♀Esther Leblanc

Esther Leblanc (born about 1744) was an Acadian exile who spent the years of deportation in Maryland and settled with her husband, Anselme Blanchard, at St. Gabriel on the Mississippi in Spanish Louisiana. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Ozite Barbe Blanchard (1763–1799).

Exile and marriage

She was a child when the Acadians were deported, and she married Anselme Blanchard in exile. A return of the Acadians in Maryland, made in July 1763 for the French ambassador in London, lists them at Baltimore as a household of two, “Enselme Blanchard et Esther le Blanc mon Epouse”. Their daughter Ozite Barbe was born soon afterwards, in about 1763, most likely at Baltimore.

By July 1767 the family had reached Spanish Louisiana. Governor Ulloa^W’s roll of St. Gabriel lists her, aged 23, in Anselme’s household with a son Jerome of eighteen months, a daughter Rose of four, and Marguerite, an orphan girl of ten. The couple had at least four children, among them Ozite Barbe, Jerome, Antoine and Louis, who died in infancy in 1779. Her husband rose to be a militia captain and district commandant, and she is named as his wife on the cemetery cards for his death in New Orleans in 1799, although two abstracts of the burial register call him her widower.

The registers do not agree on her first name. She is Esther on her daughter Ozite’s marriage act of 1783 and on a grandchild’s baptism, but Maria in other entries that name the same couple as grandparents.

Notes

Another Grand-Pré family, René LeBlanc and Marguerite Tibaut, had a daughter Esther baptized in 1740, but she married Raymond Bourdages and is a different woman. A second Esther Leblanc, a daughter of Bonaventure LeBlanc, also lived in the same Maryland exile and in the same Louisiana parishes, and the two are easily confused. No record of this Esther’s death has been found.

Parents

Her parents are believed to be Desire LeBlanc and Marie Madeleine Landry. A modern guide to the Acadians of Maryland, published in 1995, makes her their daughter, though the guide itself is known only from quotations on a family-history website. A church record now points the same way. At Ascension on 8 October 1780, an “Esther Blanc, aunt” stood godmother, beside “Benjamin LeBlanc, uncle”, to Eduardo, the son of Etienne LeBlanc and Ozitte LeBlanc. Benjamin’s own marriage in 1790 names his parents as Desire LeBlanc and Maria Landry, and Ozitte’s marriage in 1778 names her mother as Marie Landry, her father’s name being illegible in the register. Bona Arsenault’s list of the children of Etienne’s parents has no Esther, and Esther’s husband was a Blanchard, so she was no aunt by marriage either; this aunt was Ozitte’s sister. No record names Esther’s parents outright; the evidence is strong but indirect.

The names fit as well, though both were common among the Acadians: in the 1769 census of the Acadian settlements on the Mississippi, Desire LeBlanc and Marie Landry had a young son named Enselme and a daughter named Ozitte, the names of Esther’s husband and of her own daughter. In 1775 Anselme Blanchard stood godfather at Ascension, beside a godmother named Marie Landry, to a daughter of Paul Braud and Marie Marthe LeBlanc; there was more than one Marie Landry in the settlement, so this godmother is no proof.

Two published genealogies disagree about the parents of Desire LeBlanc and Marie Madeleine Landry, so the family is not traced further back with confidence.