♀Marie Madeleine Landry

Marie Madeleine Landry (born about 1723) was an Acadian woman who settled on the Acadian Coast^W of the Mississippi with her husband Désiré LeBlanc and their children, and married a second time after his death. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Esther Leblanc (born about 1744).

Marriage and exile

A shared online genealogy, drawing on White’s dictionary, gives her marriage to Désiré LeBlanc as about 1740, without a place; the Grand-Pré marriage registers for 1739 to 1741 hold no such marriage. The same genealogy has the family among the Acadians deported by the British and counted at Oxford, Maryland, in 1763. By 1769 they were on the Acadian Coast of Louisiana, where a census lists Désiré, aged 52, and Marie Landry, aged 46, with their younger children: Désiré, Benjamin, Enselme, an infant Grégoire of five months, and the daughters Izabelle, Marine and Ozitte. In 1775 two of her daughters married at Ascension, each record naming the parents as “Desire & Marie Magdalene Landry”. Her husband was buried at Ascension on 5 March 1777. The shared genealogy quotes a census of April that year that lists “Marie Landry, Widow LeBlanc”, aged 53.

Second marriage

At St. James in February 1778 she married Pierre Landry, a widower of Frosine Gautreau; the register names her as “Marie, widow of Desiré LeBlanc”, and the witnesses named were Jeromme LeBlanc and Jean Baptiste Landry; the first is probably her son Jérôme, though the entry gives no relationship. The abstract of the entry gives the date as 29 February, a day that did not exist that year.

Notes

The register of Ascension records the burial on 16 January 1790 of a “Maria, age 72 years”, filed under Landry. It names no husband, and her census ages point to a birth about 1723 rather than 1718, so the entry has not been assigned to her. The same register shows a Marie Landry standing godmother in 1775 alongside Anselme Blanchard, the husband of her daughter Esther; whether this was Marie Madeleine herself is not established by the record.

Early life

No record of her baptism survives. Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families, quoted in a shared online genealogy, names her parents as Abraham Landry and Marie Guilbeau. That couple is documented in the surviving registers of Grand-Pré as residents of the parish of l’Assomption at Pisiguit^W, where their son Alexandre was baptized in 1709 and from which two of their sons went to Grand-Pré to marry in 1732. The registers of Pisiguit itself are lost, and no record has been found that names Marie Madeleine as their daughter.

A second account, in a shared online family tree, makes her instead the Marie born on 23 November 1717 at Grand-Pré to Jean Landry and Claire LeBlanc, whose baptism survives. Her husband was living at Grand-Pré in the 1730s, which fits that account; her age of 46 in the 1769 census, which points to a birth about 1723, does not. A shared genealogy site that quotes the later censuses gives ages of 48 in 1770 and 53 in 1777, which agree with 1723. Neither account rests on a record naming her parents.