♀Françoise Hébert

Françoise Hébert (born about 1663 – died before 17 February 1713) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal who, with her husband Jean Comeau, had fourteen known children, among them twin sons, over more than a quarter of a century. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through her son Étienne and her daughter Marie Comeau (died 1708 or 1709).

Early life

She was the daughter of Étienne Hébert and Marie Gaudet. Her father died while she was still a small child: by the census of 1671 her mother, aged thirty-eight, was a widow at the head of a household of ten children, and Françoise was ten.

Marriage and family

She is thought to have married Jean Comeau about 1677, while still in her teens, and their daughter Marie was born about 1678. By the census of 1686 the couple had five children under nine, among them the twins Pierre and Étienne, and farmed four arpents^W of land with four head of cattle, ten sheep and five pigs. The roll writes her surname “Imber”.

The family stayed at Port-Royal and kept growing: the censuses of 1693 and 1698 show new children in the household, and the last two known, Joseph and Anne Judith, arrived in 1703 and 1705. The censuses of 1700, 1701 and 1703 also list her at Port-Royal as Jean Comeau’s wife. When Anne Judith was baptized on 1 August 1705, her godparents were her own elder brother Jean and sister Anne.

Death

Françoise died at Port-Royal before 17 February 1713. She was buried that day in the cemetery of the Saint-Laurent chapel up the river; the register gives her age as about fifty and calls her the wife of Jean Comeau.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) descends from Jean Comeau and Françoise Hébert by two separate lines of descent. The first reaches him through their son Étienne Comeau, which makes the couple his sixth great-grandparents; the second runs, probably, through their daughter Marie Comeau (died 1708 or 1709), which makes them his eighth great-grandparents. The two lines meet again in Ida Serrette (1903–1990), Floyd’s mother, whose parents Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) and Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) both descend from this couple.

Notes

The 1686 census

The roll enters the household as “Jean Commeaux 30, françoise Imber 23. Enfans: Marie 8, Pierre et Estienne jumeaux 6, Jean 3, Anne 1”. Reading “Imber” as Hébert is the census transcribers’ interpretation; the Port-Royal marriage records of several of her children name their mother as Françoise Hébert. Bona Arsenault’s compiled abstract of the census (1955) prints the couple’s ages as 39 and 35, but the roll itself reads 30 and 23.

Parents and marriage

The 1671 roll lists her as “françoise dix ans” in the household of “Marie Gaudet veufve de Estienne Hebert”, a widow’s household, so Étienne Hébert had died by then. Ten in 1671 would place her birth about 1661, two years before the 1663 that her age of 23 in 1686 gives. J.-Hervé Belliveau’s compiled dictionary also names Étienne Hébert and Marie Gaudet as her parents, and dates her marriage to about 1677. Descendants exiled to Belle-Île-en-Mer declared in 1767 that she was the daughter of “Etienne Hébert venu de France avec Marie Godet sa femme”. No record of the marriage itself survives. Compiled genealogies place the marriage at Port-Royal between 1675 and 1678, and Arsenault prints “vers 1677”.

Daughter Marie

The eight-year-old Marie on the 1686 roll is presumably the Marie Comeau who married Pierre Giroard and died in 1708 or 1709. A standard compiled genealogy of Acadian families (Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire, 1999) is reported to name her as the daughter of Jean Comeau and Françoise Hébert, born about 1678 and married about 1697. No known record names her parents, so the link is probable rather than proved.