♂Jean-Baptiste Landry

Jean-Baptiste Landry (about 1710 – before 5 February 1777) was an Acadian of the parish of Holy Family at Pisiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, who was driven into exile by the expulsion of 1755 and, twelve years later, settled with his children at St. Gabriel, a new Acadian community on the Mississippi in Spanish Louisiana. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Josephe Landry (born about 1737).

Pisiguit and the exile

Jean-Baptiste was born about 1710; who his parents were is not settled. He is believed to have married Anne Babin about 1731, and the couple made their home in the parish of Holy Family (Sainte-Famille) at Pisiguit: when their daughter Marie-Madeleine married in Louisiana in 1769, the register called her a native of “Holy Family Parish, Acadia”. The couple had seven known children, born between about 1737 and about 1754.

In the fall of 1755, when the British expelled the Acadians of the Minas Basin, the family was most likely among those shipped to Maryland. Anne seems to have died in those first years of exile: when colonial officials counted the Acadians at Oxford, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in July 1763, Jean-Baptiste was there as a widower with their children.

St. Gabriel

In 1767 Jean-Baptiste and his children were probably among more than forty members of the Landry family who sailed from Maryland by way of Cap-Français, in Saint-Domingue^W, and reached New Orleans in July. The new arrivals are said to have wanted to join their relatives downriver at Cabanocé (St. James), but the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa^W, insisted that they settle in a new Acadian community farther up the river, and so Jean-Baptiste became one of the first settlers of St. Gabriel. Spanish officials entered him there as a widower and the head of family number 33, with his son Jean-Athanase, aged sixteen, and four daughters, and assigned him farm number 38. His elder son, Hyacinthe, came as the head of a household of his own, with his wife.

Their daughter Marie Josephe, through whom the line descends, had married Joseph Braux, and she came to Louisiana with her own family early in 1768. The entries for the weddings of three daughters in Louisiana, in 1769, 1770 and 1777, name Jean-Baptiste Landry and Anne Babin as the bride’s parents; the entry of 1770, for Marie-Rose’s marriage to Simon Richard, calls them “Acadians, res. of Post Manchac”. Jean-Baptiste is not known to have married again. By the last of these weddings, Marie-Perpétue’s to Michel Breaux at St. James, downriver from St. Gabriel, on 5 February 1777, both parents were dead.

Notes

Records

The deportation of 1755, the marriage about 1731, the counts of the Acadians at Oxford in 1763 and of the settlers of St. Gabriel in 1767, the voyage of 1767 and the governor’s part in the settling of St. Gabriel are known from Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, which abstracts the contemporary lists. Carl A. Brasseaux’s The Founding of New Acadia also names Jean-Baptiste Landry among the Acadian pioneers of St. Gabriel. The arrival of Marie Josephe’s family in 1768 is known from a Spanish report that Cormier summarizes. The three weddings are known from the published abstracts of the registers (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vols. 1b and 2).

Age

His birth about 1710 is Cormier’s reckoning. The Spanish report on the St. Gabriel settlers in 1767 gives his age as 50, which Cormier marks as an error.

Parentage

His parents are not settled. Cormier makes him a son of Germain Landry and Marie Melanson. The summary of the 1796 dispensation for his grandson’s marriage, below, makes Carlos’s maternal grandfather, Juan Landry, the “legitimate son of Abraham Landry and Maria Traham”. With the two in conflict, no parents are given for him here.

His wife’s death

Cormier’s abstract of the Oxford count of 1763 lists “wife Anne” in his entry for Jean-Baptiste, but his entries for the children place them there “with widowed father”, and he takes the Anne of the list to be the youngest daughter, Marie-Perpétue. The Spanish report of 1767 calls Jean-Baptiste a widower. The entry of 5 February 1777 for Marie-Perpétue’s marriage names the bride’s parents as “Jean Baptiste & Anne Babin, both decd.”

His daughter Marie Josephe

Marie Josephe is not among the children counted with Jean-Baptiste in 1763 or 1767, and Cormier gives her no parents. She is placed in this family by the dispensation^W of January 1796 for the marriage of her son Carlos Braud, written Carlos Brand, to Rosalia Landry. The calendar of the Archives of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas, at the University of Notre Dame, summarizes the Spanish file: “That Maria Joseph Landry, Carlos’ mother, is the legitimate daughter of Juan Landry and Ana Baben.” Juan and Ana are the Spanish forms of Jean and Anne, and the Spanish report of 1767 names Jean-Baptiste as Juan Baptista Landri. An online family tree places her in the same family.