♀Marguerite LeBlanc

Marguerite LeBlanc (about 1714 – before 6 March 1764) was an Acadian woman of Grand-Pré, in the Minas district, the daughter of Francois LeBlanc and Jeanne Hebert, who married Charles Hébert there in 1733. Her husband’s sister Osite Hebert (born 1730) is a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

No record of her baptism has been found in the Grand-Pré register for 1707–1748; her parentage comes from her marriage record. Her elder sister Anne LeBlanc married Germain Landry at Grand-Pré in 1729.

Marriage and family

Charles Hébert, aged about 24, son of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry, married Marguerite LeBlanc, aged about 19, daughter of Francois LeBlanc and Jeanne Hebert, at Grand-Pré on 28 May 1733. The register noted that the couple were related by blood (“consanguinity 4th degree”) without saying how. Both fathers were among the witnesses, Francois LeBlanc signing and Jacques Hébert making his mark; the groom signed “Charle Heber”, while the bride made her mark.

A daughter, written “Osithe Hubert”, was born on 2 March 1734 and baptized at Grand-Pré on 11 May 1734, with the bride’s sister Cecile LeBlanc as godmother and no godfather present. The records give nothing more about her. She is a different woman from Charles’s sister Osite Hebert, the wife of Alexandre Melancon: Stephen A. White’s dictionary of the Acadian families, as he corrected it in 2011, makes that Osite a daughter of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry. No other child of the couple appears in the Grand-Pré register for 1707–1748.

Exile

On 25 February 1767, on Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, one of Marguerite’s brothers made a declaration of his family, which the Attakapas Gazette later printed in translation. It names Marguerite, “born at Mines, in 1716”, as the wife of Charles Hebert, son of Jacques Hebert and Marguerite Landry, and states that she “died in 1758 in the crossing from Isle St. Jean to France” and that “Charles Hebert lives with his family at St. Malo”. That would place the couple on Île Saint-Jean^W in 1758, the year the British deported the island’s Acadians to France^W after the fall of Louisbourg. The marriage record’s age of about 19 points to a birth about 1714, two years earlier than the declaration gives.

Death

Her husband was a widower when he married again at Saint-Malo on 6 March 1764, so Marguerite had died before that day. Where and when she died is not known. That 1764 entry sets only an upper limit. Her brother’s declaration dates her death to 1758, which falls before 1764.

Notes

Her death

The 1764 entry is known from a FamilySearch index of the Saint-Malo cathedral marriages, and the wording here follows the index. It describes the groom as a widower of Marguerite LeBlanc, which is the ground for placing her death before 6 March 1764. The only death date for her is that upper limit. The 1758 date rests on her brother’s declaration of 25 February 1767, as printed in the Attakapas Gazette.