♀Jeanne Hebert

Jeanne Hebert was an Acadian woman of Les Mines, the settlement on the Minas Basin around Grand-Pré, the wife of Francois LeBlanc and the mother of a large family baptised and married in the Grand-Pré register; when her daughter Cecile was baptised in 1717, the godfather was “Sieur Jean Mouton, chirurgien”, a surgeon. Her daughter Marguerite LeBlanc (born about 1714) married Charles Hébert, brother of Osite Hebert (born 1730), a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014); Jeanne herself was not an ancestor of his.

Family

Jeanne Hebert and Francois LeBlanc were already married when the Grand-Pré registers begin, and their daughter Anne was baptized there on 16 January 1708. The register usually spells her name “Jeanne Hubert”, and sometimes “Hebert”. At least nine of the couple’s children appear in it, baptized between 1708 and 1729 or married there between 1727 and 1748. The surgeon who stood godfather to Cecile in August 1717 is given the title “Sieur”, an honorific used for men of some standing, which the register does not give to the child’s father or to her godmother.

When Anne married Germain Landry at Grand-Pré on 4 July 1729, the register described her parents as “of Mines”, and at the marriage of her daughter Marie Joseph in October 1737 the couple were called “of the parish of St Charles de la Grande Pré”. On 2 August 1734 Jeanne stood godmother, as “Jeanne Hubert, wife of Francois Leblanc”, to her granddaughter Anne Landry, Anne’s third daughter.

No record of her parents has been found; the registers of Port-Royal from before 1702, where a baptism would have been kept, are lost. Compiled genealogies make her a daughter of Jean Hébert and Anne Doucet, and so a sister of Joseph Hébert, the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014). Their household in the Port-Royal census of 1686 included a daughter Jeanne, aged three, but the same couple’s household in the census of 1693 lists no Jeanne, and no act ties her to them. No record of her death has been found.

Notes

Parentage

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 3, page 368) lists a Jeanne Hébert, born in 1683 and “fille de Jean et d’Anne Doucet”, who married François LeBlanc. The census of 1686 gives the household’s daughter Jeanne as three years old. No act that names her parents survives, so the parentage is probable, not proved.

Another Jeanne Hebert lived at Les Mines in the same years: the daughter of Estienne Hubert and Jeanne Commeaux, as the register spells them, she married Claude Benoit at Grand-Pré on 17 January 1711, by which time Jeanne, the wife of Francois LeBlanc, was already married and had at least two children. The two women are different people.

Anne LeBlanc and Germain Landry’s daughter Marie Josephe, born at Grand-Pré in 1730, was once taken for the wife of Joseph Braux and so for an ancestor; the St. Gabriel burial of that wife in 1807, aged 70, places her birth about 1737, and the 1730 girl is not on the line.