♀Marie Anne Landry

Marie Anne Landry (born 30 May 1768 – died 1847) was an Acadian exile born in France during the diaspora years, who crossed to Louisiana as a girl and married twice, first into an Isleño^W family and then into an Acadian one. Her second husband was himself an ancestor of a separate, unrelated branch of the same later family, so her household brought together two ancestral lines that shared no blood. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Adelaide Martin (born 1796).

Exile and immigration

Marie Anne was born and baptized on 30 May 1768 at Saint-Servan, near Saint-Malo in Brittany, the daughter of Pierre Paul Landry and Anne Josèphe Thériot, Acadian exiles in the French refugee colony. Her father is said to have died in 1770, when she was two. By September 1772 her widowed mother, aged twenty-three, was supporting herself by sewing and spinning at Saint-Malo.

Her mother later married Joseph Granger, and in 1785 sailed for Louisiana as his widow. Marie Anne, seventeen, is reckoned to have crossed aboard La Ville d’Archangel, one of the Seven Ships that carried the exiles that year.

Marriages

On 19 May 1794, at the St. Gabriel church, Marie Anne married André Martin, an Isleño whose parents were from Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands. They had ten children, baptized at St. Joseph’s in Baton Rouge; the youngest, Euphrosine, died in 1810 at nineteen months. André died on 5 November 1814, and in December 1816 Marie Anne asked the West Baton Rouge probate judge for an inventory of their property, to settle the rights of her nine surviving children.

On 31 December 1816, at St. Joseph’s, Baton Rouge, she married Jean Baptiste Dupuis, an Acadian. The marriage produced no children.

Widowhood and death

Dupuis died before 3 May 1831. In May she petitioned the St. Martin Parish court as his widow, and in September, at the sale of his estate at Grande Pointe, she bought one of the enslaved people, a man named François, for $650.

A burial entry dated 9 November 1847, at the Saint John the Baptist churchyard in Brusly, West Baton Rouge Parish, records a Marie Anne Landry, aged seventy-five, who had died the day before. It names no husband or parents, and she would have been seventy-nine. It is probably her, so her death is given as 8 November 1847.

Notes

The baptism at Saint-Servan

The baptism is in the Saint-Servan register itself, in the copy of the 1768 baptisms held by the Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine. It reads: “Marie Anna Landry fille legitime de pierre & d’Anne Terrio née ce Jour trentième Mai 1768 a été Baptisée le même jour”, and it names the godparents as “pierre le Blanc” and “Marie Terrio”. Pierre Le Blanc was the brother-in-law of the groom at the parents’ 1767 marriage, which ties the two acts together. The act calls the father plain “pierre”, without “Paul”; Robichaux’s Saint-Malo compilation, which gives the fuller form “Pierre Paul”, agrees with the act on everything else. A further line, “dont a signé Pierre Landry”, suggests the father could write. That signature is probable, not established: other men called Pierre Landry were in the parish in 1767. Her father’s death in 1770 rests on Robichaux’s dates for him (about 1744 to 1770); the 1772 roll already calls her mother a widow.

The 1772 roll

Rieder and Rieder, The Acadians in France, 1762–1776, vol. 1, p. 72, prints the roll of 15 September 1772 at Saint-Malo: “ANNE TERRIOT, 23, widow of Pierre Landry, sews and spins, of St. Malo” and “Marie Anne, 4, her daughter”. The entry that follows is a different Anne Terriot, 67, also a widow of a Pierre Landry; she is not Marie Anne’s mother.

The 1785 crossing

Donald J. Hébert’s list of the 1785 exiles (Acadian Families in Exile, 1785, 1995, pp. 98–99) is not in hand. It is known only as quoted in a Geneanet family tree: “Anna LANDRY, age 17, daughter of Anne THERIOT (widow of Joseph GRANGER) by her 1st marriage. She traveled with her mother and five GRANGER children (2 stepbrothers and 3 half-siblings) as the 41st family (or 7 persons) aboard ‘La Ville d’Archangel’.” The quote gives a departure on 12 August 1785 and an arrival at New Orleans on 3 December 1785.

Her mother’s second marriage

Only compiled sources give the date of the mother’s second marriage: 13 February 1776, at Saint-Servan, to Joseph Granger the younger, as Cormier’s compiled history has it.

The 1794 marriage

The St. Gabriel marriage, as abstracted in the Diocese of Baton Rouge church records, volume 2, reads: “Mariana (Paul & Anna Anterio [sic], of St. Malo, France) m. 19 May 1794 Andres MARTINEZ (Baltasar & Rosa Jacon, of St. Cruz, Canary Islands) wit. Joseph LeBlanc & Maturin Landry.” Cormier’s compiled history instead places the wedding at Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, in May 1794, and suggests the groom came from the nearby Isleño community of Galveztown^W. This biography follows the register for the church and the date.

The children and the 1816 petition

The baptisms show ten children, and nine were living in December 1816. Euphrosine, born 29 December 1808, was buried on 2 August 1810, aged nineteen months. The December 1816 petition begins: “Marianne Landry widow of Andre Martin who died on the 5th of November 1814”, and asks for an inventory “in order to ascertain the rights of her children, nine in number”. Cormier counts at least nine children (compiled).

A 1829 date that belongs to another woman

A Find a Grave memorial gives Marie Anne’s death as 28 September 1829, “aged 61”, and has her first marriage in 1784 to an “Andreas Martinez”. The 1829 date matches a Diocese of Baton Rouge entry of 28 September 1829 for “MARTIN [omitted], widow, age ca. 75 yrs.”, which gives no given name. The age does not fit a woman born in 1768, and in September 1829 Marie Anne was the wife of Jean Baptiste Dupuis. She was alive in September 1831. The memorial’s date is rejected.

The 1820 census

The census of 7 August 1820 for West Baton Rouge lists “Jean Bte Dupuis” with a free man and a woman, each over forty-five, younger free members of the household, and six enslaved people: three boys and a girl under fourteen, and a man and a woman aged fourteen to twenty-five. None of the enslaved people is named. The woman over forty-five is most likely Marie Anne, by the household and the 1816 marriage. The census does not name her.

The 1831 estate and sale

The widow’s petition of May 1831, in the St. Martin Parish estate file, describes her as the “surviving wife of Jean Bapt. Dupuis, late of the parish of St. Martin decd, who left several legal heirs and representatives, issue of his first marriage, and who left no issue from his second marriage with your petitioner.” The inventory of 27 May 1831 values the man François at $500 and gives his age as thirty-nine. The sale of 12 and 13 September 1831 at Grande Pointe gives his age as about fifty-nine (“âgé d’environ cinquante neuf ans”) and names the buyer as “Mme Ve Jn Bte Dupuis”, at $650. The two records disagree on his age, and both are kept.

Her death

The Diocese of Baton Rouge church records, volume 6 (1840–1847), printed page 379, have the entry “Marie Anne LANDRY age 75 yrs. bur. 9 Nov. 1847 died yesterday”. The entry is known from the printed abstract only. Against the identification: the age is four years short, the entry names neither husband nor parents, and Landry was a common surname in the river parishes. For it: the name is exact; Brusly is in West Baton Rouge Parish, where the family lived (her son Joseph Martin, married in 1826 “of West Baton Rouge Parish”); her widowhood to 1831 fits; and no other Marie Anne Landry born between 1768 and 1776 appears in the family’s records. Cormier suggests she may have died near Brusly, and says that had she died in West Baton Rouge Parish in November 1847 she would have been seventy-nine rather than seventy-five, and a widow (compiled). A FamilySearch profile gives 8 November 1847 at Brusly with no source attached; it is not used as evidence.