♂Charles Leblanc

Charles Leblanc was an Acadian who, with his wife and children, was counted among the Acadian exiles at Baltimore, Maryland, in 1763 and resettled at St. Gabriel d’Iberville in Spanish Louisiana in 1767. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Leblanc.

Exile in Maryland

Charles Leblanc and his wife, Judith Landry, were counted as a household of six at Baltimore, Maryland, on 7 July 1763, entered in the petition there as “jean le Blanc” with “judithe landry mon Epouse” and four children — Jean Baptiste, Joseph, Simon and Marie. A fifth child, Anne, was baptized in Maryland on 21 February 1766, after that count was taken; the register entry, as abstracted, gives her birthplace as Baltimore. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Charles was Jean-Charles LeBlanc of Grand-Pré, who came to Louisiana by way of Maryland, and a son of the Acadian resistance leader Joseph LeBlanc dit Le Maigre, “the Skinny” — a parentage Cormier calls probable rather than proven. Cormier noted the irony that three of Charles’s own sons were in turn nicknamed “dit Agros,” meaning “Fat.”

St. Gabriel

The family reached Louisiana in July 1767 aboard the Jane, under Captain Richard Ryder, which had taken on 150 French Neutrals at Patuxent, Maryland, that March; Spanish officials counted Charles, his wife and five children at Fort St. Gabriel that same July. Cormier’s compilation adds that they had no more children in Louisiana, and that their daughter Marie died at St. Gabriel in December 1787, a year after her marriage, aged 24. His son Joseph, who carried the byname dit Agros, married Julie Trahan in 1787; their daughter Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc carried the family onward to Floyd Amatus Delahorne.

Notes

Charles’s own name is recorded inconsistently: an 1787 marriage abstract for his son Joseph calls him “Juan,” three baptisms of Joseph’s children call him “Carlos” or “Charles,” and two others print the full compound “Jean Charles.” The project enters “Charles” as the working form, with the others recorded as alternates; no register giving his own birth, marriage or death has been found.

The Spanish roll of July 1767, as printed by Chandler, reads “Juan Blancher 33,” which points to a birth about 1734. Cormier’s entry gives his age as 31 at the emigration, implying about 1736, and reports that the genealogist Bona Arsenault^W also reached about 1736; because the estimates disagree, no birth year is given above. Cormier’s separate entry for Judith Landry prints the husband’s age as 53, which does not agree with the roll as printed.

The parentage rests on Cormier alone. A declaration of Joseph LeBlanc dit Le Maigre printed in the Attakapas Gazette (1981) lists his children by Anne Bourg — Joseph, Marguerite, Simon, Olivier, Alexandre, Paul and Anne — and names no Charles or Jean-Charles.

Cormier also warns that a second Jean-Charles LeBlanc, called a son of Jean LeBlanc and Marie Thériot, married an Osite Landry at St.-Jacques in August 1770. The Maryland historian Wood identified that man with this one; Cormier holds them to be two different men of the same name, and this page follows Cormier.