♂Janvier Braux

Janvier Braux (died between 1763 and 1768) was an Acadian exile, counted with his wife and infant daughter among the Acadians at Port Tobacco, Maryland, in 1763, whose widow brought their three young daughters to Louisiana in 1768. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Pelagie Braux (born about 1762).

Acadia and exile to Maryland

Janvier Braux married Osite Landry; the place and date of the marriage are not recorded. On 7 July 1763 a list of the Acadians at Port Tobacco, Maryland, a French-headed list drawn up in British Maryland, counted a household of three, “Jean Braux, Osite Braux son épouse, Pelagie Braux”, which most likely stands for Janvier, his wife, and their infant daughter Marguerite Pelagie. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, two more daughters, Magdelaine (about 1765) and Marie (August 1767), were born in Maryland before Janvier died; no record of his death, burial, or the circumstances has been found. Cormier has the widow, “Rose-Osite Landry, age 30,” reaching Louisiana in February 1768 in an extended party of about 150 Acadians from Port Tobacco led by Alexis and Honoré Breau.

The family in Louisiana

According to Cormier, the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa^W, forced the party, most of whom had kin on the Acadian Coast, to the isolated post of Fort San Luis de Natchez. Cormier gives the youngest daughter, Marie, as dying there on 5 October 1768, within months of the family’s arrival, with no age; he gives the same date for another Marie in the party, so the record does not settle which of them died there. Ulloa was overthrown in the autumn of 1768, in the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768^W, the same year the party reached Natchez; Cormier has his successor releasing the Acadians from Natchez in late 1769, and Osite’s household moved to San Gabriel.

Marguerite Pelagie married Pierre LeBlanc on 5 October 1778, in an entry in the Ascension register, and the register names her parents as “Janvier & Osite Landry, of St. Gabriel” — the fullest surviving record of Janvier himself, entered a decade after his death. Her sister Magdelaine married Charle Hebert, a son of Pierre Hebert and Marguerite LeBlanc, at St. Gabriel on 18 May 1785.

Notes

No Louisiana register, census, or burial record of Janvier Braux has been found; everything known of him comes from the 1763 Maryland list, from the marriage entries of his daughters in 1778 and 1785, and from the grandparent clauses of his grandchildren’s baptisms, which continued to name him for decades after his death, in spellings including Janvier, Xavier, Bro, and Breaud.

The sources disagree about how the family reached St. Gabriel. Cormier’s compilation puts Osite’s household in the party that arrived from Port Tobacco in February 1768 and was sent to Natchez, and this account follows it. Carl Brasseaux’s account of the Maryland Acadians in Louisiana (The Founding of New Acadia, pp. 81–82) describes a group that reached New Orleans in July or August 1767 and was destined for Fort St. Gabriel, as well as the February 1768 group sent to Natchez; it gives no passenger list for the 1767 group. The register calls the household “of St. Gabriel” only in 1778.

A Baton Rouge diocesan register recording Marguerite Pelagie’s second marriage in 1793 gives the bride’s parents as “(Juan & Margarita Landry).” Those are most likely the parents of her first husband, Pierre LeBlanc, miscopied, since his mother was Marguerite Landry. Cormier explains the entry differently, as the priest writing “Juan” as an echo of Janvier and giving the bride’s own name in place of Osite’s.