| Notes |
- In 1659, André, son of Daniel Leblanc and Françoise-Marie Gaudet, was born 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 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 1684, Jean, son of André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas, was born in Port-Royal.
In 1686, André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas move their family to Grand-Pré.
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 the 1693 census of Grand-Pré, André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas own 8 horned cattle, 3 sheep, 5 pigs, almost 8 acres of cultivated land and 1 gun.
About 1696, 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.
In 1696, New England militia led by Benjamin Church attacked Beaubassin, burning buildings, slaughtering livestock and killing some of its inhabitants, but most fled inland and hid-out. The following year the Treaty of Ryswick ended King William?s War and restored Acadia to France.
In the 1701 census of Grand-Pré, André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas have 5 sons, 2 daughters, 8 horned cattle, 5 sheep, 8 pigs, 3 acres of land (currently under cultivation) and 1 gun.
In 1704, Jean Leblanc, son of André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas, married Jeanne Bourgeois, daughter of Guillaume Bourgeois and Marie-Anne d'Aprendestiguy de Martignon. Jeanne Bourgeois was also the great-granddaughter of Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour, the former governor of Acadia, who produced a daughter, Jeanne, with an Amerindian woman. Jeanne married into the d'Aprendestiguy de Martignon family, and her granddaughter was Jeanne Bourgeois.
In June 1704, New England militia, again led by Benjamin Church attacked Acadia with a force of seven hundred Bostonians and Massachusetts natives. At Grand-Pré, Church's soldiers sacked the colony, killing livestock, burning houses, and breaking open the salt-marsh dikes which flooded the enclosed farmland with seawater, threatening to destroy the land?s usefulness for several years; but after Church?s men left the Acadians quickly repaired the dikes, saving the soil from complete salt saturation and allowing them to plant crops the following year. Leblancs living in Les Mines at the time included the families of Jean, André, and Jacques.
Church then sailed to Port-Royal, but the fort repulsed all his probing attacks and ultimately he gave up, finding the French defenders too well-entrenched. After ravaging a few of the surrounding farms he left, turning north for Chignecto Bay and attacked Beaubassin.
When the soldiers sailed away, they took forty-five prisoners with them to Boston, to exchange for New Englanders captured in a French attack earlier that year.
In 1707, the Acts of Union united the crowns of England and Scotland into a single entity: Great Britain. The current monarch, Queen Anne, was now Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1710, a fleet of English and New England ships commanded by General Francis Nicholson, sailed into Port-Royal basin with two thousand troops and laid siege to the fort. After a few days of bombardment Governor Subercase surrendered. The French troops were paroled back to France but the Acadian civilians were allowed to stay for two years. Port-Royal was renamed Annapolis Royal and given a small occupation force and a military commander.
In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended The War of Spanish Succession in Europe and its North American extension: Queen Anne?s War. France ceded Acadia and Newfoundland to England but retained the St. Lawrence valley and the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including Île Saint-Jean and Île Royale.
As part of the treaty, France evacuated its colonists in Newfoundland to the fishing port of Havre à l'Anglois on Île Royale. The French authorities began building a fortress on the rocky headland above the harbour mouth: they named it Louisbourg. But when they tried to bring the Nova Scotia Acadians north and re-establish them on Île Royale, the Acadians were reluctant to leave their existing fertile lands around the Bay of Fundy for the hardship of starting over on a rocky island (reputed to be a poor place for pasturing animals and crop growth), with its very real threat of famine.
About 1720, ships carrying three hundred farmers, fisherman, craftsmen and thirty soldiers, arrived in Louisbourg from France. Their job was to develop Île Saint-Jean as a new source of food. The expedition continued on to the island where some of the colonists chose a deep bay on the northern shore as a sheltered place to build a home port for their new cod fishery. They named it Havre Saint-Pierre (St. Peter?s Bay). The remaining colonists sailed around the island to the southern shore where they entered a large, crenelated bay and started clearing ground on the west side of the harbour entrance, for a new colony headquarters. They named it Port-la-Joie (Port la Joye).
In 1730, François, grandson of André Leblanc and Marie-Jeanne Dugas, was born in Grand-Pré.
In 1743, André Leblanc, son of Daniel Leblanc and Françoise-Marie Gaudet, died in Grand Pré.
For more information on the life of André Leblanc's son Jean, see Jean Leblanc's Life Sketch, ID=LDSB-T2J
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1659 - 1743 (84 years)