♂Guillaume Blanchard

Guillaume Blanchard (about 1650 – before 3 January 1718) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, a younger son of the settlers Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, the husband of Huguette Goujon and the father of eleven children. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through two of his daughters.

Marriage and family

No record of the marriage of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon survives, as the parish register of Port-Royal begins only in 1702; Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s compiled genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families dates it about 1672. The censuses from 1686 to 1701 name eleven children, five daughters and six sons, born between about 1674 and 1698. The eldest, Marie, was already married to Charles Bourgeois by 1693, and the couple and their baby daughter were counted in her parents’ household.

Eight of the children married between 1707 and 1718, and each entry in the register names Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon as the parents. Isabelle married Claude Girouard on 5 February 1709, and Jeanne, the widow of Olivier Daigle, married Jean Prince on 30 January 1715.

The Petitcoudiac

Late in his life, according to Bona Arsenault’s history of the first Acadians, Guillaume was one of the first companions of the miller Pierre Thibodeau at Chipoudy in 1698, and afterwards settled at the mouth of the Petitcoudiac river with his sons René, Antoine and Jean and his son-in-law Olivier Daigle. Arsenault writes that the colony begun by Thibodeau grew into the three parishes of Chipoudy, Petitcoudiac and Memramcook. The censuses of Port-Royal nevertheless count Guillaume and his household in 1698, 1700, 1701 and 1703, and the records do not show when, or whether, he moved.

Death

Guillaume was dead by 3 January 1718, when the register of Annapolis Royal called both him and Huguette deceased at the marriage of their son Charles; the entry for their son Pierre’s marriage in November of that year does the same. At Jeanne’s marriage in 1715 neither is so described, which does not show that either was then living. Régis Brun’s study of the Acadians before 1755 places his death about 1716.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon by two separate lines, both on his mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). One runs through their daughter Anne Blanchard (born about 1684), ten generations up from Floyd; the other through their daughter Jeanne Blanchard (born about 1681), eleven generations up. The two lines meet again in the marriage of Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857) and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (1827–1867), whose daughter Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850) was Floyd’s great-grandmother; both of her parents descend from this couple.

Notes

The surviving copy of the census roll of 1671 gives his age as twenty-one. The censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698, 1700, 1701 and 1703 are given in the transcriptions published on acadian-home.org. In his commentary on the Belle-Île declarations, Edme Rameau de Saint-Père gives Guillaume as married to “Huguette Goujon” in the census of 1686, with three daughters and two sons, René aged eight and Antoine six, and dated the marriage 1675; Beliveau gives about 1672 and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadian families of Louisiana about 1673.

The eleven children are counted from the household lists, and the sources count differently: Casgrain’s account gives ten children, six of them boys, and the study From Migrant to Acadian twelve by 1698. The marriages of 1707 to 1718, including those of Isabelle in 1709 and Jeanne in 1715, are given in the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755. Neither parent is marked deceased in 1715, and both are in 1718.

The stay of Olivier Daigle and Jeanne Blanchard on the Petitcoudiac, if it happened, was short: the census of 1700 found Olivier in his mother’s household, and the register of Port-Royal shows the couple’s children baptized there from 1703 and Olivier buried there in 1709.

Port-Royal

When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal, Guillaume was twenty-one and still living at home with his parents, Jehan Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, while his elder brother Martin, twenty-four, was already married. No surviving act names Guillaume’s parents, so his identification with that young man rests on the name, the age and the parish, and the compiled genealogies of the family make the same identification. The later censuses fit it: they give his age as thirty-five in 1686 and forty-two in 1693, which again points to a birth about 1650. Floyd Amatus Delahorne also descends from Martin Blanchard, so Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert are his ancestors through both brothers.

Remembered in exile

In 1767 descendants of his brother Martin, exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany, made sworn declarations of their ancestry. They named Martin’s father not as Jean but as a Guillaume Blanchard who had come from France with his wife, and one of them called her “Huguet Poirier”. The census of 1671, taken in Martin’s lifetime, makes Guillaume his younger brother instead. The Acadian genealogist Stephen A. White has argued that the declarants took Martin’s brother and sister-in-law for his parents, and that the surname Poirier came from Huguette’s mother, Jeanne Chebrat, whose first husband had been a Jean Poirier.