♂Jacques Hébert

Jacques Hébert (born about 1684; died before 1764) was an Acadian settler at Grand-Pré, in the Minas district, and the father of at least eleven children, whose baptisms and marriages fill the parish register of St. Charles aux Mines from its first page onward. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his probable daughter Osite Hebert (born about 1730) and his son François Hébert (1710–1789).

Family

Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry are said to have married about 1706, before the surviving register of St. Charles aux Mines begins in 1707. They had at least eleven children, seven daughters and four sons. The register, as abstracted in the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, records the baptisms of ten of them between October 1707 and April 1727, the parents’ surname written sometimes Hébert and sometimes Hubert; the first of them, their daughter Isabelle, baptized on 4 October 1707, is entered on the book’s first page. Their son Charles was born and baptized on 3 November 1708. A daughter Ursule appears in the register only at her marriage, in 1735. A daughter Osite, born about 1730, is probably theirs as well, though no baptism for her is in the register: Stephen White’s dictionary of the Acadian families names her as their daughter, and the record of her remarriage in 1771 names Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry as her parents.

In 1707 the census roll of Les Mines lists him with a wife and no children, on three arpents of land, with six cattle, five sheep and six hogs. In February 1711 Marguerite stood godmother to a LeBlanc child, entered as “Marguerite Landry, wife of Jacques Hubert”. The census roll of 1714 at Grand-Pré lists Jacques Hébert and his wife, with five children: two sons and three daughters.

Parents

Jacques was a son of Emmanuel Hébert and Andrée Brun of Port-Royal. The census of 1686, as transcribed, lists their household with the children Guillaume, six, Marguerite, five, Jean, three, and Jacques, two; that of 1693 lists Guillaume, twelve, Jean, nine, Jacque, eight, Alexandre, seven, and Martin, six. No register names him as their son. Bona Arsenault^W’s genealogy of the Acadians gives “Jacques Hebert, 1684, fils d’Emmanuel et d’Andrée Brun, de Port-Royal”, married about 1706 to Marguerite Landry, and the ages in the censuses fit that birth.

The children’s marriages

Between 1726 and 1745 the register records ten marriages of nine of the children at Grand-Pré, and in most of them the priest noted that bride and groom were related in the third or fourth degree. The first was Isabelle’s, written Elizabeth in the entry, to Jean Doucet in 1726; Charles married Marguerite LeBlanc on 28 May 1733. A Jacques Hébert was among the witnesses at every one of these marriages, and in most of the entries he made his mark rather than signing; the entries do not call him the father, but he most likely was.

Their daughter Magdeleine married Joseph Melançon in 1738 and died at Grand-Pré on 29 November 1746, aged 28; her burial entry names her as a daughter of Jacques Hébert. Another daughter, Marie Joseph, baptized on 21 November 1711, appears in two marriage entries: on 14 October 1737 she married Charles Gautrot, and on 23 November 1739 François Bourg, both times aged about 26, and the second entry does not call her a widow. Both grooms came from families of Cobequid, and François Bourg was a brother of Alexandre Bourg, who had married her sister Ursule in 1735. The register holds no burial for Charles Gautrot and no child of the couple, so it is not known whether he died unrecorded between the two marriages or whether there were two daughters named Marie Joseph.

Declarations taken from Acadian exiles in France, as printed in the Attakapas Gazette, later place their son Charles at Saint-Malo and record that their daughter Anne had married again at Bristol, England, in 1758.

Jacques died before 6 March 1764. On that day, at the cathedral of Saint-Malo in France, his son Charles, then 54 and a widower of Marguerite LeBlanc, remarried; the entry calls him the son of the late Jacques Hébert and the late Marguerite Landry.

Lines of descent

The first line of descent runs through his probable daughter Osite Hebert (born about 1730). The second runs through his son François Hébert (1710–1789). Both lines reach Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). The two lines meet again in Ida, whose parents, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) and Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926), both descend from Jacques Hébert.

Notes

The day and place of his death are not known. The only record of it is an abstract of the marriage at Saint-Malo on 6 March 1764, which marks him as dead (“fils de Jacques +”). Two men of his name buried at Grand-Pré in December 1747 and January 1748, aged about 27 and about 43, were too young to be him. A Landry genealogy printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1989, drawing on Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadian families, gives his birth as 1684.

The marriage

The marriage is dated only as about 1706. Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled genealogy, Familles acadiennes, vol. II, gives 25 January 1706 at Grand-Pré; its vol. I gives the same day at Port-Royal. The Port-Royal marriages listed by the Nova Scotia Archives include no such act but do include a marriage of Jean Hébert and Magdelaine Dugas on 25 January 1704. The date therefore rests on a compilation, not on a surviving act.

The 1707 roll

The roll of Les Mines for 1707 reads “Jacques Hebert sa femme”, with no children, 3 arpents, 6 cattle, 5 sheep and 6 hogs. It does not name the wife and gives no ages, so the identification with Marguerite Landry rests on the parish register, whose baptisms from 1707 on name Jacques Hebert and Marguerite Landry as parents.

The 1714 census

The census roll of 1714 at Grand-Pré reads “Jacques Hebert et sa femme”, with two males and three females, between Pierre Vincent and Guillaume Hebert, and Jean Thibodeau two lines further on. The roll does not name the wife. Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled genealogy gives her as Marguerite Landry and her husband as 30 years old, and its household count of two males and three females agrees with the roll.