♀Marie Mercier

Marie Mercier (born about 1646) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of the farmer Antoine Babin and the mother of his eleven children. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by six separate lines of descent, through five of her children.

Port-Royal

Marie is thought to have been the daughter of Francoise Gaudet by a first husband, a Mercier whose given name is unknown and who died before 1648, after which her mother married Daniel LeBlanc. She is reckoned to have married Antoine Babin about 1661. He was some twenty years older, and by their ages in 1671 she was about sixteen when their eldest child, Marie, was born. In 1671 Antoine, a farmer of 45, had two arpents^W of land under the plow, six cattle and eight sheep, and the couple had five children, from Marie, aged nine, down to Marguerite, aged one.

By 1686 there were eight children at home, the youngest Jean, aged two, and ten cattle, twelve sheep and eight hogs, though the land was put at only an arpent and a half; the family also owned a gun. The three eldest, Marie, Charles and Jeanne, had married and kept households of their own, and Catherine, then fourteen, in all likelihood married Jean Comeau about the same year. Between them the two censuses name all eleven of the couple’s children.

Later life

Antoine Babin was counted in 1686 but not in the census of 1693, so he presumably died between the two counts, at a place that is not recorded. Marie seems to have married again, to Guillaume Lejuge, a man about twenty years her junior. By 1693 the couple, he 28 and she 50, had two small daughters, Genevieve and Cristine, and their household was counted among those of her married Babin children. They may have also had a daughter Elizabeth (born about 1687), who married Pierre Benoit about 1703 at Pigiguit^W.

When Marie died is not known. In 1767, at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, where a group of exiled Acadians was then living, the widow of her grandson Claude Babin declared that Marie and Antoine had both died at Port-Royal.

Lines of descent

The six lines of descent run through five of her children: Charles, Catherine (twice), Vincent, Marguerite and Jean. Five come down the mother’s side, through Ida Serrette, and one, through Vincent, comes down the father’s side, through Jeffrey Delahorne. The nearest runs nine generations up, through Charles. The lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux both descend from her, and once more in Floyd himself, both of whose parents, Ida Serrette and Jeffrey Delahorne, descended from her. Two lines rest on compiled genealogies and a wedding’s witnesses: no surviving act names Marie Josèphe Comeau or Marie Comeau as Catherine’s daughters.

Notes

Records

The 1671 and 1686 entries are known from modern transcriptions. Her ages there, 25 and 40 (Antoine’s 45 and 55), give a birth about 1646; the 1693 roll’s 50 gives about 1643. The marriage year 1661 is Bona Arsenault’s; the compiled genealogies date Catherine’s marriage and marry the three eldest to François Rimbault, Madeleine Richard and Michel Richard.

Family

Her parentage is Léopold Lanctôt’s reconstruction in Familles acadiennes, which dates her mother’s first marriage about 1643. No register of the period survives; it rests on the church’s dispensations^W for blood kinship between Marie’s descendants and those of Daniel LeBlanc and Francoise Gaudet. Abstracts of the Grand-Pré register show such dispensations. In November 1745 her great-grandson Joseph Babin, of her son Charles, married Marguerite LeBlanc, a great-granddaughter of Francoise through her son Rene, and the priest dispensed them for kinship “in the 3rd degree on one side and 4th on the other”. That is exactly the distance between them if Marie was Francoise’s daughter, and no other shared ancestry is known that would explain it. Marriages in 1718 and 1747 between the same two families show the same pattern. If Lanctôt is right, Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from both of Francoise Gaudet’s marriages, through Marie and through her LeBlanc half-siblings Jacques, Rene and Francoise. The 1767 declaration does not agree: it says Antoine came from France “avec sa femme Marie Mercier” (with his wife Marie Mercier).

The second marriage

No record names Marie as Antoine Babin’s widow. For the identification: the 1693 household stands among her Babin children’s; Lanctôt and Arsenault both make Guillaume Lejuge and Marie Mercier the parents of Elizabeth Lejuge, named with Pierre Benoit as a parent at their sons’ marriages at Grand-Pré in 1732 and 1735 (her own marriage date and place come from a compiled genealogy); and the 1738 Grand-Pré marriage of Elizabeth’s daughter Judique Benoit to Claude LeBlanc needed a dispensation for third-degree kinship, which fits only if Elizabeth’s mother was Francoise Gaudet’s daughter. Against it: Genevieve and Cristine would have been born in Marie’s forties, and the 1767 declaration, which has her and Antoine both dying at Port-Royal, mentions no second marriage.