♀Marie-Josèphe Richard

Marie-Josèphe Richard (about 1713 – before February 1777) was an Acadian woman of the Minas district^W who married her cousin Joseph Landry at Grand-Pré in 1733 and was counted with him and seven of their children among the Acadian exiles at Port Tobacco, Maryland, on 7 July 1763; their children made new homes along the Mississippi at St. Gabriel and St. Jacques. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Osite Landry (born about 1738).

Marriage at Grand-Pré

Joseph Landry and Marie-Josèphe Richard were married at Grand-Pré on 3 November 1733. Both were about twenty. He was the son of René Landry, then dead, and Marie Dugas, of the parish of the Assomption at Pisiguit^W; she was the daughter of René Richard and Marie-Josèphe Babin. The two were cousins, related in the third degree, and the marriage needed the church’s dispensation^W. Neither could write, and each made a mark in the register, where the bride is written Marie Richart.

Their children were born over the next two decades, most likely at Grand-Pré: Marguerite about 1735, then Madeleine, Augustin, Geneviève, Cécile, Alexandre and Pierre, and the youngest, Anne-Madeleine, about 1754. A daughter Osite, born about 1738, was probably theirs as well. Marie-Josèphe’s mother died on 14 March 1738, aged about forty-seven, and was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré.

Exile in Maryland

In 1755 the British deported the Acadians of the Minas district, and the family was probably among those shipped to Maryland. On 7 July 1763 a list of the Acadians at Port Tobacco, Maryland, counted a household of nine: Joseph, his wife, entered under his surname as “marie landry Son épouse”, and seven children, Anne-Madeleine, Augustin, Geneviève, Cécile, Alexandre, Pierre and Madeleine. Their widowed daughter Marguerite and her children are on the same list, and so are Osite, her husband Janvier Braux and their infant daughter Marguerite Pelagie. Nothing is heard of Joseph and Marie-Josèphe after 1763; they most likely died in Maryland.

The children in Louisiana

Seven of the children are said to have crossed to Spanish Louisiana in February 1768 without their parents, together with their widowed sister Marguerite and her daughters, in a party of Acadians from Port Tobacco led by Alexis and Honoré Breau. The Spanish governor sent the party to the remote post of Fort San Luis de Natchez. Within months, on 9 August 1768, Geneviève married Jean Baptiste Bellot, a sergeant of the Spanish troops born at Pavia in Italy. When the Natchez settlers were allowed to leave in 1769, her brothers and sisters moved down the river to St. Gabriel and St. Jacques, where they married into Acadian families. Madeleine married Étienne Hébert at St. Jacques on 28 June 1771, and when Pierre married Madeleine Foret there on 3 February 1777, the register recorded both his parents as dead.

Notes

Sources

The marriage of 1733 and her mother’s burial in 1738 are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a); the marriage entry gives the ages, both sets of parents, the third degree of kinship and the marks of bride and groom. The 1763 household is from the list of the Acadians at Port Tobacco printed in J.-Edmond Roy’s report on the French archives (1911), pp. 623–624. The Louisiana marriages of Geneviève (1768), Madeleine (1771) and Pierre (1777) are from the published abstracts of the Pointe Coupée and St. Jacques registers (Diocese of Baton Rouge, vols. 1b and 2), each naming Joseph and Marie Richard as the parents. The 1755 deportation to Maryland, the February 1768 crossing, the post at Natchez and the move to St. Gabriel and St. Jacques follow Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana. Cormier notes that the list of the 1768 arrivals names the seven brothers and sisters without their parents, and concludes that Joseph and Marie-Josèphe had most likely died in exile in Maryland after July 1763; the 1777 entry is the first to call them dead.

Her name

The Grand-Pré register writes her Marie Richart, and the Louisiana registers call her Marie Richard or Marie Josèphe Richard. The 1763 list enters her under her husband’s surname. The Pointe Coupée entry for her daughter Cécile’s marriage to Michel Rivais on 23 January 1769 names the bride’s mother as Marie Dugas, which was the name of Joseph’s mother; the entries for Geneviève, Madeleine, Augustin and Pierre give Richard.

Osite’s parentage

No record names Osite’s parents. She is placed in this family by Stephen A. White’s compiled genealogy of the Acadian families, as cited in another family tree, and everything around her fits: she was on the same Port Tobacco list in 1763; her age in 1768, about thirty, falls between Marguerite’s thirty-three and Madeleine’s twenty-eight; and Cormier’s list of seven unmarried brothers and sisters leaves out the married and widowed sisters, so its silence on her is no objection. Her husband Janvier Braux and Marguerite’s husband, Simon-Pierre Breau, were most likely both sons of Charles Breau and Claire Trahan, whose own household is on the same list, so two sisters had married two brothers. A St. Jacques entry of 5 August 1770 marrying an “Ausite” daughter of Joseph and Marie Richard to Jean Charles LeBlanc is read by one historian as Osite and by Cormier as her sister Anne-Madeleine; it is not used here.

The cousin marriage

The tree’s lines show how the two were related: Joseph’s father René was the son of Jean Landry, son of René Landry the younger, and Marie-Josèphe’s father René Richard was the son of Marguerite Landry, a daughter of the same René. Each spouse stood three generations below him, which is the third degree as the church counted it.

Another Joseph Landry

Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians has this family deported to South Carolina, and lists most of these children under a different Joseph Landry, the husband of Marie-Josèphe Comeau, who died in exile at Saint-Servan in France in 1764. The Port Tobacco list, with a living Joseph Landry at its head in 1763, and the Louisiana registers, which name Marie Richard as the children’s mother, place them in Maryland and in this family.