♂Francois LeBlanc

Francois LeBlanc was an Acadian farmer of Les Mines, the settlement on the Minas Basin around Grand-Pré, the husband of Jeanne Hebert and, by the family reconstruction, a son of Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois. His family and the Melansons of Les Mines appear to have married into each other twice in twenty years: Rene LeBlanc, whom the reconstruction makes his brother, married Elisabeth Melancon in 1709, and in 1729 his daughter Anne married Germain Landry, the son of Elisabeth’s sister Marie. He was not himself an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), but his parents Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois (1660–1747) were, each a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent of Floyd. His daughter Marguerite LeBlanc (born about 1714) married Charles Hébert, brother of Osite Hebert (born 1730), a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent of Floyd Amatus Delahorne.

Early life

He first appears in the census of Port-Royal taken in 1686, aged four, in the household of Rene LeBlanc, 29, and Anne Bourgeois, 25, with his elder brother Jacques, six, and his younger brother Rene, two. No baptism survives for him, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost, so his parentage rests on that census household and on the family events of his later life, all of which point the same way; a published genealogy of the Acadians gives the same parents and a birth about 1680. No act calls him their son. The marriage act of Rene LeBlanc and Elisabeth Melancon, on 30 July 1709 at Grand-Pré, names the groom’s parents as Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois, habitants of Grand-Pré, and Francois and Pierre LeBlanc signed it as witnesses; it does not say how the witnesses were related to the groom.

Les Mines

By the time the Grand-Pré registers begin, Francois and Jeanne Hebert were married and living at Les Mines. Their daughter Anne was baptized there on 16 January 1708, and her godmother was Anne Bourgeois, whom the reconstruction makes Francois’s own mother, with Pierre LeBlanc, taken to be his brother, as godfather. The register does not state their relationship to the child. The couple’s children continued to be baptized at Grand-Pré for more than twenty years, the last in 1729, and several of them married there between 1727 and 1748, with Francois signing the register as a witness at most of the weddings.

When Anne married Germain Landry on 4 July 1729, the register described her parents as “of Mines”; Pierre and Claude LeBlanc, taken to be his brothers, were among the witnesses. On 29 December 1747 Francois and Jacques LeBlanc, taken to be his elder brother, stood at the burial of Anne Bourgeois, taken to be their mother, widow of Rene LeBlanc, who had died the day before at about eighty-seven.

Notes

No record of his death has been found in the registers that survive. The family record gives no birth date for him beyond the age of four in the census of 1686.