♂Emmanuel Hebert

Emmanuel Hebert (about 1656 – 30 November 1744) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who married Andree Brun, the widow of Germain Theriot, and raised her three Theriot children alongside their own; the censuses follow him at Port-Royal from 1671, when he was an unmarried youth in his widowed mother’s house, into the 1700s. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three separate lines of descent, through two of his children: Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Hébert (born about 1682).

Life

He was a son of Étienne Hébert and Marie Gaudet. The census of 1671 lists him in his mother’s household as “Emmanuel aagé de 17 ans”, not yet married, one of her ten children. Nearly a century later, when exiled Acadians made sworn declarations of their ancestry in 1767, three of his descendants named him as Étienne’s son; one declaration, as printed and translated, says that he “was the son of Etienne Hebert who came from France with his wife, Marie Godet, to settle at Port Royal”.

No record of his marriage survives; the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. He married Andree Brun after the death of her first husband, Germain Theriot, and by about 1679, since their eldest son was six in 1686. A compiled genealogical dictionary places the marriage about 1678 at Port-Royal.

The census of 1686, as transcribed, lists the household as “Emanuel HEBERT 30, Andree BRUN 40”, with their children Guillaume, six, Marguerite, five, Jean, three, Jacques, two, and a baby of one month not yet baptized, together with Andree’s Theriot children Germain, eighteen, Pierre, fifteen, and Catherine, twelve. The farm then had four arpents^W, fourteen cattle, twenty-one sheep and eight hogs.

By 1693 it had grown to thirty arpents, with twenty cattle, forty sheep and fifteen hogs. Emmanuel, forty, and Andree, forty-six, had five sons in the house, Guillaume, twelve, Jean, nine, Jacques, eight, Alexandre, seven, and Martin, six (born about 1687), and Andree’s daughter Catherine Theriot, twenty-two, was still at home. In 1698 he was forty-four and she fifty-two; the census of that year counted twenty-five cattle, twenty-five sheep, six hogs, sixteen arpents, two fruit trees and a servant. The roll of 1700 gives him as forty-seven, with Andree and six children, and the census of 1701 lists a servant girl of fifteen.

In 1707 the census lists “Emanuel HEBERT and his wife” with four cattle, six sheep and six hogs, next to two households headed by a Jean Hébert and an Alexandre Hébert, most likely two of his sons settled on their own. The 1714 roll, as printed by Lanctôt, still lists an Emmanuel Hébert and his wife, again next to an Alexandre Hébert. His wife died at Port-Royal on 25 July 1727 and was buried there the next day, aged about eighty; the burial entry calls her the wife of Emmanuel Hébert, an inhabitant of the parish, so he was still living at Port-Royal in July 1727.

In 1732 he was at Les Mines: on 7 February that year the council confirmed to him, for life, the land called the Common of Menis, on a petition brought by his son Jacques Hébert for himself and for Emmanuel’s children. He died at Grand-Pré on 30 November 1744 and was buried there on 1 December.

His daughter Marguerite

Marguerite, who was sixteen in the census of 1698 and eighteen in that of 1701, married Jean Thibodeau at Port-Royal on 7 February 1703; the register entry names her parents as “emanuel hebert et andrée Brun”. A 1767 declaration by one of her descendants likewise calls her the daughter of Emmanuel Hébert and Andrée Lebrun.

Lines of descent

Emmanuel reaches Floyd by three lines, through two of his children. Two of them, nine generations above Floyd, run through his son Jacques Hébert. The third, ten generations up, runs through his daughter Marguerite Hébert (born about 1682). All three reach Floyd through his mother, Ida Serrette. The lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) and Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) both descend from him, and again in Ida Serrette (1903–1990), whose parents Amelia Pennison Daigle and Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) both descend from him.

Notes

His recorded ages do not agree: seventeen in 1671, thirty in 1686, forty in 1693, forty-four in 1698 and fifty in 1701, which point to births between about 1651 and 1656. The date used here follows the census of 1686; the compiled dictionary gives 1654. The burial register gives his age at death as about ninety-five, which would put his birth about 1649, earlier than any census age allows; the register is a copy made about 1895.

The 1714 roll comes from Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled genealogy, Familles acadiennes, vol. II, which prints it as “Emmanuel Hébert et femme”; the wife’s name there is the editor’s addition.