♀Marguerite Thériot

Marguerite Thériot (born 8 June 1709) was an Acadian woman of Grand-Pré who was deported to Maryland in the expulsion of 1755 and resettled in Louisiana in old age. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Anselme Blanchard (1741–1799).

Grand-Pré

Marguerite was born and baptized at Grand-Pré on 8 June 1709, the daughter of Germain Thériot and Anne Richard. She married René Blanchard at Grand-Pré on 9 July 1726, when she was about seventeen. The couple’s children, entered in the family’s baptismal record, were born between 1732 and 1746; according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, an elder son, Joseph, was also born to them in 1730.

Exile and Louisiana

The family was deported to Maryland in 1755. A 1763 report on the Acadians at Baltimore lists Marguerite in her husband’s household, her name rendered there as “Marguerite Thevreaux,” an English clerk’s version of Thériot, together with daughters Françoise and Magdeleine. She and René reached Louisiana in 1767, settling with two of their grown sons at St.-Gabriel d’Iberville, where the roll of the settlers, as Chandler prints it, lists her as Margarita, 60, with her husband and a daughter, also Margarita, 18 (Cormier reads the daughter as Magdelena, the name of a daughter in the 1763 report). The roll is the last record of Marguerite herself, and the date and place of her death are unknown. René was buried at Ascension on 27 September 1788.

Notes

The family’s marriage and the birth years of their children rest on Grand-Pré’s own baptismal and marriage registers; the 1763 Baltimore list is known from the copy J.-Edmond Roy printed in his 1911 report on the archives of France, and the 1767 roll from Richard E. Chandler’s translation of 1973; the rest of the account of the exile and the resettlement rests on Cormier’s compilation. Marguerite’s husband shared his name with his own father, another René Blanchard of Grand-Pré who had married Anne Landry; the two men, father and son, are easily confused in the records of the period, and Marguerite’s husband is the younger of the two.