♂Jean Babin

Jean Babin (about 1684 – before 20 June 1751) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who made his home on the Pisiguit River, in the Minas Basin, with his wife, Marguerite Boudrot, and raised their family there. He was most likely the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Babin (died before 1777).

Port-Royal

Jean was probably the youngest son of the farmer Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier. When the census of 1686 was taken at Port-Royal, a Jean, aged two, was the youngest of the eight children still living in their household. His father died before the next count, in 1693. Many sons of Port-Royal families moved to the Minas Basin between 1686 and 1714, and Jean was one of them; his elder brother Vincent was already living there, at Pisiguit^W, in 1693.

The Minas Basin

He is reckoned to have married Marguerite Boudrot, a daughter of Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg, about 1706. A census of Les Mines^W in 1707 counts Jean Babin and his wife with one boy under fourteen. Two of their children were baptized in the church of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré: Marguerite, born on 21 August 1708 and baptized three days later, and Germain, born on 29 April 1711 and baptized on 24 May. Marguerite’s godfather was Jean Babin, the son of Vincent Babin, who signed the register; Germain’s godparents were Germain Landry and Marie Boudrot.

By 1714 the family was living on the Pisiguit River. That year’s census, as Bona Arsenault extracted it, lists Vincent Babin and Jean Babin side by side among the settlers of the river, and a transcription of the same census gives Jean and his wife two sons and two daughters. The family is said to have belonged to the parish of Sainte-Famille at Pisiguit, whose registers do not survive, and the rest of the children are known only from compiled genealogies. With Marguerite and Germain, those genealogies name at least five more: Paul, Anne, Jean-Baptiste, Joseph and Marie-Josèphe.

Death

Jean died before 20 June 1751, at a place that is not recorded. On that day his widow was buried at Port-La-Joye^W on Île Saint-Jean^W, where she had gone in her last years, and the priest entered her as the wife of the late Jean Baptiste Babin.

The family

Before the deportation of 1755, two of the daughters, Marguerite and Marie-Josèphe, had moved with their husbands, Benjamin and François Landry, to Île Saint-Jean, where both families were living in 1752. The sons’ families were caught in the deportation itself: Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana records that the wives of Paul, Joseph and Jean-Baptiste Babin were exiled to Maryland in 1755. By July 1763 the wives of Joseph and Jean-Baptiste were counted as widows at Oxford, Maryland, and in 1766 and 1767 all three women reached Louisiana as widows.

Notes

Parentage and marriage

No surviving record names Jean’s parents. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives him as Jean Babin, born in 1684, son of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier, of Port-Royal, who settled at Pisiguit and married Marguerite Boudrot, daughter of Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg, about 1706; it adds that he lived in the parish of Sainte-Famille. The identification rests on Arsenault and on the Jean, aged two, in Antoine Babin’s household in 1686. Online family trees citing Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes give the marriage as about 1705, at Port-Royal.

Records

The census entries of 1686, 1707 and 1714 are known from modern transcriptions of the rolls; the list of the settlers of the Pisiguit River in 1714 is Arsenault’s, in L’Acadie des ancêtres (1955). The baptisms of 1708 and 1711, each naming the parents as Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot, are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a). He is plain Jean in the baptisms and Jean Baptiste in his widow’s burial entry of 1751.

Namesakes

Two other men of the name lived on the Minas Basin and at Port-Royal at the same time. The godfather of 1708 was Vincent Babin’s son Jean, born about 1689, and so is not the father of the child. A Jean Babineau of Port-Royal also had a wife named Marguerite Boudrot, an older woman, the widow of François Bourg; their daughters married at Port-Royal in 1711 and 1713, and the couple is a generation too old to be this one.

The children

Marguerite and Germain are named in their baptisms. Paul, Anne, Jean-Baptiste, Joseph and Marie-Josèphe are named as children of Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot in Steven A. Cormier’s The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, in his entries for their wives and husbands; one of those entries calls the couple “of Pigiguit” and another “of Annapolis Royal”. Arsenault lists only Marguerite (1708), Germain (1711) and Marie (about 1720), and his Marie is Cormier’s Marie-Josèphe, the wife of François Landry, though the two compilers give François different parents. The daughters’ husbands and their presence on Île Saint-Jean in 1752 are from Arsenault, and Cormier places François Landry at Rivière-du-Nord on the island in August 1752.