♀Marie Leblanc

Marie Leblanc (about 1747 – death not recorded) was an Acadian settler of St. Gabriel on the Mississippi, named as the wife of François Hebert and as a grandmother in two Baton Rouge diocesan baptisms of 1796 and 1802. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Charles Hebert.

Exile and marriage

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Marie married François Hebert, a fellow Acadian exiled to Maryland in 1755, in Maryland about 1762. Cormier gives her first two sons, Charles and Jean-Baptiste, as probably born in Maryland during the family’s exile, before she reached Louisiana. He quotes a report of July 1763 on the Acadians at Baltimore that lists the couple, with her name recorded as “Mari Le Blanc.”

Louisiana

Cormier dates the family’s arrival in Louisiana to 1767 and quotes the 1767 report on the Acadians who settled at St. Gabriel, which lists “Maria,” aged 25, in the household of François, assigned farm number 48 beside that of his own father. A St. Gabriel census taken in March 1777, as Cormier abstracts it, counted an unnamed wife aged 30 in the household with her husband, two sons and a daughter, along with eighteen cattle, three horses and sixteen hogs on five arpents^W of land. Two Diocese of Baton Rouge baptismal entries, of 1796 (St. Gabriel) and 1802 (Baton Rouge), abstracted for two of her grandchildren, name her plainly as “Maria LeBlanc,” a grandmother, though neither entry gives her a date.

According to Cormier, her son Charles, born in Maryland about 1763, moved to the Attakapas District and married Marguerite, daughter of fellow Acadians Amand Godreau and Marie Landry, there in December 1787, and the couple then returned to the St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge area. Cormier adds that a daughter of Marie and François married into the Landry and Simoneaux families, and that their sons’ descendants spread around Manchac and Baton Rouge and into West Baton Rouge Parish.

Notes

Marie’s own birth year is not recorded; the estimate of about 1747 used here comes only from the approximate age of 30 in the 1777 St. Gabriel census, not from a baptismal record, and the 1767 report’s age of 25 would put it about 1742. Cormier’s compilation is inconsistent about her given name, calling her “Marie-Josèphe or -Marguerite LeBlanc” in one place; the Baton Rouge baptismal abstracts, which come from a register rather than the compilation, give her plainly as Maria/Marie LeBlanc, and that form is used here. No death date has been found, and her parentage has not been confirmed against a primary Acadian register.