♀Marie-Josèphe Hébert

Marie-Josèphe Hébert (about 1730 – before 1760) was an Acadian woman of Beaubassin^W who married Paul Daigle there in 1748 under a Church dispensation^W, because the couple were related in the fourth degree, and who settled with him on Île Saint-Jean^W, now Prince Edward Island. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Agnes Daigle (about 1752 – 1812).

Early life and marriage

She was the daughter of Joseph Hébert and Anne Boudrot of the parish of Beaubassin, at the head of the Bay of Fundy. The register names four of her brothers and sisters: François, baptized in 1719 and married in 1742, and Anne, Madeleine and Marguerite, who married at Beaubassin in 1733, 1745 and 1746. In those acts her mother is written Anne Marie Boudrot. On 19 June 1748, after the three banns had been read, she married Paul Daigle, son of Paul Daigle and the late Anne Arsenault, also of the parish. The register calls her simply “Marie Hébert”. It records that the couple had been granted a dispensation for kinship “au quatrième degré”. The Church then counted kinship by generations back to a shared ancestor, so the bride and groom had a great-great-grandparent in common. Marriages that close needed the bishop’s leave, and in the small, much-intermarried Acadian settlements such dispensations were frequent. The witnesses were Charles Héon and Jean Damian, and the Jesuit missionary Germain officiated.

Île Saint-Jean

About 1750 the couple left Beaubassin, a village caught in the border dispute between France and Britain, for the French-held island of Île Saint-Jean. The census of the island taken in 1752, as given in a published translation transcribed on the Island Register site, found them at Malpèque. Paul was a plowman of 29 and she was 22, both natives of Acadia, and they had been on the island two years. They had two daughters, Marie, aged four, and Agnes, aged eighteen months. They owned two oxen, three cows, a bull, two calves, a horse, seven ewes, four pigs and four fowls. They held their land on verbal permission from Monsieur de Bonnaventure, and had sown eight bushels on a neighboring piece of ground, but had made no clearing of their own beyond cutting a little wood.

A published genealogy of the Beaubassin families records the couple back in the Beaubassin region, at Aulac, in the census of 1755 on the eve of the expulsion. A compiled edition of the census roll of the refugees there, taken between late 1754 and early 1755, lists the household as one man, one woman and one boy, three people. That genealogy then places them among the refugees at the camp of Espérance on the Miramichi about 1757. She died before about 1760, when Paul married again. No record of her death has been found.

Her children

The couple’s elder daughter, Marie, was four in the census of 1752. A compiled genealogy (Stephen White’s Généalogie des 37 familles, as quoted on WikiTree) says she married François Richard in the north about 1768. The same compilations give the couple three further children, none of whom can appear in the census of 1752: sons Paul, born about 1753, and Fabien, about 1755, and a daughter Marguerite, about 1760. Marguerite’s date falls so close to Marie-Josèphe’s death and Paul’s second marriage that she may belong to the second wife. Of Fabien, the compilation says he lost his mother young, was raised in the household of Abraham Dugas, lived at Miquelon until 1778 and then on the Gaspé coast. A Fabien Daigle married Marie-Rose Robichaud at Carleton on 7 November 1780, and that marriage record names his mother as Marie-Josèphe Hébert.

The younger daughter, Agnes, reached Louisiana without her parents. She appears in the Louisiana census of September 1769 at St. James on the Mississippi, aged seventeen, living as a “cousin” in the household of Joseph Sonnier. At her marriage there in 1771 the register named her parents as “Paul & Marie Heber”. The identification of the Louisiana Agnes with the Malpèque child rests on those names and on the agreement of her ages, as drawn together in a compiled Acadian genealogy. No single record follows her from the island to the Mississippi.

Notes

A compiled online family tree gives her death as 1768 at Caraquet, but it cites no record, and it has merged her two daughters into one woman. A Louisiana compilation describes the couple as “of Minas”. The records found so far place them at Beaubassin and on Île Saint-Jean. Compiled trees give her an elder sister, born about 1710, who was also named Marie-Josèphe, and the two are sometimes confused; no record naming that sister has been found, and the larger family such trees give her parents is unproven.

The Aulac roll

The roll is printed in Stephen A. White’s edition of the Beaubassin census rolls, in Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne, vol. 50 (2019). The copy is among the Thomas-Pichon papers at the Bibliothèque de Vire, France, fonds C 857, nos 17–21. Its dates run from about 20 November 1754 to after 25 January 1755. Its three people are one man, one woman and one boy, and it lists no daughter, though the census of 1752 gives two.

The 1780 marriage

The Carleton (St-Joseph) marriage record of 7 November 1780 spells the groom’s surname Daigre and the bride’s Robicheau. It names the groom’s parents as Paul Daigre and Marie Josèphe Hébert.