♂Rene Blanchard

Rene Blanchard was an Acadian of Les Mines, in the Minas district of Nova Scotia, and the husband of Anne Landry. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughter Marie Blanchard (born 1709) and his son René Blanchard (born 1701).

Cobequid and Grand-Pré

The Port-Royal censuses of 1698 and 1700 list Rene as a young man of twenty and then of twenty-three, still in his father Martin Blanchard’s household. By 1701 he is at Les Mines: the rolls of 1701, 1703, 1707 and 1714 list him there with his wife, and the 1707 and 1714 rolls show children at home.

Rene and his wife are named as a couple in the Grand-Pré parish register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, Vol. 1a), which records the baptism of their daughter Marie on 28 August 1709, with Germain Terriot and Catherine Landry standing as godparents. A sworn declaration made in France by one of their grandchildren in 1767 describes Rene as “of Cobequid” and Anne as “of Port-Royal,” and names the couple as the maternal grandparents of the declarant.

Children and the deportation

The couple had at least three children who can be traced. Their son Rene, born about 1701, married Marguerite, daughter of Germain Theriot and Anne Richard, at Grand-Pré on 9 July 1726. He was deported to the British colony of Maryland in the expulsion of 1755; a 1763 report on the Acadians gathered at Baltimore lists him there with his wife and two daughters. He reached Louisiana with the Acadian settlers of St. Gabriel in 1767 and died at Ascension in September 1788. Their daughter Marie married Joseph Trahant in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, at Grand-Pré, on 5 November 1731; Joseph and Marie were themselves deported and both died at Falmouth, England, in 1756, and their own children’s family was later declared at Belle-Île-en-Mer, France. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, citing Stephen A. White’s online corrections to the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, gives a further daughter, Marie-Anne, who married Alexis Thibodeau about 1747, place unrecorded.

Lines of descent

One line runs through their daughter Marie Blanchard (born 1709) and reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne’s mother, Ida Serrette, in eight generations; the other runs through their son René Blanchard (born 1701) and his son Anselme Blanchard (1741–1799) and reaches his father, Jeffrey Delahorne, in nine. The lines meet only in Floyd Amatus Delahorne, one through his father and one through his mother.

Notes

No record of Rene Blanchard’s own birth, marriage or death is known. The Grand-Pré register gives his daughter Marie’s marriage as 1731, while the 1767 Belle-Île declaration gives 1732; the register, being closer to the event, is followed here. Two men named Rene Blanchard were active in the same Acadian community in this period — this Rene, husband of Anne Landry, and his own son of the same name — and later compilations occasionally confuse them.