♀Osite Landry

Osite Landry (born about 1738) was an Acadian exile and the widow of Janvier Braux who, with three young daughters, was among the Acadians recorded at the isolated post of San Luis de Natchez in 1768 and afterwards settled at St. Gabriel. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Pelagie Braux (born about 1762).

Acadia and exile

Osite Landry, also recorded as Rose-Osite, was about thirty in 1768 according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which is the basis of the estimate of her birth about 1738. No record names her parents, but she is probably the daughter of Joseph Landry and Marie-Josèphe Richard, whose household was also on the 1763 Port Tobacco list. She married Janvier Braux; the place and date of the marriage are not recorded. On 7 July 1763 a household of three, headed by “Jean Braux,” with a wife “Osite Braux” and a daughter “Pelagie Braux,” was counted in a list of the Acadians at Port Tobacco, Maryland, a French-headed list drawn up in British Maryland; the household is identified as Janvier, Osite and their infant daughter Marguerite Pelagie. Cormier’s compilation adds two more daughters born in Maryland, Magdelaine (about 1765) and Marie (August 1767), and has Janvier dead before the party left for Louisiana; no record of his death has been found.

Widowed passage to Louisiana

Cormier’s compilation lists Rose-Osite among the Acadians who came in February 1768 from Port Tobacco, Maryland, in an extended group of about 150 led by Alexis and Honoré Breau: “age 30, widow of Janvier Breau,” with three daughters, Marguerite, about five, Magdelaine, about three, and Marie, an infant. He says the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa^W, insisted that the party settle at Fort San Luis de Natchez, far from the other Acadian communities although the Breaux had kin on the Acadian Coast. Cormier has Marie dying at San Luis de Natchez on 5 October 1768, within months of the family’s arrival, but he marks the entry as uncertain and gives the same date for another Marie Breaux of the party. Ulloa was overthrown in the autumn of 1768, in the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768^W, the same year the party reached Natchez. Cormier has his successor, Alejandro O’Reilly^W, allowing the Breaux families to settle where they wished in late 1769, and Osite’s household moved to San Gabriel.

Later life

Marguerite Pelagie married Pierre LeBlanc on 5 October 1778, and the register names her parents as “Janvier & Osite Landry, of St. Gabriel.” Her sister Magdelaine married Charle Hebert on 18 May 1785; that entry names the parents as “Janvier & Hosite Landry.” Osite’s name recurs, in various renderings, in the grandparent clauses of her grandchildren’s baptisms: Rosa (1798), Deosit (1800) and Rose (1802). No record of her own death is known.

Notes

No record names Osite’s parents. The link to Joseph Landry and Marie-Josèphe Richard comes from Stephen A. White’s compiled genealogy of the Acadian families, an unpublished draft cited in another family tree; the link rests on that compiled work, not on a record. The surrounding facts fit it. Osite is on the 7 July 1763 Port Tobacco list a few entries from the Joseph Landry household, which is counted at nine. Cormier’s list puts both Osite and the seven unmarried Landry children in the February 1768 party led by Alexis and Honoré Breau. Cormier gives Osite’s age as thirty in 1768, between her sister Marguerite (thirty-three) and Madeleine (twenty-eight). Cormier himself does not place her in the family: his entry for her brother Augustin names the widowed Marguerite among the siblings but not Osite, and he gives Osite’s birthplace as unknown.

A 1770 marriage at St. James of an “Ausite” Landry, daughter of Joseph and Marie Richard, to Jean-Charles LeBlanc has been read both as Osite’s second marriage and as the marriage of her sister Anne-Madeleine, who was in the Joseph Landry household in 1763. The entry does not call the bride a widow, so it is not used here. Cormier also wonders whether Osite was the Osite Landry who later married Anselme Landry at St. Gabriel, but the ages in the 1777 census do not fit well, and the idea is not taken up here.

Another family tree offers a different candidate: an Osite Landry baptized 5 May 1743 at Grand-Pré, daughter of Jean Landry and Claire LeBlanc. That baptismal record’s own family shows no Braux husband — its later marriages are to a Joseph Castille and a Joseph Broussard — and no record confirms the identification, so it is not used here.

The sources disagree about how the family reached St. Gabriel. Cormier’s compilation puts Osite’s household in the party that arrived from Port Tobacco in February 1768 and was sent to Natchez, and that is the version given here. Carl Brasseaux’s account of the Maryland Acadians in Louisiana (The Founding of New Acadia, pp. 81–82) describes a group that reached New Orleans in July or August 1767 and was destined for Fort St. Gabriel, as well as the February 1768 group sent to Natchez; it gives no passenger list for the 1767 group. The register calls the household “of St. Gabriel” only in 1778.

A Baton Rouge diocesan register recording her daughter’s second marriage in 1793 gives the bride’s parents as “(Juan & Margarita Landry).” The names do not match her known parents. They may belong to her late first husband, Pierre LeBlanc, whose mother was Marguerite Landry. Or, as Cormier suggests, “Juan” may stand for Janvier, who was himself listed as “Jean Braux” at Port Tobacco in 1763, with the bride’s own name written in place of Osite’s. Neither reading is certain.