♀Élisabeth Henry

Élisabeth Henry was an Acadian woman of Pigiguit^W and the first wife of Jean-Baptiste Breau. She was probably the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Breaux (about 1747–1815).

In the mid-1740s she married Jean-Baptiste Breau at Pigiguit; their daughter Marguerite was born about 1747 and a son, Jean, about 1751. She is said to have died before the British deported the Acadians of Pigiguit in the fall of 1755, for by then Jean-Baptiste had married Marie-Rose Landry, called Rose, who went with him and the children into exile in Maryland and on to Louisiana in 1766. Marguerite married Pierre Firmin Breaux at Ascension on 13 April 1769. Other compiled genealogies make Rose, not Élisabeth, Marguerite’s mother.

Notes

Sources

Everything known of her comes from compiled genealogies, and none gives her parents, her birth or her death. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians who came to Louisiana calls her Jean-Baptiste’s “first wife Élisabeth Henry”, the mother of Marguerite (about 1747) and of Jean (about 1751), and holds that she died before the deportation. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2nd edition, page 2438) has Jean-Baptiste married about 1745 to Elizabeth Henry and secondly about 1752 to Marie-Rose Landry, and lists Paul (1745), Madeleine (1749) and Jean (1751) as children of the first marriage. The marriage of Marguerite and Pierre Firmin Breaux at Ascension on 13 April 1769 appears in a published list of Ascension marriages, which gives the names only.

Which wife was Marguerite’s mother

Cormier makes Marguerite the daughter of the first wife, Élisabeth Henry, and Madeleine, born about 1749, the daughter of Rose; he dates the two marriages from those births. Arsenault leaves Marguerite out of Jean-Baptiste’s list of children and puts Madeleine and Jean under the first marriage, but on the next page, under Firmin Breaux, he names Marguerite’s mother as Marie-Rose Landry; a 1985 genealogy and the Wall of Names at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville also give Rose. Rose’s census ages would make her about seventeen at Marguerite’s birth. The 1769 marriage entry, as published, does not name the bride’s parents.

Another Élisabeth Henry

A widow called Élizabeth Braux was counted at Port Tobacco, Maryland, in July 1763 with a Paul and a Marguerite Braux. Wood’s study of the Acadians in Maryland takes her for Élisabeth Henry, and seems to make her Jean-Baptiste’s mother rather than his wife; an online family tree gives an Élisabeth Henry (1709–1763) as his mother. Cormier rejects the widow as Jean-Baptiste’s first wife, since Jean-Baptiste was counted at Oxford with Rose that same month, and calls the whole question “tenuous”.