♀Jeanne Blanchard

Jeanne Blanchard (about 1681 – before 15 February 1762) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the daughter of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon, who was left a widow at about twenty-eight with five young children and a sixth on the way, and who married again and raised a second family in the town under British rule. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Paul Daigle.

Her family

Jeanne was the fourth of the eleven children of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon. The censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1700 find her at home with them, at five, eleven, seventeen and eighteen. By 1701 she was in the household of her husband, Olivier Daigre. Her father was born about 1650. Both of her parents were dead by 3 January 1718, when the register called them deceased at the marriage of her brother Charles. Her mother, Huguette, was in 1671 the fourteen-year-old daughter of Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chebrat, farmers of Port-Royal.

Lines of descent

Her younger sister Anne Blanchard (born about 1684) is also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Paul Bourgeois, so Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon are his ancestors through two of their daughters. The two lines meet again at Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850).

Marriage to Olivier Daigle

Olivier Daigle was in the household of Jean Fardel in the census of 1700, aged twenty-six and unmarried. The census of 1701 lists him at twenty-eight, with his wife Jeanne, twenty. The marriage therefore took place between the two censuses, in 1700 or 1701.

Olivier, Jeanne, Marguerite and Jean Baptiste were born between 1703 and 1710. Two more children, Marie and Paul, are known from their marriages, which name Olivier and Jeanne as their parents; no baptism is recorded for either.

Olivier died at Port-Royal on 22 September 1709. The register of his burial gives his age as about forty, though the censuses make him about thirty-five. Their last child, Jean Baptiste, was born on 22 February 1710, five months after his father’s burial, and was baptized on 18 April, when the register called Olivier deceased.

A second family

In October 1710 a British and New England force took Port-Royal^W, and the conquerors renamed it Annapolis Royal. Jeanne stayed on with her children. On 30 January 1715 she married Jean Prince at Port-Royal, the son of the late Jacques Prince and of Marguerite Hebert, of Les Mines^W. The register calls her the widow of Olivier D’Aigre and names her parents as Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon.

Five children of Jean Prince and Jeanne Blanchard were baptized at Annapolis Royal between 1715 and 1723.

Her older children stood as godparents to the new family. Marie, written in the register as the daughter of Jeanne Blanchard and Olivier d’Aigre, was godmother to Marie Joseph in 1715, and a Paul D’Aigre and an Olivier D’Aigre, most likely her sons, were godfathers to Honoré in 1717 and to Joseph in 1719.

Later years

The register of Marguerite’s marriage at Annapolis Royal in 1728 describes Jeanne as married a second time, to Jean Le Prince.

Jeanne died at Port-Royal, which the British had renamed Annapolis Royal, before 15 February 1762. On that day her son Jean Baptiste married at Bécancour, Quebec, and the entry calls her deceased. The entry for her son Pierre Prince’s marriage in 1750 does not call her deceased. Declarations made in 1767 by her grandchildren, then exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, remember her and Olivier as having both died at Port Royal.

Notes

The entries for 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1701 appear in the transcriptions published on acadian-home.org. The 1700 entry for Olivier’s household is recorded on the manuscript census of Acadia. The 1701 entry also lists a Pierre, aged five, and an Anne, aged three, in Olivier’s household. Jeanne was then twenty, and the census does not say whose children they were. They cannot be hers and Olivier’s: he was still unmarried in 1700 and living in his mother’s household, that of Jean Fardel.

The register page for Paul’s marriage at Beaubassin names him as the son “de defunt Olivier Daigle et Jeanne Blanchard ses pere et mere de la paroisse de port Royal”.

The marriage of 1715 is entered on the page of the Nova Scotia Archives’ register (RG 1, vol. 26, p. 313), which calls her “Jeanne Blanchard veuve d’Olivier Daigre”. The burial of 1709 and the baptisms come from the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755, not from the original page.

The register writes her second husband’s surname Prince and, from 1721, Le Prince, and her first husband’s name as D’Aigre or Daigre.

A compiled history gives Olivier and Jeanne six children, which matches the six in the registers. Beliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families gives Huguette as the daughter of Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chabrat, and the census of 1671 gives the same names and her age of fourteen.

Her father’s parents

Guillaume was born about 1650 and was the Guillaume Blanchard, aged twenty-one, whom the census of 1671 lists in the household of Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, beside his brother Martin. No act names his parents, so this rests on the name, the age and the parish, and the ages given for him in 1686 and 1693, thirty-five and forty-two, agree with it.