Acadian Settlement Patterns in Antebellum Louisiana, 1803-61

Two years after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the old Attakapas District became Attakapas County in the Territory of Orleans.  When the Americans created the first civil parishes for Louisiana in 1807, the old Attakapas District became St. Martin Parish.  In 1817, the site of the old Attakapas Post became the incorporated "city" of St. Martinville, which styled itself La Petite Paris.  In the years that followed, the old Attakapas country became the civil parishes of St. Martin, St. Mary (1811), Lafayette (1823), Vermilion (1844), and, after the War Between the States, Iberia (1868).

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After the Louisiana Purchase, the old Opelousas District became the civil parishes of St. Landry, sometimes called Imperial St. Landry (1807), Calcasieu, also called Imperial Calcasieu (1840), and, after the War Between the States, Cameron (1870), Acadia (1887), Evangeline (1910), Allen (1912), Beauregard (1912), and Jefferson Davis (1912). The last three prairie parishes, in fact, were among the final ones created by the State of Louisiana.

An interesting note can be found in five Opelousas marriage records dated 27 December 1814 and 1, 2, and 5 January 1815.   The Reverend Michel Bernard Barrière had served as pastor of St. Martin of Tours church at St. Martinville in the 1790s, retired for a time, and was transferred to St. Landry church at Opelousas in the early 1800s.  Father Barrière recorded the marriages on pages 261, 262, and 263 of volume 1-A of the parish's marriage register, with the notation: "The above five marriages ... were celebrated during Advent due to the war and the immediate departure of the militia leaving from here [Opelousas] on the 4th January 1815."  The Battle of New Orleans was fought at Chalmette Plantation four days later. ...

For a few months during the War Between the States, Opelousas served as the capital of Confederate Louisiana. ...

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The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the arrival of more Anglo Americans that followed the purchase inevitably led to name changes in the area.  Ascension became the town of Donaldson in 1806 and Donaldsonville in 1823.  Thanks to the machinations of its founder, William Donaldson, the town served briefly as the state capital from 1829 to 1831 before the legislature moved the seat of government to Baton Rouge.  The name Valenzuéla disappeared.  Ascension survived as the name of one of the 19 original civil parishes created by the legislature of the Territory of Orleans in 1807.

The same legislation also established Assumption Parish just down bayou from Ascension.  The seat for Assumption Parish was eventually placed at Napoleonville.  In 1839, Church authorities created a new ecclesiastical parish, St. Élisabeth, at Paincourtville, a few miles up bayou from Plattenville, on land donated by Miss Élisabeth Dugas along the west bank of the Lafourche.  In the mid-1850s, St. Philomena Parish arose down bayou at Brûlé Labadie, now Labadieville, near the civil parish line; the first mass in the area had been held in the home of Widow Zacharie Boudreaux in the spring of 1842, soon after Brûlé Labadie had become a mission of the Thibodaux church, but St. Philomena did not officially become a parish until 1855.

Interior Parish, farther down Bayou Lafourche, also was one of the original civil parishes of 1807.  In 1812, with the creation of the State of Louisiana, the legislature renamed Interior Parish, Lafourche Interior Parish.  In 1817, Church authorities founded St. Joseph Parish at the site of a trading post in Lafourche Interior Parish, Thibodauxville, named after local planter and politician  Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, who served briefly as governor of the State of Louisiana in late 1824.  The legislature incorporated  Thibodauxville as a town in 1830, and it became simply Thibodaux in 1838 (the town did not formally adopt its current name, the spelling favored by its namesake as well as its residents, until 1918).  In 1853, the state legislature dropped "Interior" from the parish's name, and it became simply Lafourche Parish.

In 1822, the state legislature carved a new civil parish, Terrebonne, which means "good earth," from the lower end of Lafourche Interior Parish.  The original seat of Terrebonne Parish was at the confluence of Bayous Cane and Terrebonne but was moved to the village of Houma on Bayou Terrebonne in 1834.  Houma, named after the Indians who had moved from the Mississippi to Bayou Cane during the late colonial period, was founded in 1810 (some sources say 1834) but was not incorporated until 1848.  Church authorities created St. Francis de Sales Parish at Houma in 1847.  Today, St. Francis de Sales serves as cathedral and St. Joseph as co-cathedral for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, which Church authorities formed from part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1977.  Reverend Warren L. Boudreaux, a native of Berwick, near Morgan City, and an Acadian descendant, served as the first bishop of the new diocese. ...

"Americanization": From Cadien to Cajun

An example of the Acadian capacity for assimilation into the new American culture was that of the first "Acadian" governor of Louisiana, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux.  His origins are obscure, his early life perhaps the stuff of legend, and most historians even insist that he was French Canadian, not Acadian.  If he was Acadian, he certainly was not a typical one.    

According to one researcher, during the fall of 1755, British forces deported Alexis Thibodeau, his wife Anne Blanchard, and two of their young sons from the Thibodeau settlement at Pigiguit to Pennsylvania, perhaps aboard the British transport Three Friends.  When the French and Indian War finally ended in early 1763, instead of moving north to Canada or going to Louisiana via Maryland, Alexis and his family moved to upper New York, where son Henry was born at Albany in c1769.  The lad was orphaned at an early age.  Family tradition says that he was raised by one of the wealthiest, most powerful men of New York colony, General Philip Schuyler of Albany, and that the general sent the bright young orphan to Scotland to receive a formal education. 

Henry Thibodaux, as he preferred to spell his surname, took Schuyler as his middle name.  During the early 1790s, in his early 20s, he emigrated to Louisiana.  According to family tradition, Henry's trade was that of shoemaker.  In May 1793, history finally gives way to legend when he married Félicité, daughter of Jacques Bonvillain, a French Creole from the German Coast, at the Acadian Coast community of St.-Jacques; Félicité's mother was an Hébert.  Henry remarried to Brigitte, daughter of French Canadian Nicolas Belanger of Pointe Coupée, at Baton Rouge, in June 1800.  By 1804, Henry had moved his growing family to upper Bayou Lafourche.  He soon moved down bayou to near the headwaters of Bayou Terrebonne, an effluence of Bayou Lafourche. 

The humble shoemaker did not remain humble long.  He promptly threw himself into local politics while he amassed land and slaves on upper Bayou Terrebonne near present-day Schriever.  In 1805, at age 36, his neighbors sent him to the legislature of the United States Territory of Orleans.  In 1808, he became a justice of the peace for Lafourche County.  In 1812, he was chosen as a delegate to the state constitutional convention that helped create the State of Louisiana.  His neighbors promptly elected Henry S., as he was called, to the new state Senate, in which he served for over a dozen years.  In 1824, now 55, Henry S. was serving as president of the Senate when Governor Thomas B. Robertson resigned his office.  The Louisiana state constitution of that day designated the president of the state Senate, not a lieutenant governor, to succeed a governor who resigned from or died in office.  Henry Schuyler Thibodaux served as interim governor of Louisiana from November to December 1824, until the inauguration of Robertson's elected successor, Henry Johnson.  Three years later, while he was campaigning for a regular term as the state's chief executive, Henry S. was struck down by a liver ailment at his home on Bayou Terrebonne.  He died on 24 October 1827, age 58.  His will, dated 28 July 1817, named his wife Brigitte and his oldest son Léandre as his executors.  His succession inventories were filed at the Houma courthouse in November 1827 and at the Thibodauxville courthouse in January 1828, so he owned property in Lafourche Interior as well as Terrebonne Parish. 

Governor Thibodaux had five sons, two by his first wife and three by his second.  All of his sons created families of their own.  Most of them married French or German Creoles, though two of them married Acadians.  Henry's daughter by his first wife married into the Acadian Bourgeois family.  His daughters by his second wife married into the Barras and Porche families.  The governor's grandsons also tended to marry French Creoles, and at least three of them married Anglo-Americans.  Judging by the number of slaves the governor's sons held during the late antebellum period, the family prospered on their farms and plantations on bayous Terrebonne and Lafourche. 233

The settlement on Bayou Lafourche named after the future governor, originally called Thibodauxville, became the seat of Interior Parish in 1807 and of Lafourche Interior Parish in 1812.  The village was not incorporated until 1830, three years after the governor's death.  In 1838, it was renamed Thibodeaux, but its name was usually spelled like the governor's surname.  Not until 1918 was it officially called Thibodaux.  ...

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The "second" Acadian governor of Louisiana and the state's first popularly-elected chief executive was a paragon of assimilation into American culture.  No Acadian of antebellum Louisiana accumulated more personal and political influence than Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette Parish. 

"Here is this one on a smooth green billow of the land, just without the town [of Vermilionville].  It is not like the rest--a large brick house, its Greek porch half hid in a grove of oaks.  On that dreadful day, more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into the chapel the villagers of Grand Pre, a certain widow fled with her children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as  the houses being destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her way, with others, to these prairies.  Her son founded Vermilionville.  Her grandson rose to power--sat in the Senate of the United States.  From early manhood to hale gray age, the people of his State were pleased to hold him, now in one capacity, now in another, in their honored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of the Convention, what you will."

So writes the bard of the Creoles and Cajuns, George Washington Cable of New Orleans, in his story "Carancro," which appeared in the January and February 1887 issues of the then-popular Century Magazine.  He goes on:  "I have seen the portrait for which he sat in early manhood to a noted English court painter:  dark waving locks; strong, well-chiseled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm, steady-glowing intellectual energy.  It hangs still in the house of which I speak.  And I have seen an old ambrotype of him taken in the days of this story:  hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful, courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile." [photo]   In the story, Cable is describing a character referred to only as "the ex-governor," but anyone familiar with the southwest Louisiana of that day would know the identity of the character's original.  "I am a Creole," a destitute widow says to the ex-governor when she comes to him for assistance.  "Yes," he tells her, "and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be.  But I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing else."222  

Alexandre Mouton indeed was an Acadian whose paternal ancestors had lived in old Acadie.  Although Cable's character, the ex-governor, was based on Mouton, the character's genealogy is not quite the same as that of the real former governor of Louisiana.  ... 

Alexandre's father Jean served under Spanish Governor Don Bernardo Gálvez in the fight against the British during the American Revolution.  In the late 1770s, he crossed the Atchafalaya Basin and settled along upper Bayou Teche in the Attakapas District.  There, in June 1783, at age 29, he married Marie-Marthe, called Marthe, daughter of a prominent resident of the Attakapas Post, surgeon Antoine Borda, a native of France and second husband of Marguerite Martin dit Barnabé, an Acadian born at Chignecto.  Jean and Marthe produced a large family:  sons Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, François, Charles, Louis, Pierre-Treville, Alexandre, Antoine-Émile, and Césaire, and daughters Marie-Modeste, Marie-Adélaïde, and Marie-Marthe--a dozen children in all.  Alexandre was born in November 1804, the year after the United States purchased Louisiana from France.  He was born at his father's plantation house on Bayou Carencro in present-day Lafayette Parish, where Jean had become a prominent sugar planter at the northern edge of the Attakapas District.224  

Alexandre, like other children of prominent planters, received an elementary education in the local district schools, where he was instructed in his native French.  He also learned to speak English fluently, which stood him in good stead when he enrolled in a prominent Jesuit school, Georgetown College in Washington, D.C.  Back home in Louisiana, he studied law first in the offices of Charles Antoine, then in St. Martinville with Judge Edward Simon.  In 1825, at age 21, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and began his practice in Lafayette Parish.225

His career in the law was short-lived.  His father gave him a plantation near the village of Vermilionville, now the city of Lafayette.  Alexandre transformed the plantation into a major sugar-producing operation.  He would henceforth make his substantial living as a sugar planter, not as a lawyer, and become the quintessence of what a twentieth-century folklorist called a "genteel Acadian."  He lived first in a townhouse in Vermilionville that had been built by his father around 1805, when the community was called Grand Prairie.  Over the years, Alexandre amassed a plantation of 19,000 arpents, which he ran from the Greek revival home that he built in the 1830s on the banks of the Vermilion, a house he called Île Copal after the exotic trees that graced the property.  By 1860, he owned 121 slaves to work his extensive holdings.  No one in Lafayette Parish owned more slaves than ex-governor Mouton.226

Like his grandfather Salvator, Alexandre Mouton also married twice.  In 1826, he married French Creole Célestine Zelia, called Zelia, Rousseau, a granddaughter of Jacques Dupré, one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in St. Landry Parish who later served briefly as acting governor of the state.  Among the four children of Alexandre and Zelia was Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred, their third child and second son and the only son to survive infancy.  Alfred, as he was called, was born in February 1829 in St. Landry Parish.  Their other surviving children were daughters Henriette Odèide, Marie Cecilia Arcade, and Marie Céleste Mathilde.227

In the same year of his marriage, at age 22, Alexandre's political career began when he was elected to represent Lafayette Parish in the lower house of the state legislature.  He served in that body until 1832 and as its speaker in 1831-32.  He was an avid Jacksonian Democrat and served as an elector for that party's national tickets in 1828, 1832, and 1836, the year he was sent back to the state legislature to represent Lafayette Parish again.  The following year, in 1837, the state legislature chose him as United States Senator to serve out the term of Alexander Porter, who had resigned.  Alexandre was only 33 years old when he assumed this high office, only three years older than the minimum age of 30.  At the end of the Senate term, in 1838, he was elected to the United States Senate in his own right and served in Washington until March 1842, when he resigned his senatorial seat to run for governor of Louisiana.  

Alexandre's wife Zelia had died in Lafayette Parish  in November 1837, early in his senatorial career.  Two months before he left Washington to return to Louisiana to run for governor, in January 1842, at age 38, he remarried to Anne, 12-year-old daughter of Charles K. Gardner of New York.  Gardner had served as adjutant general of the United States Army during the War of 1812 and was at the time of his daughter's marriage to Mouton a clerk in the United States Treasury Department.  Alexandre and Emma had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood:  daughters Marie Thérèse and Anne Eliza, and sons Alix Gardner, who died an infant, George Clinton, William Rufus King, Paul Joseph Julien, and Charles Alexandre.  

Alexandre Mouton, the first popularly-elected governor of Louisiana, was inaugurated in January 1843 and served until February 1846.  When he assumed the governorship, the state was deeply in debt, but by the time he left office, most of the state's indebtedness had been liquidated.  During his governorship, he was active in the 1844 presidential campaign of Jacksonian James K. Polk, helping the Democratic ticket carry Louisiana in the federal election.  He promoted the development of railroads in the state and pursued this interest after he returned to private life.  He was chosen president of a railroad convention held in New Orleans in January 1852.228

Though he held no more elective offices after his term as governor, Mouton remained active in Democratic politics.  He served as a delegate to the Democratic national conventions at Cincinnati, Charleston, and Baltimore in 1856 and 1860.229

His most interesting public service after his governorship was as president of the 1858 vigilance committee created by prominent local leaders to rid the Lafayette and St. Landry parish region of marauding cattle rustlers.  For years these outlaws had raided local cattle herds from their hiding places on the prairies west of Vermilionville.  By 1858, their numbers and depredations had increased to the point that local law enforcement officers could not control them.  The vigilance committee's armed force, led by the governor's son Alfred, a graduate of West Point, brutally suppressed the band of rustlers, and even hanged some of its leaders without trial.  

After Lincoln's election to the Federal presidency in November 1860 and the calling of a convention in South Carolina the following month to consider the fate of the Union, the Louisiana legislature authorized the election of a convention to address the question of secession.  Delegates were elected on 7 January 1861 to meet in Baton Rouge on January 23.  Lafayette Parish chose Alexandre Mouton as its delegate to the convention.  Reflecting the fact that he was still a popular and respected leader in his native state, the convention at its opening session elected the 56-year-old former governor as its president.  Mouton openly supported secession, as did a majority of the delegates.  After three days of debate and deliberation, on 26 January 1861, the convention voted 113 to 17 to secede from the Union, making Louisiana the sixth state to do so, after South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, who soon formed a southern Confederacy.  

The business of secession concluded, Governor Mouton returned to Île Copal to await the consequences of the convention's work.  In the weeks following Louisiana's secession, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President of the United States, the Confederates fired on the Federal garrison in Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress what he insisted was a Southern rebellion, more Southern states seceded, and the Confederate government that had been formed in February moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond.230  

Always an enthusiastic Confederate, Mouton offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the national senate, but for the first time in his political career he failed to win election.231  "The Acadian of the Acadians" would endure the War Between the States as a private citizen.  His son Alfred and thousands of other Louisianans, however, including Acadians like himself, both high and low, would endure the war as soldiers, wearing the gray and butternut uniforms of a new American nation that Alexandre Mouton helped create. ...

The Acadians and the Church in Louisiana

The most distinguished priest to serve the parish at Attakapas in its early days was Father Michel-Bernard Barrière, a fugitive from the French Revolution, who officiated at St.-Martin de Tours from 1795 to 1804.  A historian of the Church in Louisiana notes:  "He [Father Barrière] took up his residence about a mile from the village but he walked to the church every morning for Mass and he remained at the church all day on Sunday."  The St. Martin parish registers attest to Father Barrière's diligence in documenting the lives of his Attakapas parishioners.  The historian goes on to call him "'The Apostle of the Teche Country', for to him is really due the laying of the foundation of the Faith in most of the present Catholic parishes in a wide area around St. Martinville, now independent church parishes, but then all children of the mother-parish of St. Martin of the Attakapas."

Acadian Marriage Patterns in Antebellum Louisiana, 1803-1861

The Acadians and the South's Plantation Economy

Acadians in Gray

______________________

BOOK ONE                BOOK TWO            BOOK THREE           BOOK FOUR

NOTES - BOOK FIVE

222.  Quotations from Cable, Creoles & Cajuns, 248, 249.

224.  Jean's gravestone holds a plague that calls him a patriot of the American Revolution.  See [photo]. 

The Attakapas District was created and first settled, a decade before the Acadians arrived, by a hand full of French Creoles, most of whom raised cattle; the church records for the district date back to 1756.  The site of the old French/Spanish post was renamed St. Martinville in 1817.  See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 728.  The Indian name is pronounced uh-TACK-uh-paw & is "officially" spelled Atakapas, but the name of the district is almost invariably spelled Attakapas.  

To illustrate the point that "all" Acadians are related, Marguerite Martin, Alexandre Mouton's maternal grandmother, is one of the author's ancestors as well!  Her first husband was René Robichaux, & one of their daughters, Geneviève, married Amand Dugas, father of Rosalie Dugas, who married Pierre Cormier, père, called Pierre of Opelousas, one of my paternal great-grandfathers.  Who knows how many other Cajuns today share blood with Governor Mouton.

225.  The principal source used here for the details of Alexandre's life is DAB, 7:295.  A word about the spelling of Alexandre Mouton's name:  his grave stone and the article in the DAB spell his first name "Alexander," the anglicized spelling of the name.  All other sources spell his first name using the French version, "Alexandre," which is used here.  See [photo] for his likeness and his gravesite, as well as a portrait of five of his children.  Edward Simon was a native of Belgium who served as an associate justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1841-49.  Simon died at St. Martinville in 1867.  His son, Arthur, served as a major in the Confederate army under Alexandre's son Alfred.  See Perrin, SW LA, pt. 2:78.

226.  The c1800 town house built by Jean, later called the Sunday House, is still standing in Lafayette as part of the Alexandre Mouton House Museum on Lafayette Street, near downtown.  See [photo].  Jean Mouton is celebrated as the founder of Vermilionville/Lafayette.  Alexandre Mouton's slave count is from 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Lafayette Parish, pp. 53-54.  His slaves in 1860, 51 females & 70 males, ranged in age from 2 to 70 years old.  For the origin of the term "genteel Acadian," see Dormon, Cajuns, 30, who attributes it to folklorist Patricia K. Rickels.  See her essay, "The Folklore of the Acadians," in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 223, 229-30, in which she categorizes Cajuns as "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses."  (This author confesses that he is one of the latter.)

227.  Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:822, her birth/baptismal record, spells her name Céleste Zilia, so there is also confusion in the spelling of Zelia Rousseau Mouton's name.  Her tombstone, like her birth record, spells her name "Zilia," but genealogical and family records spell it "Zelia," which is used here.  See [photo]

228.  See <sec.state.la.us/33.htm>.

229.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 8-10, 12, 14-15.

230.  The Louisiana Convention remained in session a little over two months, first in Baton Rouge, convening on January 23 in the state capitol and meeting there until the state legislature convened a few days later.  The convention then moved to New Orleans, where it reconvened on January 29, went into recess on February 12, reconvened on March 4, and adjourned on March 26.  One of the convention's most significant actions during its session in New Orleans was the ratification of the Constitution of the Confederate States by a vote of 101 to 7 on March 21, 5 days before it adjourned.  When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the War Between the States commenced 3 days later with Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion, the Louisiana Convention had been done with its work for two and a half weeks.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 27-46.

231.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 180-81.  As in the United States at the time, the Confederate States constitution provided that the state legislators, not the voters, would choose national senators, two per state.  The Louisiana state legislature cast ballots for the office on November 28, 1861.  Mouton came out sixth of 10 on the first ballot and was not even considered for the second ballot, which elected men from Concordia & Orleans parishes to the national senate, now meeting in Richmond.  So one could claim that Alexandre Mouton never lost a popular election.

233.  Although he is not on their commemorative Wall of Names with the other Acadians who emigrated to LA, the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, LA, recognizes Henry S. Thibodaux as the first of 4 Acadian governors of the state. 

Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., DLB, 786, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, says he was born in 1769 in Albany, NY, that his father Alexis Thibodaux was a "French Canadian" & his mother was Anna Blanchard, details his life, including wives & children, & says he died in 1847 [obviously a misprint]; BRDR, 2:104-05, 694 (SJA-2, 20), the record of his first marriage, calls him Henrrique Tibodaux, calls his wife Felicitas Bonvilen (Bonvillain), gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexo Thibodeaux & Ana Blanchar "of New York in America," says her parents were "of St. Charles Parish," & that the witnesses to his marriage were Francisco Frederic, Rosalia Frederic, & Josef Frederic; BRDR, 2:69, 694 (SJO-3, 25 & 26; SJO-85, 5), the record of his second marriage, calls him Henri Thibodeaux "of Canada," calls his wife Brigita Bélanger, gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexi & Anna Thibodeaux, & that the witnesses to his marriage were Nicolas Bélanger [probably his father-in-law], Guilermo Doiron/Dorion, & William Dawson; <www.sec.state.la.us/26.htm>, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, includes a portrait of him from the LA State Museum, labels him a National Republican, says that he was Catholic, that he was a shoemaker after his term as governor, provides his correct death date, & says that he died of an abscessed liver during his campaign for governor; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Houma Ct.Hse.: Succ.: #17), a succession inventory record, dated 24 Nov 1827, calls him H. S. Thibodeaux m. (2)Brigitte Bélanger, m. (1)Félicité Bonvilain, dates his will 28 Jul 1817, & lists his children as, from his first marriage, Léandre Bannon, Aubin B., & Eugènie, &, from his second marriage, Henry Michel, Émilie, Elmire, Henry Claiborne, & Barron Goforth; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), another succession inventory record, dated 5 Jan 1828, calls his Henry Schuyler Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Belanger, & lists his children as Léandre, Aubin, & Eugènie; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), papers related to a land sale, dated 6 Nov 1828, calls him Henry S. Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Bélanger, & lists his children as Léandre B., Eugènie m. Joseph Paul Bourgeois, Émilie m. Leufroy Barras, Elmire m. Evariste Porche, Henry Claiborne, & Bannon Goforth.   Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503-04, includes many other court documents--deeds, loans, hypotheques, mainlevees, mortgages, acquitances of mortgage, quittances, quit claims, receipts, & the like--relating to Henry Schuyler Thibodaux & his family & associates. 

West, Atlas of LA Surnames, 140, citing Reeves's study of LA governors, published in 1976, and Marguerite E. Watkins's LSU master's thesis on the history of Terrebonne Parish, dated 1939, says that Henry S. Thibodaux "was not an Acadian refugee, but was born in Albany, N.Y., in 1769 of French-Canadian parents."  To be sure, Henry S. Thibodaux came to the colony alone, not with other Acadians.  A recent study, however, Jobb, The Cajuns, 265-66, using information gathered by Dick Thibodeau of MA, says that Henry S.'s father, Alexis, was from Village Thibodeau, Pigiguit, on the Ste.-Croix River near present-day Windsor, Nova Scotia, that Alexis, his wife Anne Blanchard, & sons Simon, age 5, & Étienne, age 3, were exiled to PA in the fall of 1755, deported probably aboard the British sloop Three Friends, which left Pigiguit on 27 Oct & reached PA 21 Nov, but Gov. Morris did not let the Acadians land until early Mar 1756.  Anne died in either the late 1750s or early 1760s in PA, & Alexis remarried to Catherine LeBlanc, a widow with 4 children from her previous marriage, in 1762.  Their son Joseph was born in PA in 1763, so, according to Jobb & his source, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux's mother had to be Catherine LeBlanc, not Anne Blanchard, if Henry was born at Albany, NY, in 1769.  However, his 2 marriage records, cited above, & the birth/baptismal records of 3 of his children, that of son Cubino, dated 23 Apr 1796, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 136), daughter Eugenia, dated 7 Jan 1798, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 160), & son Miguel Enrique, dated 18 Jul 1801, in BRDR, 2:697 (SJO-1, 148 & 149), are clear that Henry S. Thibodaux's parents were Alexis Thibodeau & Anne Blanchard, not Alexis Thibodeau & Catherine LeBlanc.  

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BOOK ONE:      Acadia

BOOK TWO:     The Great Upheaval

BOOK THREE:  French Louisiana

BOOK FOUR:   A New Acadia

Copyright (c) 2001-13  Steven A. Cormier