♂René Blanchard

René Blanchard (born about 1701 – died 27 September 1788) was an Acadian farmer of Grand-Pré who endured twelve years of exile in Maryland after the deportation of 1755 and settled at St.-Gabriel d’Iberville in Louisiana in 1767, when a roll of the new settlers gave his age as sixty-six. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Anselme Blanchard (1741–1799).

Acadia and marriage

René married Marguerite, daughter of Germain Thériot and Anne Richard, at Grand-Pré on 9 July 1726. The family was living at Grand-Pré by 1732, when their daughter Anne was born there. The couple had at least six children entered in the family record, born between 1732 and 1746; according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, an elder son, Joseph, was also born to them in 1730.

René shared his name with his own father, another René Blanchard of Grand-Pré, who had married Anne Landry — the two men, father and son, are easily confused in the records of the period, and this René is the one who married Marguerite Thériot.

Exile and Louisiana

The family was deported to Maryland in 1755, when René was about fifty-four. A 1763 report on the Acadians at Baltimore lists him with his wife — given there as “Marguerite Thevreaux,” an English clerk’s version of Thériot — and daughters Françoise and Magdeleine. René and Marguerite reached Louisiana in 1767, along with their married sons Joseph and Anselme, who had grown up and married during the exile. Spanish officials settled the family at St.-Gabriel d’Iberville. The roll of the settlers, as Chandler prints it, lists “Rene Blanchard” at 66 with a wife, Margarita, at 60, and a daughter, also Margarita, at 18; Cormier reads the daughter as Magdelena and gives René as head of family number 27, assigned farm number 35. Cormier calls him one of the oldest Acadians to come to the colony. René was buried at Ascension, just downriver from St.-Gabriel, on 27 September 1788, at the age of eighty-seven by Cormier’s account.

Notes

René’s birthplace at Port-Royal and the family and farm numbers rest on Cormier’s compilation; the marriage to Marguerite Thériot and their residence at Grand-Pré come from the family’s own baptismal and marriage records. His burial is in the Ascension register as abstracted by the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which gives only “Rene” under the Blanchard name, with no age or wife; Cormier assigns it to him, and the one other René Blanchard of the exile, husband of Isabelle Comeau, had died before 1765.