♂Desire LeBlanc

Desire LeBlanc (born about 1717 – buried 5 March 1777) was an Acadian exile whose family, after the deportation from Nova Scotia, resettled on the Acadian Coast^W of Louisiana. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Esther Leblanc (born about 1744).

Parentage and exile

An online compilation drawing on the genealogist Stephen White’s Acadian dictionary states that Desire was a son of Rene LeBlanc and Elisabeth Melancon, and that about 1740 he married Marie Madeleine Landry, daughter of Abraham Landry and Marie Guilbeau; the same compilation places the couple, during the deportation years, on the 1763 census taken at Oxford, Maryland. The Grand-Pré registers bear out the parentage in part: in 1736 Desire stood godfather to a daughter of Marie Joseph LeBlanc, whose own marriage act names her parents as Rene LeBlanc and the late Elizabeth Melancon. By 1769 the family had reached the Acadian Coast, where a census there recorded the household of “Dezire LeBlanc, age 52” with his wife “Marie Landry,” then 46, and their children Isabelle (18), Marine (11), Desire the younger (16), Ozitte (9), Benjamin (9), Enselme (6), and an infant son, Gregoire, five months old — with a twenty-year-old, Augustin Broussard, also listed in the household.

Children and death

Two of Desire’s daughters married at Ascension in 1775, each record naming her as a daughter of Desire and Marie Magdelaine Landry: Marine to Joseph Babin on 19 February, and Elisabeth to Joseph Landry on 18 April. His son Benjamin married Rosalia Babin at Ascension on 12 July 1790. Desire himself was buried at Ascension on 5 March 1777, recorded there as a married man.

Notes

A separate compilation, Gregory A. Wood’s 1995 guide to the Acadians in Maryland, names a daughter Marie Esther Leblanc, later the wife of Anselme Blanchard, as a child of this same Desire and Marie Madeleine Landry, and the family’s line to Floyd Amatus Delahorne runs through her. No Louisiana church or civil record naming Esther’s own parents has been found; the relationship rests on Wood’s compilation rather than a register entry.