♂Charles Hebert

Charles Hebert (born about 1763; living in 1817) was a settler of the St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge district on the Mississippi under Spanish rule, known from the church registers that record his fourteen children with his wife Marguerite Godreau, born between 1789 and 1807. Another man named Charles Hebert married his wife’s sister, and the two couples baptised children at the same church in the same years. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Henriette Hebert (about 1799 – after 1880).

Family

Charles was a son of François Hebert and Marie Leblanc, whose names are printed as his parents in the grandparent lines of two of his children’s baptisms, at St. Gabriel in 1796 and at Baton Rouge in 1802. His wife Marguerite was a daughter of Amand Godreau and Marie Landry. The marriage is recorded at St. Martinville, then the Attakapas post, on 28 December 1787. According to Cormier, Charles was the son of the Acadian exiles François Hebert and Marie Leblanc and was probably born in exile in Maryland about 1763. He came to Louisiana in 1767 at the age of four, with his parents and his brother Jean-Baptiste, among the Acadians who settled at St. Gabriel; the Spanish list of the settlers’ belongings, drawn up in July 1767, enters him as “Carlos (Charles)”, aged four, in the household of “Franco. Hiber”, aged 30, and his wife “Maria”, 25, with a brother “Juan Bauptista”, aged three. After his marriage at Attakapas he returned to St. Gabriel, where his children were baptized from 1789. The clerks of the Spanish period wrote the family’s names in Spanish forms, so Charles appears as “Carlos Hebert” or “Carlos Ebert” and Marguerite as “Margarita Gotrau” or “Goudreau”.

The second Charles Hebert was a son of Pierre Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc and married Anne Godreau, Marguerite’s sister. His first wife, by a register entry of 18 May 1785, was Madeleine Braux, a daughter of Janvier Braux and Osite Landry. The two families are told apart by the paternal grandparents the baptismal entries print: on one page of the St. Gabriel register in 1796, the baptism of Charles and Marguerite’s son is followed two entries later by that of the other couple’s daughter, the first naming François Hebert and Marie Leblanc as the child’s grandparents, the second Pierre Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc. Both couples also named a son Hipolite.

St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge

The couple’s children were baptized at St. Gabriel, in Iberville, from 1789 to 1796. By May 1798, when a daughter Celeste was baptized, the family was described as “of Baton Rouge”, and the later children were baptized there, the last in 1807; among them were twins, a son and a daughter, born in April 1805. Celeste died in January 1801, and a daughter born in January 1802 was given the same name. Two further daughters are known only from their marriages, in 1808 and 1827; the entry for the 1827 marriage describes the bride’s family as of West Baton Rouge Parish.

On 21 April 1817 Charles was a witness at the marriage of his daughter Henriette to Eloi Dupuis, both of them described as of the parish of the Virgin Mary at Baton Rouge. The register entry names him and Marguerite as the bride’s parents and carries his own signature alongside those of the couple and the groom’s father.

Notes

His death is not established. His age of four on the 1767 list places his birth between mid-1762 and mid-1763, years his parents spent in exile in Maryland; no record of the birth itself has been found. Online family trees give him a burial at St. Gabriel on 30 October 1829, but that burial and the West Baton Rouge succession opened for a Charles Hebert in November 1829 belong to the other man of the name: the heirs named in the succession are that man’s children, and none of them is a child of Charles and Marguerite. Cormier gives 30 October 1829, probably in West Baton Rouge Parish and aged 67, as the death of the other Charles Hebert, the son of Pierre Hebert, and gives no death for this Charles. Several of the earliest children are placed with this couple on the mother’s name alone, because their baptismal entries print no grandparents.

Marriage date

The printed abstract of the St. Martinville register entry (St. Martin de Tours marriages, volume 4, number 10), as Donald J. Hébert gives it in Southwest Louisiana Records (1-A:347), dates the marriage 28 December 1787 and names the bride’s parents as Amand and Marie Landry. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives the same date at Attakapas, when Charles was 24. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives 26 December 1787 at Saint-Martinville, the only printed source with that date.