LeBlanc, Daniel 1623
- Birth: 1623 or 28 - Martaizé, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes, France
- Immigration: c. 1645
- Marriage: c. 1650
- Death: c. 1697 - Port Royal, Acadia
- Burial: Garrison Graveyard, Port Royal, Acadia
He came to Acadia in about 1645 and settled about 15 kilometers north of Port Royal. When Port Royal was taken by Phipps in 1690, Daniel was appointed member of the board responsible for administer of the colony, until the governor arrived. The name Le Blanc was written as two separate words until about 1800, when it was combined into one word.
He was a farmer, and he married Francoise Gaudet, who was a young widow, in c 1650. They settled on the north bank of the Port-Royal River, and had 7 children.
The French colony of Acadia (Fr: Acadie) was established in 1605 by trader Pierre Dugua de Monts and his expedition cartographer, Samuel de Champlain. After a disastrous winter on an islet off the North American coast (later a part of Maine) they chose a new site in a large basin on the peninsula that later became Nova Scotia. They named the site: Port-Royal.
It was a place to trade with the natives for furs and also a base for Catholic priests to work out of as they tried to Christianize the local Mi'kmaq population. There were no families at this time, just men working to solidify France's claim to the land and its resources.
In 1632, when a treaty restored Acadia to France’s stewardship, Cardinal de Richelieu, the powerful clergyman and first minister to Louis XIII, formed a new organization called the Compagnie-de-la-Nouvelle-France (Company of New France) and sent three hundred labourers, artisans, and farmers to restart the Acadian colony. No permanent immigrants were sent with this expedition.
In 1635 a flotilla of ships brought more artisans to Acadia, and for the first time, whole families, as colonists. They sent William Alexander's Scottish colonists packing back to Europe, and re-established Port-Royal around Alexander's evacuated colony at Charles Fort.
The Leblanc surname was not one of the earliest family names to arrive in Acadia. Several decades passed, including a dozen or more years after whole families began arriving, before a Leblanc made the Atlantic crossing.
Historians estimate that Daniel arrived in Port-Royal between 1645 and 1650, where soon after he married Françoise-Marie Gaudet, daughter of Jean Gaudet and Françoise-Marie d'Aussy.
In 1654, a joint force of New Englanders and Cromwell’s Roundheads, led by Robert Sedgwick, attacked Port-Royal. After a brief defense the small garrison surrendered. The French soldiers were paroled back to France, but the civilians were allowed to stay and keep their farms, overseen by a military occupation force. France did not recognize the legitimacy of Sedgwick’s attack on Port-Royal but did little to dislodge the English. In 1657, Britain appointed Sir Thomas Temple as governor of Nova Scotia, with orders from Cromwell to assert English rule over France’s claim to the peninsula, until the Treaty of Breda in 1667 restored Acadia to the French.
In 1659, André, son of Daniel Leblanc and Françoise-Marie Gaudet, was born in Port-Royal.
In 1671, Françoise-Marie Leblanc married Martin Blanchard, son of Jean Blanchard and Radégonde Lambert, in Port-Royal.
In 1672, after decades of living under the seigneural system with its feudal control over them, the Acadians and began to look elsewhere for new areas to settle. Port-Royal’s resident surgeon, Jacques Bourgeois, with a few others, sailed north to explore the inlets and estuaries along the neck of land connecting peninsular Nova Scotia to the mainland, known as the Isthmus of Chignecto. The western part of the isthmus is an expanse of open wetlands, sparsely treed, much of it close to sea-level. Ordinarily unusable as farmland because of the high salt content impregnating the intertidal soil, the Acadians had a unique skill learned in similar coastal areas of France, that allowed them to forgo the strenuous work of clearing thick forest and instead, farm the treeless soil below the high-tide line using an ingenious device called an aboiteau (plural: aboiteaux): a dike (Fr: levée), holding the sea at bay while successive rains gradually flushed salt out of the alluvial soil into sluices with clever built-in valves called clapets that opened and closed with the tides; the falling sea at ebb tide releasing pressure on the sea-side of the wooden valves, allowing the weight of the accumulated runoff to push open the clapets and drain away, and the returning flood tide pushing the clapets shut, preventing the rising sea from back flowing into the sluices. After two or three years, the saline content of the otherwise fertile soil was low enough that the land became arable, and bountiful; supporting huge harvests.
A short distance up one of the rivers Jacques Bourgeois and his partners founded a farming settlement that they named Mésagouèche (the adjoining river thus became the Missaguash River). As more families from Port-Royal joined them they referred to it simply as: the Bourgeois Colony.
In 1673, Jacques Leblanc, son of Daniel Leblanc and Françoise-Marie Gaudet, married Catherine Hébert, daughter of Antoine Hébert and Geneviève Lefranc.
In the late 1670s, the governor of New France, Louis de Buade Comte de Frontenac, anxious to reinforce France’s hold over Acadia, assigned administrative control of the troublesome colony to Michel Leneuf de la Vallière, and granted him a wide swath of the Isthme-de-Chignectou as a seigneury (fief). Leneuf founded a colony just across the Missaguash River from the Bourgeois Colony. He named his new colony Beaubassin (“Beautiful Basin”).
Despite Governor Frontenac’s intention that the Bourgeois Colony remain independent of Michel Leneuf’s seigneury, their close proximity to each other inevitably melded them together and the name Bourgeois Colony disappeared; the entire area afterwards referred to as Beaubassin.
Soon afterwards, Pierre Melanson dit la Verdure and Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont led a few other Port-Royal families on a colonizing expedition north to a large sheltered bay they named Bassin-de-Minas (Minas Basin) where they established the colony Grand-Pré (“Great Meadow”); the area as a whole sometimes referred to as, Les Minas.
Over the next ten years, more families arrived in Les Minas and the available farmland around Grand-Pré was used up. Newcomers spread eastward along the banks of a deep estuary and its tributaries (present-day Avon River); an area they named Pisiguit.
In 1683, André Leblanc married Marie-Jeanne Dugas, daughter of Abraham Dugas and Marguerite-Louise Doucet, in Port-Royal.
In 1688, King William’s War began; the first of six colonial wars between England and France.
In 1689, the settlement of Cobequid was established at the eastern end of Bassin-de-Minas.
In the spring of 1690, New England militia led by Sir William Phips landed at Port-Royal. With its unfinished stockade and eighteen cannons out of firing position, Governor Meneval saw no point in resistance and surrendered the fort. The Acadians were allowed to stay, but were asked to swear allegiance to King William, an oath they feared would obligate them to fight against France and their native allies. Phips’ troops sacked the fort and the nearby farms but did not consolidate their victory by providing an occupation force, instead withdrawing to Boston with Port-Royal’s seventy-man garrison and Governor Meneval as prisoners, leaving the leadership of Port-Royal in the hands of a council of locals that included Daniel Leblanc.
In 1692, Françoise Blanchard, daughter of Martin Blanchard and Françoise-Marie Leblanc, married Jean Doucet, son of Pierre Doucet and Henriette Pelletret, in Cobequid.
François Cormier, son of Thomas-Charles Cormier and Marie-Madeleine Girouard, married Marie-Marguerite Leblanc, daughter of Jacques Leblanc and Catherine Hébert, in Port-Royal.
In 1695, Pierre Melanson dit Pedro, son of Pierre Melanson dit la Verdure and Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, married Marie Blanchard, daughter of Martin Blanchard and Françoise-Marie Leblanc.
1693-1698, Daniel Leblanc, patriarch of the Leblanc surname in Acadia, died. By the year of Daniel’s death, most of his family had left the volatile Port-Royal basin and moved north to Grand-Pré. Only Pierre remained near Port-Royal, having inherited his father’s land.
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