♀Osite Hebert

Osite Hebert (about 1730 – about 1805) was an Acadian woman of the Minas district, deported to Maryland in the expulsion of 1755, who reached Louisiana in 1766 and was left a widow with five sons within a few years of her arrival. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Charles Melancon (died 1818).

Parentage and marriage

Osite was most probably the daughter of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry of Grand-Pré, in the Minas district, and was born in Acadia about 1730. The one act that names her parents is her second marriage, at St. James on 7 January 1771, in which the bride, written Osithe Hébère, is called the daughter of Jacques and Margueritte Landris, and the groom is Augustin Boudrot, son of Pierre and Marie Doiron. That bride is not named there as anyone’s widow, so the act alone does not show that she was Alexandre Melancon’s. The identification comes from Stephen A. White, whose dictionary of the Acadian families first listed the Boudrot bride under Jacques Hébert and treated her as a different woman, and whose 2011 corrections made her the widow of Alexandre Melançon. His reason, as relayed second-hand by later correspondents, was a DNA test: the maternal line of the woman who married Augustin Boudrot leads to Perrine Rau, who stands in the maternal line of Marguerite Landry according to compiled trees.

An earlier reading took Osite for Osithe Hubert, daughter of Charles Hebert and Marguerite Leblanc, baptized at Grand-Pré on 11 May 1734, and Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana calls her “perhaps” that child. That baptism belongs to another girl. Charles Hébert was himself a son of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry, so if Osite was their daughter, the baby of 1734 was her niece and namesake.

About 1749, still at Minas, she married the widower Alexandre Melancon, when she was about nineteen and he about thirty-two. By Cormier’s account he had already lost a first wife, Marie-Josèphe Gautreaux.

Deportation and Maryland

The couple was swept up in the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755 and deported to the colony of Maryland. By 7 July 1763 they were living at Snow Hill, in Worcester County, Maryland, where a French-language return of the Acadian refugees held there, dated 7 July 1763, lists Alexandre, “Osite Melanson son épouse”, and Jean, Madeleine, Jacques, Joseph, Étienne and Paul in the household. The return states no relationships beyond “son épouse”, so it does not say whose children they were; for Paul, later registers do, and some of the others may have been the children of Alexandre’s first wife.

Louisiana and widowhood

Spanish Louisiana opened to the Maryland refugees in 1766, and, by Cormier’s account, the family reached Cabanocé, on the Mississippi above New Orleans, that year. According to the same compilation, her youngest child, Charles, was born there not long afterward, the only one of her children born in Louisiana; other compiled accounts place Charles’s birth about 1764, in Maryland, and no record of his baptism has been found.

Alexandre died at Cabanocé about 1768; White’s dictionary puts his death between July 1767 and the census of September 1769. When Spanish officials counted the settlement in 1769, Osite was listed there as his widow, keeping house with her five sons and no husband.

On 7 January 1771 she married Augustin Boudrot, Boudreaux in some compilations, at St. James, if White’s identification is right; the marriage rests on that identification alone. By one account a letter of the commandant Nicolas Verret to Governor Unzaga, written months after the wedding, says Boudrot asked leave to go to Canada to collect money owed him, and nothing shows that he returned. On 1 December 1776 an “Osite Heber”, very likely her, stood godmother at St. James to her grandson Paul, son of Pierre Jacques Melançon and Isabelle Landry. In the 1777 census of St. James Parish, by Cormier’s account, she was again heading the household without a husband.

By the 1790s her son Paul Melançon (Paul Olivier), the “Paul” of the 1763 Snow Hill list, had married Osite Barbe LeBlanc, daughter of Marcel LeBlanc and Marie Josèphe Braux; the marriage act has not been found, and their first known child was baptized in 1791. Four of their children baptized at St. James between 1796 and 1802 (Jean-Baptiste, Paul, Gilbert and Marcelline) name the paternal grandparents as “Alexandro Melanson & Ozita Hebert”, which ties Paul to Osite and Alexandre. Osite Barbe was buried at St. James on 24 August 1811, aged about forty-four, and Paul, “widower of Ozite Barbe LeBlanc”, remarried at St. Michael’s in Convent on 8 May 1821.

Osite was buried at St. James Parish on 1 September 1805, aged seventy-five. The burial entry calls her only “Osite, age 75 yrs., widow of Alexandre Melanson” and says nothing of a second husband.

Notes

Her parentage is graded as probable. It rests on the 1771 act, on White’s identification of that bride with Alexandre’s widow, and on her recorded ages. The DNA basis is White’s own, known only through a 2008 e-mail relayed by two correspondents and quoted in compiled form on a WikiTree page; no test report has been seen. The recorded ages wander: 32 on reaching Louisiana in 1766, 39 in the 1769 census (read as 33 by White), 45 in 1777 and 75 at burial. The last three point to a birth about 1730, and the age of 32 is the outlier.

A godmother written “Osite Hebert” appears at Grand-Pré on 23 June 1742, at the baptism of a child of François Hébert, one of Jacques and Marguerite’s sons, and an “Osite Hubert” stood godmother at a Melançon baptism there on 16 November 1747. The entries do not say whose daughters these godmothers were. No baptism has been found for Osite among the children of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry.

The first marriage of her husband and the exile details rest on Cormier’s compiled history, cited there to a 1763 report on the Maryland refugees and to the Spanish Louisiana censuses; none of that has been checked against an original register. The compilation is not fully consistent about the timing of her husband’s death: its entry for Alexandre places it at Cabanocé about 1768/69, but its account of Osite’s arrival elsewhere describes her as already a widow when the family reached Louisiana in September 1766.