♀Magdelaine Landry

Magdelaine Landry (born about 1655 – 17 February 1740) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal), the widow of René Richard, who by 1693 had married Pierre Dupuis, by most census ages about fifteen years her junior; the rolls of 1693 and 1700 make the gap about six. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Dupuis.

Early life

The census of 1671 lists “Magdeleine”, aged 15 and unmarried, in the household of René Landry, a farmer of 52, and his wife Perrine Bourg, aged 45, at Port-Royal, with her younger brothers Pierre, 13, and Claude, 8. The age places her birth about 1655. No baptism of hers has been found; her parents are known from the census household, not from a record naming them as such.

Two marriages

Her first husband was René Richard, the son listed as René, aged 14, in the 1671 household of Michel Richard and Madeleine Blanchard at Port-Royal. No record of the marriage has been found. In the census of 1686 the couple, René 28 and Magdelaine 29, were living at Port-Royal with three children, Michel, Anne and Antoine, on five arpents^W with ten cattle and ten sheep. The couple had at least five children, Michel, Anne, Antoine, Pierre and René, all still living with their mother in 1698, the youngest then about 12.

René Richard had died by 1693: that year’s census already lists her, aged 38, as the wife of Pierre Dupuis, 32, with the Richard children in the household. The copyist first wrote her new husband down as “Pierre Richard”, then struck out the surname and wrote “du peux” above it. In 1698 the census lists Pierre Dupuis, aged 28, with his wife “Madeleine Landry”, aged 43. Her new husband was most likely the “Pierre” who had been three months old in the household of Michel Dupuis and Marie Gautrot in 1671, so by the 1698 ages she was about fifteen years older than he was; the rolls of 1693 and 1700 give him as 32 and 39, a gap of about six years. The census ages are the whole of the evidence for the gap, and the records do not explain the match. The same household held her five Richard children, Michel, Anne, Antoine, Pierre and René, 12, and two younger girls, Marie, 5, and Jeanne, 3; a later pencil bracket on the roll marks the five as Richard and the two girls as Dupuis, and the 1693 and 1701 rolls also keep René with the Richards. The census of 1701 lists Pierre Dupuis, written Dupuy and aged 30, as head of the household at Port-Royal, with Magdelaine Landry, aged 47 and written Magdeleine, and her children by both marriages. Her Richard sons were Michel, 20, Antoine, 17, Pierre, 15, and René, 13, and her Dupuis children were Marie, 8, Jeanne, 6, and Charles, 4, with a servant, Therese Mirande, 18. Her last child, Pierre, was born about 1702, when she was about 47.

Later life

Her son by the second marriage, entered as “Jean Pierre Dupius”, married Jeanne Richard at Port-Royal on 6 January 1720. The parish register of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) calls the groom the son of the late Pierre Dupuis and Magdelaine Landry. Her second husband died before 9 September 1709, and is most likely the Pierre Dupuis whose burial the register records on that day, aged thirty-seven. The bride was the daughter of the late Alexandre Richard and Elizabeth Petitpas, and Alexandre Richard, listed aged 3 in the same 1671 Richard household, was the younger brother of René Richard. Her son thus married a niece of her own first husband; there was no blood tie between the couple.

Her daughters married at Port-Royal as well. Marie married Alexandre Hébert on 26 January 1712, and Jeanne married Guillaume Blanchard on 16 January 1714.

Her son Charles Dupuis, born about 1697, settled at Les Mines, at Grand-Pré. He married Elisabeth LeBlanc, born there in 1703, and their children were baptized at Grand-Pré from 1724 to 1748. In 1767, at Belle-Île-en-Mer, Elisabeth’s brother Joseph Le Blanc made a sworn declaration naming Charles as “son of Pierre Dupuis and Magdelaine Landry” and stating that the English had deported the couple to Maryland.

She was still living in February 1721, when she stood godmother at Port-Royal, on 1 February 1721, to her son’s first child, Anne, entered in the register as “Magdelaine Landry widow of Pierre Dupius”. She died at Port-Royal on 17 February 1740 and was buried there the next day, 18 February 1740.

Notes

She is a different woman from the Magdelaine Landry who married Jean Granger (born 1713), of a later generation.