♀Madeleine Robichaud

Madeleine Robichaud (born 1665) was an Acadian farm wife of Port-Royal, the eldest child of a household whose head turned the census-taker away from his door in 1671. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Landry (about 1683–1753).

Early life

Madeleine was the eldest child of Étienne Robichaud and Françoise Boudrot, and is said to have been born at Port-Royal in 1665. When Father Laurent Molin, a Franciscan missionary, went from house to house for the census of 1671, her father, entered as a plowman, would not see him: he left the house and had his wife say that he would not give a count of his cattle and land. The missionary wrote the refusal into the roll in place of the family’s details, so Madeleine, then about six, and her two small brothers are missing from it. Her father had died by the census of 1686, which found her mother a widow at Port-Royal with five younger children still at home.

Marriage and family

About 1682 she married Pierre Landry, a son of René Landry and Perrine Bourg of Port-Royal. In the census of 1686 the young couple were farming at Port-Royal with one son, Pierre, three years old, and six cattle and six sheep; Madeleine was given as 21. By 1693 they had three children, Pierre, nine, Marguerite, six, and Jean-Baptiste, three, and the family was still at Port-Royal, near Pierre’s brothers and sisters. The couple are said to have had seven children in all, born between 1683 and 1699.

Death

Madeleine probably died after 1703, and she had died by November 1714. In the census of that month Pierre Landry was a widower with four sons still at home, at “the Cappe” of Port-Royal, the point of land where the Robichaud family farmed. The next households on the roll were those of her brothers Prudent and François Robichaud and of her widowed mother.

Notes

Birth, parentage and death

The year 1665 and her parents’ names come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which lists “Madeleine, 1665” first among the children of Étienne Robichaud and Françoise Boudrot and has her marry Pierre Landry about 1682. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (tome II) agrees on the parents, gives her birth at Port-Royal in 1665 and the marriage at Port-Royal in 1682, and places her death between 1703 and 1714. One online family tree gives her a different father; both printed genealogies name Étienne Robichaud.

The census of 1671

The missionary’s note, as Lanctôt prints it: « Laboureur. Estienne Robichaut ne ma pas voulu voir Il a sorty de chez Luy et a dit a sa femme quel me dit qu’il ne me vouloit point donner Le Conte de ses bestiaux et terres. » Arsenault quotes the same note, and John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme tells the episode among the residents who would not cooperate with that census. The children’s ages for 1671 are Lanctôt’s reckoning, not the roll’s.

The censuses of 1686, 1693 and 1714

The household entries are taken from Lanctôt’s transcriptions. He prints the 1686 entry more than once and the ages differ between copies: Pierre Landry is given as 22, 27 or 29, and Madeleine as 21 or 19; the son Pierre is three, with six cattle and six sheep, in every copy. The 1693 entry reads “Pierre Landry 36 ans, Magdelaine Robichaut 28; Pierre 9, Marguerite 6, Jean-Baptiste 3”, and Lanctôt places the family at Port-Royal that year, with Pierre’s brothers and sisters. For 1714 he gives the four entries that follow one another: Pierre Landry, widower, four boys; Prudent Robichaud and his wife; François Robichaux and his wife; and the “Veuve Robichaux”.

Children

Arsenault lists seven children born between 1683 and 1699, six sons and a daughter, Marguerite; Lanctôt counts at least five sons and two daughters.