♂René Richard

René Richard (born about 1689) was an Acadian of the Minas district^W who raised six children in the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré, where his daughter Marie-Josèphe married her cousin Joseph Landry in 1733. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie-Josèphe Richard (1713–1777).

Family

He was most likely the son of Pierre Richard and Marguerite Landry, a couple settled at Grand-Pré, where their children married between 1711 and 1734. In 1693 René, then aged four, was living at Les Mines as one of that couple’s children. His wife, Marie-Josèphe Babin, was most likely a daughter of Vincent Babin and Anne Thériot of Pisiguit^W.

René Richard and Marie-Josèphe Babin were probably married about 1711, and over the next thirteen years they had six children: Pierre, Marie-Josèphe, Claude, Joseph, Jean-Baptiste and Armand. Their children were baptized in the parish church of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré, Pierre, the eldest, in September 1712, and the three youngest sons between 1718 and 1724. At Pierre’s baptism the godmother was a Marguerite Landry, most likely René’s mother. By 1714 René and his wife were counted at Grand-Pré with two children, a son and a daughter. On 12 March 1715 René Richard was among the inhabitants of Les Mines named on a list of that year.

In November 1733 their daughter Marie-Josèphe married her cousin Joseph Landry at Grand-Pré, and two years later, in November 1735, Pierre married Marguerite Granger there. A René Richard, most likely the father, was among the witnesses at both weddings, and like the bride and groom of 1733 he could not write and made his mark. An elder Pierre Richard, in all likelihood René’s own father, witnessed both marriages too.

Later years

Marie-Josèphe Babin died on 14 March 1738, aged about forty-seven, and was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré. René outlived her by at least nine years. When their sons Claude and Joseph married, in November 1740 and February 1745, the register called their mother dead but not their father, and René Richard was among the witnesses each time. Claude died on 11 February 1747, and René Richard was again a witness at his burial in the cemetery of Saint-Charles.

Notes

Sources

The baptisms of Pierre (1712), Joseph (1718), Jean-Baptiste (1721) and Armand (1724), the marriages of Marie-Josèphe (1733), Pierre (1735), Claude (1740) and Joseph (1745), and the burials of Marie-Josèphe Babin (1738) and Claude (1747) are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a). His birth year, the marriage about 1711, and the birth years of Marie-Josèphe (1713) and Claude (1716) are from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which also names his parents and his wife’s. His entries of 1693 and 1714 are from the censuses of Les Mines, and his name in 1715 from the list of its inhabitants; the 1714 entry is placed here at Grand-Pré, though the roll itself is headed Les Mines. The marriage itself is not in the Grand-Pré register. Nothing is recorded of him after February 1747, and the date and place of his death are not known.

His parents

No surviving act names René’s parents, but the Les Mines census of 1693 counted him, then aged four, among the children of Pierre Richard and Marguerite Landry. Arsenault gives them as Pierre Richard and Marguerite Landry, and the Grand-Pré register fits: their daughter Marguerite married Joseph Dugas there in 1711, and at the marriage of her son Charles Dugas in January 1739 the witnesses included a Pierre Richard, called the groom’s grandfather, and a René Richard, called his uncle. The third degree of kinship between Marie-Josèphe and Joseph Landry in 1733 is also exactly what the line through Marguerite Landry gives. The Port-Royal censuses of 1693 and 1701 count another René Richard of almost the same age, a son of René Richard and Madeleine Landry; he is a different man.

Names and ages

The register writes the family name both Richard and Richart. Armand’s baptism of 1724 writes him Amand and gives his mother as Marie Robin, a slip for Babin. Claude’s burial entry of 1747 gives his age with the second digit left out; his marriage in 1740 at about twenty-four points to a birth about 1716.