♂Michel Lambremont

Michel Lambremont (born about 1767 – 28 July 1829) was a settler of St. Gabriel, Iberville Parish, Louisiana, whose two daughters married two Hébert brothers on the same day, at the same church, in February 1825. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Cidalise Lambremont.

Family

Michel was a son of Pierre Lambremont and Francoise Eloi (written Clois in his marriage entry, and Elois or Cloa in other entries), a couple whom one baptismal entry calls “of Acadia” and another “of New Orleans.” On 15 October 1793 he married Marguerite Pelagie Braux at the St. Gabriel church; the register names her as the widow of Pierre LeBlanc, her first husband, and the witnesses included Joseph Michel LeBlanc and Charles Hébert. The couple raised at least five children at St. Gabriel: Marie Cidalise (born 1799), Eugenie, Pierre Cleandre, Marie Denisse and Marie Mathilde (born about 1805).

Land

When the United States examined the old French and Spanish titles in its new Territory of Orleans, Michel claimed a tract on the Mississippi in the county of Iberville, six arpents, eighteen toises and four feet wide along the river and forty arpents deep. The land had been surveyed in 1772 for Alexander Landry and granted to him by Governor Unzaga^W in 1774, and Michel held it under that grant. The commissioners confirmed his claim, and their report reached Congress in January 1812. The same report names “land of Michel Lambremont” as the lower boundary of a neighbor’s tract on the west bank of the river; the claim itself does not say which bank his land lay on.

A 1982 archaeological and historical study of the White Castle Gap, which cites the parish conveyance book, gives an account of a public auction on 30 July 1821 at which the estate of Joseph LeBlanc was sold: Michel, with Jean Danos and Jerome LeBlanc, bought one 40-by-40-arpent tract for $6,000 and kept the quarter that adjoined his own land on the north.

Military service

The War of 1812 muster rolls for Louisiana militia in federal service, as the Louisiana National Guard museums list them, name Michel as captain of a company in the 8th Regiment, under Col. Nathan Miriam, for Iberville and West Baton Rouge. The list gives the dates of that service as 29 December 1814 to 4 March 1815 and nothing about what the company did.

A double wedding

On 1 February 1825, at St. Gabriel, two of Michel’s daughters married two Hébert brothers on the same day: the register records Marie Denisse’s marriage to Michel Hébert, a widower of Victoire LeBlanc, and Marie Mathilde’s marriage to Auguste Hébert, both grooms sons of Joseph Hébert and Anastasia Landry, with the same witnesses at both. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana calls Auguste the younger brother of Michel.

Death

Michel was buried at St. Gabriel on 28 July 1829, aged 62 by the priest’s record, which places his birth about 1767. He was still appearing as a witness to parish acts as late as 1828. By the time his daughter Marie Cidalise remarried, on 10 November 1834, the register recorded him as already deceased.

Notes

Michel’s birth year is derived from his recorded age at burial, not from a baptismal record; a FamilySearch index offers a 1765 christening at New Orleans, from the Archdiocese of New Orleans series, but the entry is not confirmed as his. An online family tree quotes a printed abstract of those registers for the baptism of a Michel, son of Pierre and Marie Francoise Eloy, born on 20 November 1770; the quoted abstract is second-hand, and the date does not fit the age of 62 recorded at his burial. An online family tree naming a “Jean Baptiste Lambremont,” born 1767 and married 1795, is a different man: this Michel married in 1793, under his own name, at St. Gabriel. Several other Lambremont households appear in the same St. Gabriel registers in these years - Jean Baptiste Lambremont and Anne Marguerite Hamilton, Pierre Michel Lambremont and Marie Louise Braud, and Rosemond Lambremont and Clementine Braux - evidently kin. The baptisms of Jean Baptiste and Anne Marguerite’s children from 1797 name the same paternal grandparents as Michel’s children, Pierre Lambremont and Francoise Eloi, and Michel stood godfather to one of their sons in 1799; yet Jean Baptiste’s own marriage entry of 20 January 1795 names his parents as “Paul & Maria Ylua, of New Orleans”. The records do not settle whether he was Michel’s brother. The relationship of the other two households is not known.