Arsenault (vol. 3, p. 1092) gives “ANNE BABIN, 1688, fille de Charles et de Madeleine Richard, épousa Clément Benoit, de Pisiguit” (Anne Babin, 1688, daughter of Charles and Madeleine Richard, married Clément Benoit, of Pisiguit), and the Grand-Pré register names Anne Babin as Clément’s wife at the baptism of their son Charles in July 1709. An online family tree makes Clément’s wife the Anne Babin born in 1674, a daughter of Antoine Babin, but a daughter born to Clément and Anne in 1732 rules that out. Alexis Benoit, through whom the line descends, is placed among Clément and Anne’s children by Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (1999), as quoted in an online family tree; Arsenault’s partial list of their children does not name him.