♂René Landry

René Landry (born about 1716) was an Acadian of Pisiguit, a son of Abraham Landry and Marie Guilbeau, who was married twice and settled in Spanish Louisiana, where he was living “of LaFourche” in 1792. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Valentin Landry, whose mother was his second wife, Anne Landry.

Acadia and exile

At Grand-Pré on 18 February 1737 René, then about twenty-one, married Marie Thériot, about nineteen, a daughter of Jacques Thériot. The register names his parents as Abraham Landry and Marie Guilbeau of the parish of Pisiguit. Marie bore him six children between about 1742 and about 1760: Marguerite, Marin, Félicité, Olivier, Joseph and Firmin. Marie was still his wife on 7 July 1763, when a list of Acadians at Oxford, Maryland, named René, Marie his wife and their six children. Their son Firmin married Victoire Babin at Ascension on 12 July 1789, and the register names René and Marie Thériot as his parents.

Louisiana

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, René married Anne in the late 1760s, probably at Cabanocé, and the marriage is dated about 1768. Anne was the widow of Jean Broussard, and René was a widower of Marie Thériot; the records do not say what became of Marie. By the Spanish census of 1769 René, aged 53, had a wife named Anne, aged 37, with two sons of his first marriage, Joseph, 12, and Firmin, 9. That puts his birth about 1716, and Anne’s about 1732. Firmin was the son of Marie Thériot, and Joseph was hers too: the 1763 list places him in her household, and a compiled history names him as René’s son by his first wife. Anne is the mother of the later children: Valentin was baptized at St. James on 15 January 1771, with Simon LeBlanc and Marie Landry as godparents, and Pierre Baptiste at Ascension on 7 February 1773.

The same history places them on lot 140 on the east bank at Cabanocé in the census of September 1769. In August 1770 the census counted them on the east bank at Ascension, with 12 arpents of land, six of them fallow. In April 1777 the Ascension census listed René, aged 62, and Anne, aged 44, with their children, Jean Broussard, 16, Anne’s son by her first marriage, and René’s older brother Joseph Landry, 67; the household held 6 arpents and three enslaved people, whose names the abstract does not give.

When Valentin married Celeste Bourgeois at St. James in 1792, the register named his parents as Renato and Ana Landry “of LaFourche”, the district at the head of Bayou Lafourche, later Ascension Parish; one of the witnesses, Fermin Landry, was probably his half-brother Firmin. René is named once more, as a grandfather, in the baptism of Valentin’s son Adelard in 1800.

The Baton Rouge diocesan register records the burial at Ascension on 3 June 1781 of a man named Rene in the register, aged 64 years, and the entry names no wife. The burial is tied to this René by a published abstract of the Ascension Parish civil records, which describes his estate: an inventory was made on 7 and 8 June 1781, and a sale of all his movables began on 17 June, both at the request of the guardians of the minor children of his first and second marriages. The abstract names Anne Landry as his second wife. No date for his death is known.

Notes

The second marriage

Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians gives René’s second marriage as about 1753 and Valentin’s birth as about 1754; both are contradicted by the 1763 list, which still has Marie as his wife, and by Valentin’s baptism in 1771. Arsenault also gives René’s birth as about 1712, where the marriage act’s age points to about 1716.

The 1763 list

A transcription of the 1763 Maryland census at acadian-home.org names René, Marie his wife, Marguerite, Marin, Félicité, Olivier, Joseph and Firmin, a count of eight for the Oxford entry of 7 July 1763. The list names Marie as his wife, so it is the record that she was living then. Cormier’s compiled history takes the same Oxford report to show René as “probably a widower”, with his daughter Félicité and sons Olivier, Joseph and Firmin, and says that Marie “had died by then”, without saying when or where. The list contradicts that compiled view.

The 1777 entry

The 1777 census writes him as “Renée”. Cormier’s abstract calls Joseph Landry the husband’s “uncle” in Anne’s entry and corrects him to René’s “older brother” in René’s own entry; this account follows the correction.

The burial and the estate

The burial entry gives his age as 64 years, which allows a birth in 1716 or 1717; the census ages (53 in 1769, 62 in 1777) fit the estimate of about 1716, which is kept. The burial entry names no wife. The abstract that names Anne is Eileen Larré Behrman’s Ascension Parish, Louisiana, Civil Records 1770-1804, page 21. It is a published secondary abstract, not a primary record, and its wording is known here only from a quotation in a WikiTree profile.