♀Francoise Gaudet

Francoise Gaudet (born about 1623) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of Daniel LeBlanc and the mother of a large family, who by 1698 was a widow of eighty living alone. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by 15 separate lines of descent, the nearest of them nine generations up, and four of her eight children are ancestors of Floyd.

Family and first marriage

The historians Archange Godbout and Stephen White reconstruct her as the eldest known child of Jean Gaudet, who was still living at Port-Royal in 1671, a laborer of 96 with a second wife, and of a first wife whose name is unknown, with a younger brother Denis and a younger sister Marie who also settled at Port-Royal. No register or deposition names Jean as her father; the link is their reconstruction. A maternal DNA study of Acadian founding mothers has since found the same haplogroup in the descendants of Francoise and of Marie, which fits sisters by one mother but does not name the father. A church record of 1718 points the same way. When Pierre Aucoin, a grandson of Denis Gaudet, married Catherine Comeau, a great-granddaughter of Françoise through her daughter Marie Mercier, at Grand-Pré on 1 August 1718, the priest dispensed them for consanguinity “in the third to fourth degree”. That is exactly the kinship they would have if Françoise and Denis were brother and sister, and no other shared ancestry is known to explain it.

According to Godbout, as cited by White, she had been married first to a Mercier, and Marie Mercier was her daughter by that marriage, not a daughter of Daniel’s. A compiled genealogy, Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, argues the same from church dispensations for consanguinity between Marie Mercier’s descendants and the LeBlanc descendants. On that account her first husband was a Mercier, whose given name is not known, and who was dead before 1648. Arsenault agrees. Marie Mercier appears in the 1671 census as the wife of Antoine Babin.

Port-Royal

In the Port-Royal census of 1671 she was 48, the wife of Daniel LeBlanc, a farmer of 45, with a married daughter, Francoise, and six sons at home: Jacques, Estienne, Rene, Andre, Antoine and Pierre. In 1686 the couple were still at Port-Royal, their son Rene’s household listed beside theirs, and in 1693 she was living with Daniel, their son Pierre and his child. By 1698 she was a widow: that year’s census lists her alone, “francoise Godet vᵉ 80”, with no land or livestock.

Lines of descent

15 lines run from her to Floyd, through four of her children: Françoise LeBlanc, Rene LeBlanc, Jacques LeBlanc and Marie Mercier. Twelve run on Floyd’s mother’s side, through Ida Serrette, and three on his father’s side; the nearest, through her son Jacques, is nine generations up. The lines join again at Ozite Barbe Blanchard, whose parents both descend from her, and last in Floyd’s own parents. Those through Marie Mercier rest on the compiled account that Marie was her daughter by a first marriage, supported by kinship dispensations at Grand-Pré in 1718, 1745 and 1747. Another line, through Rene’s son Jacques, rests on a 1767 declaration at Belle-Île-en-Mer, not an act.

Notes

Her recorded age does not add up from one census to the next: 48 in 1671, 60 in 1686, 76 in 1693 and 80 in 1698. Her place as Rene’s mother rests on the censuses; no act naming Rene’s parents survives. Her father’s name rests on the reconstruction of Godbout and White and on the 1718 dispensation, rather than on a record naming her as his daughter.