♀Françoise LeBlanc

Françoise LeBlanc (born about 1653) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the first wife of Martin Blanchard, who appears in the first nominal census of Acadia in 1671 as a wife of eighteen. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines of descent, two through her son Rene Blanchard and two, less certain, through her daughter Marie Blanchard.

Life

Françoise was born about 1653, most likely at Port-Royal, a daughter of Daniel LeBlanc and Francoise Gaudet, and the census roll of 1671 records her twice. Under her parents she is “une fille de mariée françoise Le blanc aagée de 18 ans”, their married daughter, listed ahead of her six unmarried brothers, the eldest of them Jacques, twenty. Two pages earlier the roll records her own household: Martin Blanchard, a farmer of twenty-four, “sa femme françoise Le blanc aagée de 18 ans, point d’enfant”, with no children yet, five head of cattle, two sheep and fifteen arpents^W under the plow. Martin Blanchard married Françoise LeBlanc at Port-Royal, probably about 1670.

She is the only married Françoise LeBlanc on the roll. No act names her parents, because the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost; her parentage rests on these two entries. She had three children with Martin, Françoise, Marie and Rene, born between about 1672 and 1677. By the census of 1686 Martin had married again, to Marguerite Guilbeau, and Françoise’s three children are listed as “children by his first marriage” [Francoise LEBLANC]; the bracket is the transcriber’s addition, not the roll’s words. She had died before that census.

Lines of descent

Four lines of descent run from Françoise to Floyd through two of her children, Rene Blanchard and Marie Blanchard, two through each. The nearest, nine generations above Floyd, runs through Rene. One runs down Floyd’s father’s side through Jeffrey Delahorne; three run down his mother’s side through Ida Serrette. The lines meet again in three marriages: those of Ida Serrette’s parents, Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle; of Amelia’s parents, Melia Thibodeaux and Jean Baptiste Daigle; and, last, Floyd’s own parents, Ida Serrette and Jeffrey Delahorne, since both of them descend from Françoise. The two lines through Marie rest on compiled genealogies for her identification with Pierre Melancon’s wife, so they are less certain than the other two.

Notes

Her name is not settled in every record. The 1671 roll calls her Françoise LeBlanc. On the 1686 census a later hand noted beside her children that they were “issus du 1er mariage avec Marie Leblanc”, born of the first marriage, with Marie Leblanc. A published transcription of the 1698 census glosses her as Françoise Boudrot, a name the roll itself does not give. The declarations sworn by Rene’s descendants at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 call her Marie Leblanc in two recitals and Anne Leblanc in a third. The census name, recorded in her own lifetime, is followed here. Lanctot’s compiled Familles acadiennes gives her death as 1681, at the age of twenty-eight. The marriage date of about 1670 is from Lanctot’s compiled Familles acadiennes; Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives about 1671. The same volume (tome I, p. 64) gives her birthplace as Port-Royal; this is a compiled statement, not a register entry, since the Port-Royal registers before 1702 are lost, and the census gives no birthplace.