♀Jeanne Boudrot

Jeanne Boudrot (about 1646 – 8 May 1710) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, where she and her husband, Bonaventure Thériot, farmed for at least a quarter of a century and raised at least three daughters. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines of descent, through her daughters Anne Thériot (born about 1673), Marie Terriot (about 1667–1734) and Marguerite Thériot (about 1678–1740).

Port-Royal

Jeanne Boudrot was born about 1646 at Port-Royal, a daughter of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, and the second of their eleven children. Acadian exiles who made declarations in 1767 remembered that her parents had come from France. No record of her marriage to Bonaventure Thériot survives, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost; Bona Arsenault^W’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians places it about 1666.

When the census of 1671 was taken, the couple were farming at Port-Royal with one child, their daughter Marie, aged four. They kept six cattle and six sheep and had two arpents^W of land under the plow. The next household the census-taker entered was her parents’, who still counted Jeanne, aged twenty-five, among their three married daughters.

By 1686 Bonaventure was forty-three and Jeanne forty-two. Marie was no longer at home, and the compiled genealogies have her married to Claude Gautrot about 1684; living with them were their daughters Anne, twelve, and Marguerite, eight. The farm had doubled to four arpents, with five cattle, six sheep and two pigs, and the household owned a gun.

Published transcriptions of the later censuses show the farm still growing. In 1693 only Marguerite, fourteen, was still at home, with a sixteen-year-old servant named Joseph, and the couple had fourteen arpents, eighteen cattle, twelve sheep and ten pigs. By 1698 they also had twenty fruit trees.

Death

Jeanne Boudrot died at Port-Royal on 8 May 1710, having received the last sacraments, and was buried the next day by Justinien Durand, a Récollet^W friar. The register names her as the wife of Bonaventure Teriot and gives her age as about sixty.

Bonaventure outlived her. By 1718 he was living at Les Mines^W, where their daughter Anne had settled with her husband, René Landry, and he stood witness at Grand-Pré when Anne’s daughter Marie married Pierre LeBlanc. Their descendants in exile still remembered where each of them had died: a declaration made on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 names Marguerite Thériot as the daughter of Bonaventure, “decede aux Mines”, and of Jeanne Boudrot, “morte au Port-Royal”.

Lines of descent

Jeanne reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines, through her daughters Anne, Marie and Marguerite Thériot. All four run on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990), and the nearest is nine generations up. Two lines pass through Marie, whom compiled genealogies make Claude Gautrot’s wife. One line runs through Anne, her son Antoine Landry and his daughter Judith Landry (born 1728), whose identification as Joseph Leblanc’s mother is probable rather than proved. The lines meet again in the parents of Pierre Anatole Serrett, Firmin Serrette and Euphemie Dupuis; in Floyd’s maternal grandparents, Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle; and in Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc’s parents.

Notes

Her age

Her age drifts from record to record. The census of 1671 gives her twenty-six in her own household and twenty-five on her parents’ line, which places her birth about 1645 or 1646; the roll of 1686 gives forty-two, and transcriptions of the censuses of 1693 and 1698 give forty-eight and fifty. The burial register’s “about sixty” makes her some years younger than the censuses do. Arsenault gives a birth year of 1645. The burial register writes her surname Boutrot.

Anne’s mother

Two declarations made in exile in 1767 disagree on the mother of her daughter Anne. Anne’s granddaughter Marie Magdeleine Leblanc named Anne as “fille de Bonaventure Theriot et de Marie Gautrot du Port Royal”; the other declaration names Jeanne Boudrot as the mother of Anne’s sister Marguerite. Marie Gautrot was the name of the wife of Bonaventure’s brother Claude Thériot, and the declaration does not explain why she is named. The censuses settle it for Jeanne: she was Bonaventure’s wife in 1671, before Anne’s birth; in 1686 Anne, twelve, and Marguerite, eight, were living with Bonaventure and Jeanne; and in 1710 she was buried as his wife.

Marie

The census of 1671 lists the couple’s only child as a daughter, Marie, aged four. The identification of that child with the Marie Terriot who married Claude Gautrot is the genealogists’ own, not a record’s: Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy (Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, volume 2, page 806), J.-Hervé Béliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families and a Cormier compilation on the Gautreaux family all make it. Arsenault gives the other Marie Thériot of those years, a daughter of Claude Thériot and Marie Gautrot, as the wife of Pierre LeBlanc.