♀Marie Bernard

Marie Bernard (born about 1645) was an Acadian settler of Port-Royal, the wife of René Landry the younger and the mother of at least fifteen children; widowed by 1693, she was still at Port-Royal in 1700 with three of her grown sons, and the census of 1707 lists her household between her sons’ households. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by twelve separate lines of descent, one of them most likely, and eight of their fifteen known children are ancestors of Floyd.

Life

Stephen White’s genealogical dictionary makes her a daughter of Andrée Guyon, who by 1671 had remarried and was the wife of Antoine Belliveau at Port-Royal; no record names Marie as her daughter, and her father’s identity is uncertain. On that reckoning she had two half-siblings, Jehan and Magdeleine Belliveau, who were 19 and 17 when the Port-Royal census of 1671 counted them with their parents. Her descendants, deposing at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767, said that she came from France with her husband.

In the census of 1686 at Port-Royal she was 42, the wife of René Landry, 52, with twelve children at home. Their son Antoine, born about 1660, already had a household of his own; Charles, born about 1688, and Isabelle, born about 1690, came after that census.

By 1693 she was a widow, 48, with six of her children still at home, and her married son René, 25, and his wife Anne Thériot, 20, lived with her. In 1698 the census listed her as “Marie Bernard, widow of René Landry”, 53, with Abraham, Pierre, Catherine, Anne and Charles, and directly after her the household of her son Germain and his wife Marie Melanson. In 1700 she was 55, with Germain, Abraham and Pierre still counted with her.

In the census of 1703 her sons Abraham and Germain are listed one after the other at Les Mines^W, and the census of 1707 lists “Germain Landry, sa femme”, “Pierre Landry, sa femme”, “Marie Bernard, veuve” and “Abraham Landry, sa femme” one after another; the surviving copy does not show which settlement that page covers. On 29 October 1708 her son Charles married Catherine Brossard, daughter of François Brossard and Catherine Richard, at Port-Royal; the marriage act calls him the son of the late René Landry and Marie Bernard.

Lines of descent

Twelve separate lines of descent run from her to Floyd Amatus Delahorne through eight of her children: Abraham, Marie, Anne, René, Antoine, Jean, Marguerite and Claude. Eight come up the mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990), the nearest nine generations up; four come up the father’s side, through Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), the nearest ten up. The lines join again in Ida Serrette’s parents, Amelia Pennison Daigle and Pierre Anatole Serrett; in Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc’s parents, Julie Trahan and Joseph Leblanc; and in Floyd’s own parents, Jeffrey Delahorne and Ida Serrette. Some of these lines rest on probable or compiled links, among them Claude’s parentage and the identification of her great-granddaughter Judith Landry (born 1728).

Notes

Her mother’s name rests on the genealogical dictionary of Stephen White; no record names Marie as Andrée Guyon’s daughter. White reaches it from the 1767 statements that Marie came from France, which he takes to mean that her mother came from there too, so the statements do not themselves name Andrée. Some writers have made André Bernard or Charles Bernard her father; White rejects the first, and the second has been offered only as a possibility. The parish register records her burial at Port-Royal on 11 January 1719.