♂François Hebert

François Hebert (baptized 10 June 1738, Grand-Pré – death not recorded) was an Acadian settler of St. Gabriel on the Mississippi, named with his wife Maria LeBlanc as the grandparents in two Baton Rouge diocesan baptisms of 1796 and 1802. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Charles Hebert.

Acadia and exile

A baptism of 10 June 1738 at Grand-Pré records a François, son of François Hébert and Marie Joseph Melançon. That this child is the man of St. Gabriel rests on Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which makes François the third son of the elder François Hébert and Marie-Josèphe Melançon of Grand-Pré, exiled to Maryland in 1755 at seventeen. Cormier has him marry a fellow exile, Marie-Josèphe (in other entries Marie-Marguerite) LeBlanc, in Maryland about 1762, and quotes a report of July 1763 on the Acadians at Baltimore that lists him as “François Eberd,” with his wife recorded as “Mari Le Blanc.” Cormier gives the couple two sons, Charles (born about 1763) and Jean-Baptiste (about 1764), both probably born in Maryland.

Louisiana

Cormier dates the family’s arrival in Louisiana to 1767 and quotes the 1767 report on the Acadians who settled at St. Gabriel, which lists François as “Franco Hiver,” aged 30, head of family number 16, with his wife Maria and two sons. The report assigned him farm number 48, next to his father’s farm number 47. A St. Gabriel census taken in March 1777, as Cormier abstracts it, counted “Fransois Etbert” with an unnamed wife aged 30, two sons and a daughter, along with eighteen cattle, three horses and sixteen hogs on five arpents^W of land. Two Diocese of Baton Rouge baptismal entries, of 1796 (St. Gabriel) and 1802 (Baton Rouge), abstracted for two of the couple’s grandchildren, name the grandparents “Francisco Ebert” and “Francisco Hebert” with “Maria LeBlanc,” though neither entry gives either of them a date.

According to Cormier, their son Charles, born in Maryland about 1763, moved to the Attakapas District and married Marguerite, daughter of fellow Acadians Amand Godreau and Marie Landry, there in December 1787; the couple then returned to the St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge area to raise their own family. Cormier adds that a daughter of François and Marie married into the Landry and Simoneaux families, that their sons settled around Manchac and Baton Rouge and in West Baton Rouge Parish, and that a grandson was among the few Acadians who settled in Pointe Coupée Parish.

Notes

No death date has been found for François or for Marie. Cormier’s compilation is inconsistent about the wife’s given name, calling her “Marie-Josèphe or -Marguerite LeBlanc” in one place; the Baton Rouge baptismal abstracts, which come from a register rather than the compilation, give her plainly as Maria/Marie LeBlanc, and that form is used here. Neither François’s parentage nor his wife’s has been confirmed against a primary Acadian register. His parents are given as François Hébert and Marie-Josèphe Melanson in Arsenault’s compiled genealogy (vol. 3, p. 1191), and the account of his origin rests on the compilation alone, including its identification of him with the 1738 Grand-Pré baptism.