♂Joseph Leblanc

Joseph Leblanc (born about 1756 – buried 16 March 1811), known in the records of his parish as Joseph Leblanc dit Agros, was an Acadian exile who crossed from Maryland to Louisiana as a boy of twelve aboard the Jane in 1767, only to be sent by the Spanish governor to a new post the exiles had not asked for, and who farmed there, at Fort St. Gabriel in Iberville, for the rest of his life. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc (1794–1837).

Exile and the passage to Louisiana

He was a son of Charles Leblanc and Judith Landry, and a child of the Acadian deportation. A compiled genealogy of the Acadians of Louisiana (Steven A. Cormier’s), drawing on Arsenault’s work, gives his parents’ marriage as about 1756, after their deportation from Grand-Pré to Maryland in 1755, which would make him a boy born in exile in Maryland. By July 1763 the family was living at Baltimore, in Maryland, among the exiles the British authorities there called the French Neutrals; a petition drawn up on 7 July that year lists the household as six people and names Joseph among the children.

In March 1767 the family joined a party of about a hundred and fifty exiles who sailed from the Patuxent in Maryland aboard the Jane, under Captain Richard Ryder. They reached the Balise, at the mouth of the Mississippi, on 12 July 1767. The Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, sent them upriver to the new post at Fort St. Gabriel in Iberville rather than to Cabannocé, where the Acadians had asked to join their kin. Ulloa wanted settlers at St. Gabriel to guard the new frontier with British West Florida, across the Bayou Manchac, and he placed several parties of newly arrived Acadians there against their wishes. A list drawn up on arrival records the household — a man, his wife and five children — receiving eight arpents of land, and enters Joseph, the third child, as twelve years old.

Marriage and family

On 27 October 1787 he married Julie Trahan at Donaldsonville, in Ascension. She was a daughter of Chrysostome Trahan and Anne Granger, and her family had reached Louisiana by a very different road, by way of Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany.

Nine children followed, the first of them, Joseph, born in August 1788, the year after the marriage; their baptisms at St. Gabriel run from 1788 to 1808. The parish register records their grandparents on both sides at nearly every baptism, which is how both sides of the family can be followed at all. The children married into the Guidry, Trahan, Landry and Reboul families of the river parishes, and several of them had moved across to Baton Rouge by the 1810s.

Later life and death

By 22 September 1804 he held three arpents of land in the Second District of Iberville. The census of 1810 finds him in Iberville, entered as “Jos Leblanc Agro” — the by-name, rather than the surname, being the surer way to tell him apart from the many other Joseph Leblancs of the same parishes. A burial at St. Gabriel on 16 March 1811 of “Joseph dit Agros, age 55”, is probably his; the entry names no wife or parents, and another man of the family carried the same by-name. If it is his, he lies in the settlement he had arrived at as a boy of twelve.

Notes

The year of his birth is not recorded. Four documents give an age instead, and they do not agree. The 1767 settlement list makes him twelve, which points to about 1755; the 1777 census at St. Gabriel lists him as a bachelor of eighteen, which, as Cormier gives it, points to about 1759; and the burial register gives his age as fifty-five, which points to about 1756. Cormier and Arsenault give him as born about 1758, in Maryland. The year used here, about 1756, follows the burial register. Only the twelve of the 1767 list would place his birth at the deportation itself. No birth or baptism record of him is known; the Maryland birthplace rests on Cormier’s compiled account and on the family’s residence there.

The burial entry names neither a wife nor parents, and the identification rests on the dit Agros by-name, on the parish, and on the 1810 census entry. The same by-name was carried by a Jean Baptiste Leblanc dit Agros, buried at St. Gabriel in 1812 and very likely his brother.

His father appears in the registers under more than one form of his name. Two baptisms of Joseph’s own children print the grandfather as Jean Charles, while other entries give the Spanish and French forms Juan and Carlos; the family record keeps the shorter form.