♀Marguerite Godreau

Marguerite Godreau (born about December 1768) was an Acadian woman of the lower Mississippi, the wife of Charles Hebert and the mother of fourteen children, whose recorded baptisms run from 1789 at St. Gabriel in Iberville to 1807 at Baton Rouge. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Henriette Hebert (about 1799 – after 1880).

Family

Marguerite was born at Cabahannocer, the settlement later called St. James, and was a daughter of Amand Godreau and Marie Landry, Acadians who were living in Iberville in 1794. The grandparents named on her children’s baptisms identify her parents repeatedly, at St. Gabriel in 1796 and at Baton Rouge from 1802 to 1807. Her sister Anne also married a man named Charles Hebert, a son of Pierre Hebert, and the two couples baptised children at St. Gabriel in the same years, both giving a son the name Hipolite. Two entries printed one after the other on the same page of the St. Gabriel register in 1796 separate the families: each names Amand Godreau and Marie Landry as the maternal grandparents, but Marguerite’s husband is given as a son of François Hebert and Marie Leblanc, and Anne’s as a son of Pierre Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc. A “Henrieta” baptized at St. Gabriel in September 1796 was Anne’s daughter, not Marguerite’s.

Marriage and children

The marriage is recorded at St. Martinville, then the Attakapas post, on 28 December 1787. Their first known child, a daughter named Maria Loreto, was baptized at St. Gabriel on 3 February 1789. In July 1789 she was living at St. Gabriel, where on 19 July she stood as godmother to her niece Margarita Coleta Allain. Their children were baptized at St. Gabriel until 1796, and by 1798 the couple were described as “of Baton Rouge”, where the later baptisms took place. In all they had fourteen children. A daughter Celeste, born in April 1798, was buried at Baton Rouge in January 1801 at the age of four, and a daughter born in January 1802 was given the same name. Twins, a son and a daughter, were born on 24 April 1805, and the last known child, Carlos, in April 1807.

Between 1816 and 1822 Charles and Marguerite were named as grandparents at the baptisms of grandchildren at St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge, among them Euphemie Dupuis, their daughter Henriette’s first known child, in December 1817. By 1827 the family was described as of West Baton Rouge Parish. Charles had died by September 1831, when the marriage of their son Victor names him as deceased; the entry does not mark Marguerite so.

Notes

No baptism of Marguerite has been found, and no record of her death or burial has been found. The family’s baptisms are known from the published abstracts of the Diocese of Baton Rouge registers. One of them, the 1801 baptism of a daughter Margarita at the age of one, names the maternal grandparents as Antonio and Maria Gautro rather than Amand Godreau and Marie Landry; every other entry that names them gives Amand and Marie.

Birth date

The census of 14 September 1769 at Cabahannocer lists a daughter, Margueritte, nine months old, in the household of Amand Godreau (written Gautherot there) and Marie Landry. Arsenault gives her birth as 1768. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history places it in late 1768 or early 1769, from the censuses of 1769, 1770 and 1777.

Marriage date

The printed abstract of the St. Martinville register entry (St. Martin de Tours marriages, volume 4, number 10), as Donald J. Hébert gives it in Southwest Louisiana Records (1-A:347), dates the marriage 28 December 1787 and names the bride’s parents as Amand and Marie Landry. Cormier’s compiled history gives the same date. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives 26 December 1787, the only printed source with that date.