♀Jeanne Holle

Jeanne Holle (born about 1739) was the wife of the Acadian exile François Daigle, with whom she raised her children first in France and then in Spanish Louisiana. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son François-Alexandre Daigle (born 1763).

Marriage at Cherbourg

The Le Havre roll of 1772 gives Jeanne’s age as thirty-three, which puts her birth about 1739. The marriage act of 17 January 1761 at Cherbourg names her parents as Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, “bourgeois de Cherbourg”, and says her father was already dead. Father Donald Hébert’s printed abstract and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana place the marriage in the parish of Très-Sainte-Trinité, a name the act itself does not give. Cormier takes the phrase to mean that Jeanne and her parents were from Cherbourg rather than Acadia, and she does not appear to have been an Acadian herself. On that day she married François Daigle, an Acadian who, in Cormier’s account, had been deported to that city three years before, joining her to a refugee community she had not shared. The groom, a minor, was the son of the late Abraham Daigle and the late Anne Boudrot, and his elder brother Jean Daigle consented as his guardian; the bride signed the act and the groom made his mark.

About six weeks before the wedding, on Sunday 7 December 1760, a marriage contract was drawn up at Cherbourg. It names Jeanne as the daughter of Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, and François as the son of Abraham Daigle and Anne Boudrot, and her mother was among those present. In 1790 Jeanne produced the contract at Manchac when the estate was settled, and the division paid her the sum it named.

France

Her eldest son, François-Alexandre, was born on 7 February 1763 and baptized at Cherbourg the next day; his baptismal entry names his mother as “Jeanne Holley” and his father as an inhabitant of Acadia and a mariner by trade. Four of the children were baptized at Cherbourg between 1761 and 1769, the last of them, Marie-Jeanne-Jacqueline, in September 1769, so the family was still there then; her husband’s elder brother Jean stood godfather to Marie-Thérèse. The Archigny register records their daughter Marie-Thérèse’s marriage on 19 November 1776, in which the parents were described as former residents of Acadia, now of the parish of Archigny in Poitou.

By 15 September 1772 the family was living at Le Havre, where the government’s roll of the Acadian families in France took down the household. Milton and Norma Rieder printed the roll in abstract in The Acadians in France 1762-1776 (1967), and the entry, written under the name Daigre, gives François as a carpenter and Jeanne, thirty-three, as sewing and spinning. Their daughter Marie-Thérèse, ten, was already an apprentice embroiderer. Four younger children were listed with her, from François-Alexandre, eight, to Flore-Adélaïde, one, and a sixth, Marie-Louise, born on 3 July 1773, was added to the entry after the roll’s date.

Louisiana

In 1785, according to Cormier, Jeanne, François and four of their children sailed to Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont, the third of the Seven Ships that carried Acadian exiles from France to Spanish Louisiana; the ship reached New Orleans in late August, and most of its passengers went on to Manchac. Cormier gives the Spanish list of the Acadians at Fort Bute^W, near Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, in 1788 as counting the family there.

François was dead by September 1790, when two of their daughters, Marie-Jeanne-Jacqueline and Marie-Louise, married in a double wedding at St. Gabriel; the second record calls their mother Jeanne, of Manchac, and neither names her as deceased. Two months earlier, on 21 July 1790, another daughter, Flore-Adélaïde, married at Pointe Coupée.

On 20 October 1790 the goods of François were inventoried at Fort Bute, Manchac, and the inventory records that he had “died intestate”. On 21 October the estate was divided among his widow and six children. Jeanne signed the division in her own name, her son Louis signed his, and the other children made their marks. The share set aside for Marie-Thérèse, who was “absent in France”, went to her mother on condition that she send it on to her.

On 18 September 1791 she was godmother at the baptism, at St. Gabriel, of her grandson Juan Francisco, son of her daughter Flore-Adélaïde and John Charles Toulier, so she was living then. A Pointe Coupée baptism of 14 June 1792 lists a Jeanne Holley among the sponsors of a child of Marie-Jeanne-Jacqueline, a record that fits her. On 2 November 1805 she was still living at Baton Rouge, when a Spanish succession record for the estate of her son’s wife, Rose Adelaide Bourg, listed five pesos that he owed to her.

Notes

No record of Jeanne’s death has been found. Her parentage, and the description of her parents as of the Cherbourg bourgeoisie, rest on the 1761 marriage act in the Cherbourg register. Her surname is written Holey on the 1772 roll and Hollet, Holeyte or Holley in the Louisiana records, and Cormier’s sources give it also as Aulai, Aulet and Rollet. The roll’s printed abstract writes her husband Daigre and the youngest child “Marie Louis”. Cormier’s passenger list of 1785 has her at 47, which would put her birth about 1738; the age on the roll is followed here. The editor of the English translation dates the marriage contract 1730, though its text reads 1760. Some family trees give 18 September 1791 as the date of her death; that is the date of the St. Gabriel baptism at which she was godmother, and the death date appears to have been taken from it. The contract and the 1790 division are printed in the English translation of the Spanish archives of West Florida, 1782 to 1816, and the 1791 baptism is in the Diocese of Baton Rouge church records, volume 2.