♂Vincent Babin

Vincent Babin (born about 1665) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who settled at Pisiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, and raised a family of at least seven children there. His name served the settlement as a landmark: in 1709 a woman of Pisiguit was buried “near the chapel du costé of Vincent Babin”, the chapel on Vincent Babin’s side. He was most likely the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie-Josèphe Babin (1691–1738).

Port-Royal

Vincent was a son of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier and grew up at Port-Royal, where the census of 1671 counted him as a small boy, one of their five children. In 1686, aged twenty-one, he was the eldest of the children still living in his parents’ household.

Pisiguit

He probably married Anne Thériot about 1687, and within a few years the couple had left Port-Royal for the Minas Basin. The census of 1693 found them there, Vincent with Anne, aged twenty, and two children, Jean, aged four, and Marie-Josèphe, a year old. On the roll their household came directly after that of Guillaume Lejuge and his wife Marie Mercier, most likely Vincent’s widowed mother, who had married again.

The family made its home at Pisiguit, and the household grew over the next two decades: Vincent and Anne had at least seven children, Jean, Marie-Josèphe, Madeleine, Anne, Marie, Cécile and Joseph, born between about 1689 and 1710.

The woman buried there in September 1709 was Marie Richard, the wife of Michel Vincent, one of the settlers of Pisiguit, laid “in a place planned for a cemetery” near the chapel. The register placed the chapel by his name, so it most likely stood on or close to his land, and ground beside it was being set aside for the dead.

Later life

Vincent Babin was still living in 1718, when two of his daughters married at Grand-Pré, Madeleine to Pierre Forest on 10 January and Anne to Claude Brossard, of the parish of Port-Royal, on 24 October. He was a witness at both weddings and signed his name each time, as he had in 1712 at the wedding there of his brother Charles’s daughter Marguerite, while several of the other witnesses made their mark. When and where he died is not known.

Notes

Records

The 1671 and 1686 entries are known from modern transcriptions of the rolls; the 1686 one gives his age as 21. The 1693 roll of Les Mines gives him as 26; Bona Arsenault’s extract of it, in L’Acadie des ancêtres, gives 27 and places the household at Pisiguit. Arsenault’s extract of a roll of 1704 gives him as 40, with six children: Jean, born 1689, Marie-Joseph, born 1692, Marie, Madeleine, Anne and Joseph. The birth year 1665 and the marriage about 1687 are from Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which Belliveau’s dictionary follows; both say he lived in the parish of Sainte-Famille, the parish of Pisiguit.

The chapel and the weddings

The burial of 1709 and the weddings of 1712 and 1718 are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a); the burial entry keeps the register’s French “du costé”. No other Vincent Babin appears in the Minas records of those years, and Michel Vincent and Marie Richard are called inhabitants of Pisiguit at their daughter Marie’s wedding in October 1709.

Children

Madeleine and Anne are named as daughters of Vincent Babin and Anne Thériot in their marriage entries of 1718, and Jean, “the son of Vincent Babin”, signed as a godfather at a Babin baptism at Grand-Pré in 1708. Joseph is named as their son, and Marie as Vincent’s daughter, in the declarations of exiled Acadian families printed by Casgrain; the one about Marie, who died in Maryland in 1756, calls her mother Magdelaine Thériot and makes Vincent a descendant of Antoine Babin. Cécile rests on Arsenault and a compiled Brossard genealogy. Arsenault gives two daughters named Marie, about 1690 and about 1706, but the 1693 roll has no Marie and the 1704 one a single Marie besides Marie-Joseph, so the family is given here one Marie, born before 1704.

His daughter Marie-Josèphe

No surviving act names Marie-Josèphe Babin’s parents. Arsenault makes her the daughter of Vincent Babin and Anne Thériot of Pisiguit, his extracts list a Marie-Josèphe in their household in 1693 and 1704, and the 1745 marriage of her son Joseph Richard names her Marie Joseph Vincent Babin, most likely adding her father’s forename to her own.