♀Marie Blanchard

Marie Blanchard was an Acadian woman of the Minas Basin, the wife of Pierre Melancon and the mother of a large family, most of them daughters. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through two of her children, Francoise Melancon (1709–before 1777) and Cécile Melanson (about 1704–1763).

Life

She was probably the daughter of Martin Blanchard and Françoise LeBlanc of Port-Royal. A compiled online family tree gives her birth as 1674 and her death as 1739, calls her “Marie Rosalie”, and dates her marriage to Pierre Melancon to about 1693 at Cobequid; none of that is confirmed by a record. In the Grand-Pré registers she is always “Marie Blanchard”, named as mother at her daughter Francoise’s baptism in 1709 and her son Pierre’s in 1712, and at the marriages of her daughters Marie Magdeleine in 1712 and Marguerite in 1715 and of her son Joseph in 1738 and 1748.

At Francoise’s baptism the godfather was the French commandant at Les Mines, an officer of the naval detachment. Godparents in Acadian families were nearly always kin or neighbors, and an officer’s presence at a farmer’s child’s baptism was rare.

Lines of descent

Pierre Melancon and Marie Blanchard reach Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both reaching him through his mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990). The nearer line runs through their daughter Francoise Melancon (1709–before 1777) and her son Thomas Theriot, and on through the Theriot family. The farther line, one generation longer, runs through their daughter Cécile Melanson (about 1704–1763) and her descendants. The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) and Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847), both descend from this couple.

Notes

The Grand-Pré registers also record a younger woman, Rosalie Blanchard, wife of another Pierre Melanson, with children born between 1735 and 1747. The online tree’s name “Marie Rosalie” may come from confusing the two.

Her parents

Two compiled genealogies, by Arsenault and by Lanctot, identify her as Marie, born in 1674, a daughter of Martin Blanchard and his first wife Françoise LeBlanc, who married Pierre Melanson. A declaration made at Belle-Île in 1767 also calls her a daughter of Martin Blanchard, though it gives her mother as Anne Leblanc. The censuses fit: Martin’s daughter Marie was 12 in 1686 and 18 in 1693, and was no longer in his household in 1698, in time for the births of her daughters Marie Magdeleine and Marguerite, who married in 1712 and 1715. No record of her marriage survives.