♂François Hébert

François Hébert (born 2 April 1710) was a man of Grand-Pré, Acadie. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son François Hebert (born 1738).

He was born at Grand-Pré, Acadie, on 2 April 1710, the son of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry, and the brother of Osite Hebert (born 1730).

Grand-Pré

On 17 November 1732 he married Marie-Josèphe Melanson, daughter of Jean Melancon and Marguerite Dugas, in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré.

The couple stayed in the parish, and the children came steadily over the next eighteen years: at least nine sons, born between 1733 and about 1750, and probably a daughter, Madeleine, about 1752. Their son François was born and baptized on 10 June 1738.

Exile and Louisiana

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, the family was deported to Maryland in 1755, when he was forty-five, and a report of July 1763 on the Acadians at Georgetown and Frederick lists him with his wife and children. In 1767, by then a widower, he came to Louisiana with six unmarried children and settled at St. Gabriel, on the Mississippi, where the settlers’ list placed his farm next to that of his son François. The same history records his death at St. Gabriel on 28 March 1789, at the age of seventy-nine.

Notes

Birth

The birth at Grand-Pré on 2 April 1710 is in the abstract of the Grand-Pré register in Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1A (1707–1748), entry SGA-1, 14.

The marriage

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 3, p. 1191) gives the date and the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines. The Baton Rouge abstract of the same register entry (vol. 1A, SGA-2, pp. 206–207) gives the same date, gives the groom’s age as 23 and the bride’s as about 20, names both sets of parents, and calls her mother deceased. The register abstract is what the wife’s notes also cite.

Children

Arsenault’s list of ten children adds a daughter, Marie-Madeleine, about 1752, to the nine sons. The daughter rests on Arsenault and on Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which counts a Madeleine, aged 14, among the children who came to Louisiana with their father in 1767.

The baptism of 10 June 1738 at Grand-Pré, of a François son of François Hébert and Marie Joseph Melançon, is from the same register abstract. That this child is the François of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, rests on Cormier’s compiled history, as the notes of his son’s own biography explain. The line from this François down to Louisiana depends on that identification.