♂Joseph Landry

Joseph Landry (baptized 15 June 1708 – 6 June 1764) was an Acadian of the Minas district^W of Nova Scotia who died in exile at Saint-Servan, France, nine years after the deportation of 1755 scattered his family across two continents. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Paul Landry.

Acadia

Joseph was born and baptized the same day at Grand-Pré, the son of Claude Landry and Catherine Thibodeau; his godparents were Claude Gotrot, who a few years later married Joseph’s sister Margueritte, and Magdelaine Leblanc. On 10 November 1727 he married Marie Josèphe Comeau, also at Grand-Pré; the marriage record names no parents for either of them, listing instead as witnesses her kinsmen Jean and Étienne Comeau and his own kinsmen Claude and Jean-Baptiste Landry. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana dates the marriage of Joseph’s sister Claire Landry to Claude Comeau, son of Jean Comeau and Catherine Babin, to that same day and place, but the published abstract of the Grand-Pré register gives Claire’s marriage as 11 November 1721, so the two weddings may not have been held together. That same compilation lists the couple, with a question mark, as being “of Minas,” an uncertainty consistent with Joseph’s own baptism at Grand-Pré, in the Minas basin.

Exile

The deportation of 1755 separated Joseph’s family for years. According to Cormier’s compilation, a daughter, Marie-Blanche, born about 1732, was deported to Virginia in 1755 and then to England in 1756, where she married about 1757; she was later repatriated to France aboard the frigate La Dorothée, reaching Saint-Malo in May 1763. According to Milton and Norma Rieder’s The Acadians in France, as quoted on a Geneanet family tree, that was the same ship, and the same year, that carried Joseph and Marie Josèphe themselves to Saint-Malo, together with two more of their children, Marie and Marguerite, and their son Pierre, on a list of the returning exiles sailing from Southampton, where the family had spent the preceding years. Their son Pierre Paul Landry, the Pierre of that list, married at Saint-Servan four years after the family’s arrival in France.

Death

Joseph died at Saint-Servan on 6 June 1764 and was buried in the parish churchyard the next day, aged fifty-seven according to the burial register; the entry misrecords his widow’s name as “Marie Marguerite” rather than Marie Josèphe. His son-in-law Pierre Le Blanc and his son Pierre Landry were present at the burial, though neither could sign his name. The genealogical compilations of Stephen A. White and of Albert J. Robichaux, as quoted on the same Geneanet tree, give the same death in June 1764 at Saint-Servan; both abstract that same register entry, so they are not independent confirmation.

Notes

Joseph’s parents, Claude Landry and Catherine Thibodeau, are named in his own baptismal entry. His elder brother Claude Landry married Madeleine Doucet on 2 February 1712; the published abstract of the Grand-Pré register (SGA-1, 53) names the groom’s parents as Claude Landry and Catherine Thibeaudo of Mines. Claude and Madeleine are therefore Joseph’s brother and sister-in-law, not his parents. The age given at Joseph’s burial, fifty-seven, implies a birth year about a year earlier than his baptism allows; the discrepancy is common to burial registers and has not been resolved. His daughter Marie-Blanche’s parentage rests on Cormier’s compilation, and the family’s Southampton stay and its crossing on La Dorothée on the Rieder roll as quoted on the Geneanet tree; neither has been checked against a register or the roll itself.