♀Scholastique Le Gentilhomme

Scholastique Le Gentilhomme (baptized 16 January 1700) was, with her husband Thomas Holley, a burgher of Cherbourg, in Normandy, whose daughter married an Acadian exile in that town in 1761. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Jeanne Holle (born about 1739). She was baptized at Tourlaville, in the Manche, the daughter of Jean Le Gentilhomme and Anne Le Rivager. Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme married at Tourlaville on 22 April 1727, both listed as of Cherbourg. Jeanne is one of the couple’s six known children; the baptisms of the other five were recorded at Cherbourg between 1730 and 1741. The fullest record of the couple is their daughter’s marriage, in which her name is written Jeanne Holley.

Their daughter’s marriage

On 17 January 1761, after the betrothal and the publication of the banns^W, Jean Terouilly, curate at Cherbourg, married her to François Daigle, the son of the late Abraham Daigle and the late Anne Boudrot. The act sets the two families side by side, the groom and his parents as “tous originaires de l’Acadie”, all natives of Acadia, and the bride’s father and mother as “bourgeois de Cherbourg”, burghers^W of the town. In the France of the time the word marked a settled townsman with the standing of a citizen of his town; the act gives no trade for either parent. It calls her husband “feu”, the late, and the groom’s mother “defunte”, but uses no such word for Scholastique, so she was most likely still living. Jeanne signed the register as Jeanne Holley; the groom made his mark.

After the wedding

Jeanne and François Daigle were living at Le Havre by September 1772, and according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana the family sailed to Spanish Louisiana in 1785. The records do not show when or where Scholastique died.