♂Joseph Hébert

Joseph Hébert (fl. 1707–1748) was an Acadian farmer, the husband of Anne Boudrot and the father of five children known from the register of Beaubassin^W, among them a daughter who married there in 1748. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie-Josèphe Hébert (1730–1760).

Records

A copy of the Acadian census of 1707, which a later transcription places at Beaubassin, lists “Joseph Hébert” and “Anne Boudrot” as a couple with no children yet, holding 12 arpents of land, eight cattle, fifteen sheep and three hogs. The copy gives no ages; the ages that appear with the entry online were added by an editor. The couple appear again in the Beaubassin register on 19 June 1748, when their daughter Marie married Paul Daigle and was entered as “fille de Joseph Hébert et de Anne Boudrot”. His parents were probably Jean Hébert and Anne Doucet, of Port-Royal, though no record names them.

Children

The Beaubassin register names five children of Joseph Hébert and his wife, who is written Anne Marie Boudrot in most of the acts: François, Anne, Madeleine, Marguerite and Marie-Josèphe. François was born on 17 May 1719 and baptized on 2 June, and married in 1742. Anne, Madeleine and Marguerite each married at Beaubassin, in 1733, 1745 and 1746, and Marie-Josèphe married in 1748.

Notes

Identity

Many Acadian men bore his name, and online family trees give him a birth about 1685 at Port-Royal, a marriage about 1706, and a large family, including an elder daughter also named Marie-Josèphe; these rest on compiled genealogies and on a census entry of 1686 for a Hébert infant named Joseph. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 3, pages 368 and 859) names the Beaubassin Joseph as the son of Jean Hébert and Anne Doucet, and Cormier’s compiled genealogy gives him a birth at Port-Royal in November 1685. No surviving act names his parents, the Port-Royal registers before 1702 being lost, so that parentage is probable, not proved. No record of his birth or death has been found.

Two other acts, of 1712 and 1742, name an Anne Marie Boudrot as the wife of a Jean Hébert and of a Michel Hébert, so either the clerks wrote the father’s name wrongly or there was more than one couple of that name. For that reason the larger family that some trees give this couple is unproven.