♀Julie Trahan

Julie Trahan (born 13 July 1765) was an Acadian woman who was born in exile at Morlaix, in Brittany, spent her childhood on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, and came to Louisiana with her family from France; in 1787 she married Joseph Leblanc dit Agros at Donaldsonville. She was born in France to Acadian parents who had married at Falmouth, in England, while held there during the deportation. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc (1794–1837).

Birth and childhood in France

Her parents, Jean Chrysostome Trahan and Anne Granger, were both born in Acadia, at Pigiguit^W and at Rivière-aux-Canards, and both families were caught up in the deportation of the Acadians that began in 1755. Carried to England, they married at Falmouth on 10 January 1763; all four of her grandparents had died there in the exile. When the war ended in 1763 the Acadians held in England were sent to France, and Julie was born at Morlaix, in the parish of Saint-Martin, on 13 July 1765.

Her birth is known from a sworn declaration her father and two of his brothers made on 26 February 1767 in the parish of Bangor, on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the south coast of Brittany, where the French crown had settled a colony of Acadian families. Each household was required to declare its members and its descent, and the Trahan brothers traced theirs back through six generations to the settlers who had come from France to Port-Royal. The family was then living in the village of Kerlan. Her sister Marie Magdelaine was baptized on the island in January 1768, and two brothers were baptized there in 1774 and 1777. The family later moved to Nantes, and Louisiana registers afterwards described two of her younger brothers and sisters as “of Nantes”.

The crossing to Louisiana

A published transcription of the passenger lists of the 1785 expeditions that carried Acadians from France to Louisiana, as reproduced on a genealogy website, places the household aboard L’Amitié: her father, a plowman aged 43, her mother, and seven children, of whom “Anne-Julie”, aged 20, was the eldest. The same website gives the ship’s sailing from France as 20 August 1785 and its arrival in Louisiana as 8 November 1785. That placement rests on the published transcription alone.

Marriage and family

On 27 October 1787, at Donaldsonville in Ascension, she married Joseph Leblanc, a son of Charles Leblanc and Judith Landry; her father was one of the witnesses. Joseph’s family had come to Louisiana by an entirely separate road, sailing from Maryland in 1767, when she was still a small child on Belle-Île, and had settled at St. Gabriel in Iberville.

The couple made their home at St. Gabriel, where their children were baptized. They had nine children: Joseph, Jean Baptiste, Marguerite Eulalie, Reine Sophie, a second Jean Baptiste, Constance, Pierre and Julie Emerite, and a daughter, Azelia, whose baptism has not been found. Julie Emerite, the youngest, appears in later registers as Marie Ameranthe or Emerite, the name under which she married Valerien Landry in 1825. The eight whose baptisms have been found were born between 1788 and 1807, and most of their baptism entries name both sets of grandparents. The first son, Joseph, was born in August 1788, the year after the marriage; a second son was given the name Jean Baptiste in 1798, after the first, born in January 1792, whose burial has not been found. Two of her daughters, Marguerite Eulalie and Reine Sophie, married the brothers Antoine and Celestin Serrette, in 1814 and 1816.

A burial at St. Gabriel on 16 March 1811 of “Joseph dit Agros, age 55”, recorded in an index of the register, is probably her husband’s; the entry names no wife or parents, and another man of the family carried the same by-name. The last record found that names her is the marriage of her daughter Constance to Alexandre Reboul on 19 June 1826, which describes the parents as “of West Baton Rouge Parish”. No record of her death or burial has been found.

Notes

The 1767 declaration, as printed in an 1890 edition of the Belle-Île registers edited by Casgrain and Rameau, gives her birth year as 1755. That year is impossible: her parents married in January 1763, and her mother was born about 1743. 1765 fits every other record, and the 1785 passenger list, which gives her age as 20, agrees.

The declaration calls her Anne-Julie; the Louisiana registers call her Julie or Julia, and the baptism of her daughter Marguerite Eulalie gives her name as Judith. Her other records all name the same parents, Chrysostome Trahan and Anne Granger, and the Judith of that one entry is a slip.

A woman recorded as “Mrs. Joseph dit Agnos”, aged 34, was buried at St. Gabriel on 6 January 1808, two months after the birth of Julie’s daughter Julie Emerite. The age does not fit Julie Trahan, who was then 42. A published index of Iberville Parish successions lists a succession for Julie Trahan, wife of Joseph LeBlanc, dated 7 November 1808, and another in 1810; the index survives only as quoted, so her date of death remains open. An 1826 marriage entry that names her and Joseph as a daughter’s parents does not show her alive then, because it names Joseph the same way, and he was most likely the Joseph dit Agros buried at St. Gabriel in 1811.