♂Rene LeBlanc

Rene LeBlanc (born about 1684) was the Acadian notary of Grand-Pré, a man who stood by the British government of Nova Scotia, was held captive for it, and died in exile at Philadelphia after the deportation of 1755; he is the old notary of Grand-Pré in Longfellow’s poem Evangeline^W. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Desire LeBlanc (born about 1717).

Early life and first marriage

He was a son of Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois. The census of 1686 lists him at two in their household at Port-Royal, with his older brothers Jacques and Francois; by 1693 the family had moved to Les Mines^W, where the roll gives his age as eleven. On 30 July 1709 he married Elisabeth Melancon at Grand-Pré, a daughter of Pierre Melancon, Sieur de la Verdure, and the widow of Allain Bugeaud, a royal notary. The act calls the groom’s parents “habitants de la Grand Prée”, and several Melansons and LeBlancs witnessed it; the groom signed “R. LeBlanc”, while his bride made her mark. The Grand-Pré registers name three of the couple’s children, Benjamin, Marie Joseph and Elisabeth, born between 1711 and 1718, and a modern dictionary of Acadian families adds a fourth, Desire, born about 1717, through whom the family’s line descends. Elisabeth was dead by November 1720.

Second marriage

On 26 November 1720 he married Marguerite Thébeau at Port-Royal, a daughter of Pierre Thébeau and Jeanne Comeau of that parish, after one banns^W had been published and the other two dispensed. The act calls him “veuf d’Elizabeth Melanson habitant des mines”, the widower of Elisabeth Melancon, living at Les Mines, and he signed it “R. Le Blanc”, as he had in 1709; the bride made her mark. In the twenty-seven years that followed, Marguerite Thébeau bore him sixteen children recorded in the Grand-Pré register, beginning with triplets, Anne, Marguerite and Marie, born and baptised on 25 July 1721, and including twins in 1731 and again in 1740; the youngest, Marie Jeanne, was born in April 1748. He signed the register at two of their baptisms, and between 1744 and 1746 he witnessed the weddings of three of the daughters.

The notary

The register already calls him “Rene Leblanc, notary” at the triplets’ baptism in 1721, more than twenty years before he was named to that office; the records do not explain the earlier title. He had served as a deputy of the inhabitants and was known to the British government at Annapolis Royal as a cooperative man. A history of the deportation, drawing on the report of a British officer who lodged at his house, tells how in 1732 he took the contract to build a blockhouse for troops at Les Mines, and how that July three Mi’kmaw men came to the house and threatened him and his brother Pierre; the building went no further. In December 1744 the Nova Scotia Council^W suspended the notary of Les Mines, Alexandre Bourg^W, who was married to his first wife’s sister Marguerite, and, as its minute records, named Rene LeBlanc notary public in his place.

Captivity and exile

His loyalty to the British government cost him dear. In December 1749 Abenaki, Maliseet and Mi’kmaq fighters, armed by the missionary Jean-Louis Le Loutre^W, besieged the British troops at Grand-Pré, and when they withdrew to Chignecto they took him away with their prisoners. The petition that the Acadians exiled in Pennsylvania later sent to the King says that he was seized “when actually travelling in your Majesty’s service”, that his house was pillaged, and that he was carried to the French fort and regained his liberty only “with great difficulty”. He came home to Grand-Pré an old man. When troops under Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow arrived in August 1755, he was among the elders who called on the commander, and on 5 September he was among the men shut in the parish church and told that they were to be deported.

When the people of Grand-Pré were put aboard the transports that October, the family was broken apart: he, his wife and his two youngest children went on one vessel, four other young children on another, and the grown children with their own families on others still. The petition tells the rest. His family, “consisting of twenty children, and about one hundred and fifty grand children, were scattered in different Colonies, so that he was put on shore at New York, with only his wife and two youngest children, in an infirm state of health”. From New York he joined three more of his children at Philadelphia, and there he died, the petitioners wrote, “notwithstanding his many years labour and deep suffering for your Majesty’s service.”

In Longfellow’s Evangeline

The petition reached the poem through a history. Thomas Chandler Haliburton^W printed it in his An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia in 1829, with the notary’s capture and his four years of captivity. John Frederic Herbin’s history of Grand-Pré says that Longfellow made use of that book when he wrote the poem. Evangeline appeared in 1847 and, by one history’s count, went through six printings in its first three months, and within ten years had been put into a dozen languages.

In the poem the notary is an old man with glasses on his nose and a crowd of children at his knee, “Father of twenty children”, with “more than a hundred / Children’s children” about him. When the blacksmith Basil doubts the English ships, the notary does not believe they mean harm, since the country is at peace. He tells his favorite tale instead, of a bronze statue of Justice beneath which an orphan maid was hanged for a lost pearl necklace, until lightning struck the statue, its scales fell, and the necklace was found in a magpie’s nest. The blacksmith is silenced, not convinced.

As the betrothal is arranged, Benedict Bellefontaine, Evangeline’s father, says that “René Leblanc will be here anon, with his papers and inkhorn,” and the notary duly enters. He writes the date and the ages of the couple, names the bride’s dowry in flocks of sheep and in cattle, sets the seal of the law on the page, and is paid three times his fee in silver. The poem’s contract is a poet’s picture of a notary’s work. The records show the real man named notary public by the Nova Scotia Council in December 1744.

The poem keeps to the petition on the main points: twenty children, a crowd of grandchildren, and four years a captive. The petition says only that he was carried to the French fort; the poem puts him in an old French fort at Port Royal, which had been the British Annapolis Royal since 1710, while Cormier places the captivity at Village-des-Beausoleil on the upper Petitcodiac. The petition has him join three of his children at Philadelphia; the poem leaves him there with only one of his hundred descendants. The poem’s grown son, Baptiste Leblanc, is a suitor pressed on Evangeline, but the real notary’s son of that name, Jean Baptiste Marie, was baptized at Grand-Pré on 5 June 1744 with his father signing the register, and was about eleven at the deportation.

Notes

The two marriages

Only one Rene LeBlanc married Elisabeth Melancon, in 1709, and the act of 1720 calls the groom her widower, so the husband of Elisabeth, the father of the Thébeau children and the notary of the Grand-Pré register were one man; he signed both marriage acts in the same form. No record of Elisabeth’s burial has been found, and the 1720 act is the earliest record of her death.

Desire LeBlanc’s parentage

That Desire was a son of this Rene and Elisabeth Melancon rests on a modern dictionary of Acadian families, seen as quoted online, and on a godparent entry. Desire does not appear in the surviving Grand-Pré baptisms, which begin in the middle of 1717, but in 1736 he stood godfather to a daughter of Marie Joseph, whose marriage act of 27 April 1734, to Joseph Meunié, a man from Pentagouet, names her parents as Rene LeBlanc and the late Elizabeth Melancon. No act naming Desire’s parents has been found. Several online trees give Desire’s parents as Jean LeBlanc and Jeanne Bourgeois instead.

Dates and numbers

His birth year varies with the source. The census of 1686 gives his age as two, which points to about 1684; the roll of 1693 gives eleven, and Placide Gaudet’s 1911 study of the notaries of Acadia gives 1682. John Mack Faragher’s history of the deportation, A Great and Noble Scheme, calls him seventy-five in 1755.

The petition gives no date for his death. Steven A. Cormier’s compilation on the Acadians of Louisiana places it at Philadelphia after 6 February 1758, in his late seventies.

The petition speaks of four years in captivity; Faragher and Cormier give two, Cormier from Christmas Day 1749, with Le Loutre and his Mi’kmaq holding him at Village-des-Beausoleil on the upper Petitcodiac.

The Council’s minute naming him notary is known from Gaudet, who quotes it: dated 17 December 1744 in the English calendar then in use, it names “Renny Le Blanc” to the office; Gaudet gives the date as 28 December 1744, and Cormier agrees on December 1744. Faragher, following Stephen White’s dictionary of Acadian families, identifies the man of the 1732 blockhouse, with his brothers Pierre and Francois, as a son of Rene LeBlanc and Anne Bourgeois.

The petition’s twenty children agree with the three children of the first marriage named in the registers, Desire, and the sixteen of the second. Cormier counts twenty-two, seventeen of them by Marguerite Thébeau, among them a third pair of twins, and gives him a third wife whose name is not known; the petition does not name the wife who went into exile with him. Gaudet gives Marguerite Thébeau’s age at her marriage as sixteen.