♀Marguerite Pelagie Braux

Marguerite Pelagie Braux (born about 1762 – 12 March 1822) was an Acadian settler of St. Gabriel, Iberville Parish, Louisiana, born in exile to an Acadian family found in British-held Maryland in 1763. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Cidalise Lambremont.

Acadian exile and Maryland

Marguerite was a daughter of Janvier (Jean) Braux and Osite Landry. On 7 July 1763 the list of the Acadians held at Port Tobacco, Maryland, printed in a 1911 report on the French archives, records the household as “jean Braux, osite Braux son epouse, pelagie Braux”, three people - her father, her mother and Marguerite herself, then an infant. The same compiled history has Janvier dead before the party left Maryland and Osite reaching Louisiana in February 1768 as a widow with three daughters - Marguerite Pelagie, about five, Madeleine, about three, and an infant Marie - sent to the post of San Luis de Natchez and moving afterwards to San Gabriel in the Spanish colony. The official roll of the Acadians who arrived at St. Gabriel in August 1767, which names every person with an age, holds no Janvier Braux and no household with a girl of about five that could be his. By 1778 the register describes Marguerite’s parents as “of St. Gabriel.”

Two marriages

Marguerite married twice. Her first marriage, to Pierre LeBlanc, took place on 5 October 1778; the entry is in the Ascension register, though it describes both parties as “of St. Gabriel,” and it names her parents as Janvier Braux and Osite Landry. St. Gabriel baptisms between 1779 and 1792 name a Pedro LeBlanc and a Margarita Braux as parents, but a second couple of the same names lived there, so the children cannot be assigned with certainty. The likeliest are François Xavier (born 1779) and Joseph Auguste (born 1784), whose sponsors were Marguerite’s own kin; a set of twins in 1787 and a Pedro in 1789 are weaker candidates. Pierre had died by 1793. On 15 October 1793 Marguerite, described in the register as the widow of Pierre LeBlanc, married Michel Lambremont; the couple raised at least five children at St. Gabriel, including Marie Cidalise, born in 1799.

Death

Marguerite was buried at St. Gabriel on 12 March 1822, aged 60 by the priest’s record, which places her birth about 1762 - consistent with her age at her first marriage, about sixteen, and with the 1763 Maryland census, where she is the only child in her father’s household. By the time her daughter Marie Cidalise remarried, on 10 November 1834, the register recorded Marguerite as already deceased.

Notes

The burial entry names only “Madame Michel,” an inference for Marguerite rather than a direct naming; a second candidate, Marie Louise Braud (also a Lambremont wife at St. Gabriel), is excluded because her own children were baptized in 1824 and 1825, after this burial. The 1793 marriage register’s entry, “(Juan & Margarita Landry)” after her first husband’s name, is read here as the groom Pierre LeBlanc’s parents miscopied, since his mother was Marguerite Landry; the 1778 marriage register and a granddaughter’s 1800 baptism both give “Janvier & Osite Landry” as Marguerite Pelagie’s parents. Cormier reads the 1793 entry differently, as her own parents’ names garbled, with “Juan” an echo of Janvier and her own name written in place of her mother’s. A compiled family history describes Osite Landry’s daughters as marrying into the Hébert, Lambremont and LeBlanc families without naming which daughter married which husband; the register evidence used above, which names Marguerite directly at both of her own marriages, is preferred over that reading.

The sources also disagree about how the family reached St. Gabriel. Cormier’s compilation puts Osite’s household in the party that arrived from Port Tobacco in February 1768 and was sent to Natchez. Carl Brasseaux’s account of the Maryland Acadians in Louisiana (The Founding of New Acadia, pp. 81-82) describes a group that reached New Orleans in July or August 1767 and was destined for Fort St. Gabriel, as well as the February 1768 group sent to Natchez; it gives no passenger list for the 1767 group.