♀Marie Landry

Marie Landry was an Acadian woman living at Iberville, on the lower Mississippi, in the 1790s, the wife of Amand Godreau and the mother of three daughters known from the registers, two of whom married two different men named Charles Hebert. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Godreau.

In the registers

In the Louisiana church registers she is known only from the records of her daughters, as printed in the published abstracts of the Diocese of Baton Rouge church registers. At the marriage of her daughter Theodosia to Joseph Brasseur on 11 July 1794, she and her husband were described as “of Iberville”. She was named as the maternal grandmother at baptisms of the children of Theodosia and of her daughters Marguerite and Anne, at St. Gabriel^W between 1796 and 1804 and at Baton Rouge between 1802 and 1807; an entry of 1796 calls the couple Acadians, and one of 1805 says they were “of Acadia”. Marguerite and Anne each married a Charles Hebert, one a son of François Hebert and Marie Leblanc, the other a son of Pierre Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc, and the two couples baptized children at St. Gabriel in the same years. Two baptisms printed one after the other on the same page of the St. Gabriel register in 1796 give Amand Godreau and Marie Landry as the maternal grandparents in both families, which shows that the two wives were sisters. Her husband, Amand Godreau, was born at Grand-Pré and baptized there in January 1732, and a compiled genealogy by Cormier says that she married him in Maryland about 1758, during the Acadian exile, and that the couple came to Louisiana in 1766 with the first group of Maryland exiles, settling at St.-Jacques and moving by the early 1770s to Ascension.

St. James and Ascension

On 14 September 1769 a census of the Acadian settlers on both banks of the Mississippi, taken at Cabahannocer, St. James, lists a household headed by “Amant Gautherot”, aged 39, with Marie Landry, aged 31, Anne, aged 4, Margueritte, aged nine months, and Magdelaine, aged 14. A compiled genealogy by Arsenault places the household on lot 83 on the right, or west, bank. A compiled genealogy by Cormier places the household in the Ascension census of 1770, on the right bank, as head of family number 48 with six arpents, and in the Ascension census of 1777, written “Amand Gauteros”, aged 45, with a wife aged 38, four daughters and the same six arpents.

Her name and what is unknown

The entries give her name as Maria or Marie Landry, and one, the 1804 baptism of a grandson in Anne’s family, as Marie Blanche Landry. The Maryland list of 1763 calls her “La Blanche”. No record of her parents has been found, and no entry gives the date of her birth or marriage. A burial at Ascension on 14 January 1783 names a “Maria Blanche”, aged 45, and is probably hers; the entry names no husband. Several other women named Marie Landry, the wives of other men, appear in Louisiana registers of the same years.