Jacques Antoine Le Borne was born 15 May 1697 at Notre Dame, Valenciennes, France, and died Bef. 1784 in Louisiana.
Wife Genevieve Bettemont was born Abt. May 1705 in Paris, France and died 25 November 1784 in St. Charles, LA. They were married Abt. 1725 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Their children were:
1- Jean Baptiste Le Borne b: 1727 Louisiana; d: 27 April 1749 St. Charles, LA
+Francoise Lavergne m: 13 July 1745 St. Charles, LA [Louis/Elizabeth Thomelain]
2- child Le Borne b: Abt. 1728
3- unknown Le Borne b: Abt. 1730
4- Genevieve Marguerite Le Borne b: 30 March 1735 Louisiana; d: Abt. 17 March 1785 St. Charles, LA
+Francois Castan m: 8 October 1754 St. Charles, LA
5- Jacques Antoine Borne b: 22 June 1737 St. Charles, LA; d: 11 May 1809 Edgard, St. John, LA
+Marianne Haydel b: 22 July 1742 St. Charles, LA; m: Abt. 1760 German Coast, LA [Ambros Heidel/Anne Marguerite Schaaf]; d: 12 February 1810 Edgard, St. John, LA
6- Jean Francois Le Borne b: 22 January 1740 St. Charles, LA; d: 2 May 1749 St. Charles, LA
7- Marguerite Le Borne b: 13 January 1743 St. Charles, LA
+Joseph Verret
8- George Le Borne b: Abt. 1747; d: Bet. 1778 - 1784
9- male Le Borne b: Abt. 1749; d: 1 February 1749.
10- Claude Francois Le Borne b: 10 January 1751 New Orleans, LA; d: Abt. 11 October 1784 St. Charles, LA
+Rosalie Bossier m: 14 February 1774 St. John, Edgard, LA; d: Abt. 11 October 1784 St. Charles, LA
Notes for Jacques Antoine LeBorne:
- Jacques Antoine LeBorne was a member of the 99-person DeMeuves Concession, which later became the German Coast.
They sailed from La Rochelle on La Marie on 23 May 1718. The ship arrived in
Louisiana on 25 August 1718. The Concession contingent settled about 30 miles above New Orleans.
Jacques settled across the river between Cannes Bruslee (Kenner) and Anse ou Outardes (Norco).
From an October 1726 list of persons requesting slaves from the Company, Jacques was a resident at the Bayougoulas.
- 1 July 1727: census (right bank ascending): Antoine LeBorne, his wife and one child (between
the land of Francois Cheval and Rene Dorvain). The couple worked their
fields alone, no engages (indentured workers) and no enslaved Africans.
- 1731 census: Bornes, wife and 3 children were residing at Anse aux Outardes.
Their holdings were now more extensive, so Jacques utilized 4 European men who
had chosen to come as indentured workers, as well as 4 enslaved Africans.
- 1731 Landowners: east bank Miss. R. ascending, 10 arpents by possession.
- After the Choctaw Indians raided the habitations on the east bank (1748-9), and at least one of his neighbors Francois Cheval was murdered, Jacques moved to the west bank and acquired land grants on the lower end of what was to have been the original Concession above present day Hahnville.
Notes for Genevieve Bettemont:
- Genevieve Bettemont arrived in 1719 on La Mutine in the passenger list of
'girls from Paris sent by order of the King'.
Extract from American Historical Review on Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (author Joan DeJean). The establishment of French Louisiana, so the story goes, was a disreputable affair. The first European residents, "the convicts, vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells, misfits, and prostitutes," the dregs of early eighteenth-century French society, made little contribution to the colony and left no lasting impact. Contemporaries particularly dismissed founding women as ugly, ungovernable, dissolute, and unmarriageable, while historians have subsequently concluded that most failed to marry or have children, so simply faded from the historical record, leaving no lasting impact. Joan DeJean’s engaging narrative history Mutinous Women transforms this widely accepted account by placing these women at the center of this founding story and offering a detailed account of their lives. In 1719, two ships left France, bound for the wilds of Louisiana: Les Deux Frères and La Mutine, which together forcibly transported nearly 140 women. Condemned as libertines and prostitutes on trumped-up charges and through aborted legal processes, French officials packed them off to the new colony of Louisiana without provisions, a plan, or thought for what role they would play. For many, their odyssey began in the infamous Parisian prison La Salpêtrière, incarcerated for crimes ranging from murder, to theft and smuggling, to the apparently fabricated charge of "divine lèse-majesté" for stealing and eating consecrated communion bread. The vast majority of them, however, were interred for debauchery and, increasingly, prostitution.
Extracts from Joan DeJean's Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast:
In early October 1719, Marie Louise Balivet and Genevieve Bettemont were added to the chain as "#125 & #126. They remained shackled together during the trip to the coast."... "No information survives on the arrest of prisoners 125 and 126. We can't know either the nature of the incident that landed them spots on Bourlon's chain or what Balivet was doing in Paris and in the company of Genevieve Bettemont, a Parisien of modest extraction, although one who had most decidedly never crossed paths with anyone of royal blood. But one thing is clear. Genevieve Bettemont's fate was determined once again by urban indigence - in her case, by a type of genteel poverty that became unbearable when stock market madness set in."
Having been loaded into the ship's hold as 'merchandise' and in shackles, the ship unloaded the women onto Ship Island. This was a barrier island about 8 miles wide and a few hundred yards wide. There were no preparations for their arrival and no supplies, including clothing or shoes. The survivors were eventually rowed to the mainland, ending up in Mobile or Biloxi. Some traveled on to New Orleans. Of the first 10 marriages performed in New Orleans, Genevieve Bettemont's was one.
"Whereas the misery of the men who toiled in Paris ports was so plainly visible that these workers were often confused with beggars, that of Genevieve Bettemont's family might well have remained largely inconspicuous to the outside world. Bettemont's parents, Pierre Bettemont and Charlotte Delormel, did everything in their power to conceal the family's financial plight and concomitant loss of social status. Whenever he was asked to identify himself, Pierre, a mere dyer who did not even have his own shop, claimed to have attained the more lucrative and prestigious rank of master dyer. This exaggeration betrayed a basic insecurity about his place in the city's social hierarchy. And Pierre Bettemont had serious cause for concern. In addition, whenever identification was requested, Pierre never provided an address. This, too, he did for a reason: the family moved so often that they were surely on the run, fleeing from creditors and skipping out without paying overdue rent. The one street address Pierre ever volunteered, rue Darnetal, was an excellent choice for a family seeking to avoid detection. Darnetal was a tiny street that gave into the rue Saint-Denis, by far the longest artery in the bustling working-class neighborhood just north of the Halles market.
"The family of four children - a boy named Pierre and three girls, of whom Genevieve was the oldest - lived decidedly below the poverty line. From January 1708 (when Genevieve was three) on, the family seems to have survived solely or nearly on 320 livres a year, the interest on a rente or annuity offered by Paris's Hotel de Ville (City Hall). Such annuities, a conservative investment, had been particularly popular among Parisiens before John Law turned them into frenzied speculators. This particular annuity dated from the late seventeenth century and was a so-called perpetual pension that paid interest on a quarterly basis during the investor's lifetime and could be passed on to the investor's heirs. The tidy sum that constituted its principal - 7200 livres - represented the carefully accumulated life savings of Marie Madeleine Damiette, Charlotte Delormel's aunt.
"On May 25, 1705, shortly after Genevieve Bettemont's birth, Damiette drew up a particularly well-considered will, of which the annuity was the centerpiece. Upon Damiette's death and during her own lifetime, her niece Delormel was allowed to use the interest 'for her food and personal expenses.' She could not, however, touch the principal, since the annuity itself was bequeathed to Delormel's children, Pierre and Genevieve Bettemont, and to any future offspring. By the time of Damiette's death in 1708, Pierre Bettemont and Charlotte Delormel had four small children and a mountain of debt. They owed back rent; they had mounting grocery bills; they had never repaid a sizeable sum borrowed from Damiette in 1704. And there was no one to whom the couple could have turned for help. Bettemont was the only son of a poor family in Sarcelles, about ten miles from Paris, while Damiette was Delormel's last close relative. The couple's few friends were all illiterate and worked at low-paying jobs. Charlotte Delormel inherited Damiette's very modest possessions, virtually worthless at a total of 74 livres, and the interest on the annuity: 80 livres every quarter, a sum that from then on became the family's principal source of revenue - and this at a time when even the cheapest single rooms in Paris rented for 45 livres a year. Damiette had paid them far more than that each year to provide her meals. Nothing suggests that Bettemont had any income to speak of from his trade.
"Genevieve, though born to parents who both wrote well, was herself illiterate, so there had been no money for her education. Her two younger sisters never reappear in family documents and probably became casualties of malnutrition and the Great Winter that struck not long after Damiette's death. Pierre Bettemont had died before December 1713, when destitution beset his family. The interest on the annuities offered by City Hall was not fixed: that month, it was reduced from 5 percent to 4, the lowest rate ever offered during Louis XIV's long reign. According to the rationale behind such reductions, those dependent on the interest from annuities represented only a small percentage of the population and were usually well-off. No one considered households like the Bettemont's, a poor family with no other visible means of support. And on August 27, 1719, when the roundup to fill out the deportation chain was in full force, financial disaster struck the Bettemonts once more. That day, a decree from the Royal Council officially lowered the rate on annuities still again, this time, from 4 percent to 3. In addition, all interest payments on existing annuities were suspended. The news was in print with days and would have spread like wildfire along the rue Saint-Denis.
"By the first days of September at the latest, Delormel realized she could expect neither her July payment (they were always late) nor October's. From then on, she would be forced to get by on little more than half the sum on which she could rely in 1708. At the same moment, stock in John Law's Indies Company passed the four thousand mark and began its definitive surge. By reducing the rate of return on annuities while Parisiens of means were obsessed with the stock market's vertiginous rise, the government definitively discouraged the old, conservative investment. Prices for basic commodities began to soar, just at the time when those without access to ready cash could least afford the rise. At age fourteen, Genevieve Bettemont became a casualty of declining interest rates. Her entire life in France had been blighted by the annuity that her great-aunt had hoped would guarantee her a fine future. Instead, she became number 126 on the deportation chain and the second-youngest passenger on La Mutine. At no other moment are the arrest records of the Parisien police more jumbled than during the final frenzied weeks before the October 6 manifest was drawn up. Bettemont entered the system sometime between August 19, when passenger 121, Anne Therese Valenciennes, received her sentence with lightning speed, and the October 14 transfer of Marie Moule and Jeanne Mahou, who became Genevieve Bettemont's lifelong friend.
"Not all inhabitants of the German Coast were German: After Jacques Massicot and Marie Daudin's son Jacques married Genevieve Grevenberg, the young couple resided and raised a family on the coast. Jacques was among D'Arensbourg's successors in governing the settlement. All through the final decades of the eighteenth century, Jacques Massicot, the son of a woman outlawed from France, served as the chief judicial authority on the German Coast. From the start, high mortality was a fact of life on the German Coast. In April 1721, Bienville sent a dispatch announcing the imminent arrival on the concessions near New Orleans of many who had long been begging to escape the encampments on Biloxi beach. Upon reaching their destination, however, the new inhabitants learned that they had exchanged one disastrous situation for another, and Bienville before long warned authorities that those who were already living on what soon became known as the German Coast 'are dying every day from hunger and poverty.' Among those who pulled through was the second-youngest of all survivors, Genevieve Bettemont, deported when John Law changed the rules for French investors and her mother was no longer able to make ends meet. In Louisiana, Genevieve's fate was determined when one of those who had profited most from the system that impoverished her family in Paris himself faced sudden bankruptcy. Genevieve married Jacques Antoine Le Borne (or Borne), an engage or enlistee who had come voluntarily to the colony, to cultivate land on the concession of financier Demeuves. When Demeuves was ruined, along with a group of Germans, Genevieve and Jacques Antoine developed a site on the Mississippi known as 'Anse aux Outardes,' a name translated today as 'Bustard's Cove,' though its original settlers, Canadians, surely had in mind a type of outarde more familiar to them, Canada geese.
"In 1727, the couple had a first surviving child; by 1731, three children. By 1751, when her last child was born, Genevieve had given birth to at least ten. For much of that time, Genevieve and Jacques Antoine lived in a small, close-knit community of eight families, four of them German and four French. Their son Jacques Antoine married Marianne Haydel, one of many unions that united Germans and French. Genevieve and her husband became respected members of the area dominated by the Germans who found refuge there in the wake of John Law's debacle. When their church was finally completed, Jacques Antoine became a trustee. And when their daughter Genevieve Marguerite married in 1754, D'Arensbourg, still the commander of the German Coast, was a witness.
"The status of property on the German Coast was even more confused than in early New Orleans. After the Indies Company promised the first inhabitants a fixed amount of land in return for clearing and farming it, a brouhaha about the measurement of river frontage ensued. In 1725, two surveyors arrived from France, but they were soon dismissed, because Pauger found fault with their work. The company next decided to reduce individual allotments and guaranteed residents 'definitive titles' once they had had new surveys carried out to make certain that they were respecting the revised dimensions. Some inhabitants lost hope. Volunteers like Jacques Le Borne had signed three-year contracts that guaranteed free return passage, and in the early 1720s, when those began to expire, many wanted to go home. Few ships were then traveling to Louisiana; their captains, knowing full well that the Indies Company would never reimburse their expenses, refused to honor its pledge. In the end, only a handful of volunteers managed to get out.
"Jacques Antoine Le Borne bided his time. In about 1731, when the Indies Company admitted defeat and returned Louisiana to the Crown, a record of property owners along the river was drawn up, including the bases for their claims. Some had been granted land; others had purchased it from a concession. Le Borne owned his land 'by possession,' because of a deal cut with the Indies Company. In exchange for renouncing the return passage to France legally due him, he was granted 'possession' of land. Jacques and Genevieve raised a family on the farm thus acquired, 10 arpents or 8.5 acres, the third-largest holding in their community.
"In 1743, Jeanne Mahou chose to make the longer journey between two small settlements on the German Coast because of an enduring friendship. Twenty-three years after La Mutine landed them on Massacre Island, the baby's mother and the woman she asked to serve as his godmother, Genevieve Bettemont, by then the wife of one of the church's trustees, remained united by their shared past.
"In 1744, Genevieve Bettemont also traveled to New Orleans. She made the trip in order to join other survivors such as Marie Anne Dinan who, from 1738 on, attempted to recover money owed them by the families who had banished them to John Law's colony. Genevieve Bettemont's struggle to obtain what was lawfully hers was exceptionally protracted, the hardest-fought of any such claims. On December 29, 1744, both Genevieve and Antoine were present to consult royal notary Augustin Chantalou. Other survivors initiated such procedures only when they were assured that relatives were deceased, but Genevieve was being farsighted. She had had no contact with Charlotte Delormel, the mother who had not seen fit to protect her, nor, it appears, had the person who provided the information she did possess, perhaps her only surviving sibling, Pierre, who lived still in Paris. She didn't know her mother's current abode, that she did know that Delormel had remarried, had again been widowed, and had once resided in Clermont-en-Beauvaisis in northern France. Genevieve believed her mother was still alive, but 'en cas de deces de Delormel,' 'in the event of Delormel's demise,' she formally requested that 'a full and complete inventory of her estate be drawn up.'
"This was only the beginning of Genevieve's patient and methodical campaign to obtain her due. Twenty years later, on November 26, 1764, Genevieve and Antoine were once again in New Orleans, meeting with a notary to draw up a kind of document specific to the colonial context. In order to secure 'funds due her as sole heir to her father and mother and to obtain all necessary papers proving her claims,' the notary required a colleague in Paris to act on Genevieve's behalf, so she signed a blank power of attorney, authorizing 'Sieur [name to be filled in] to recover from Paris's City Hall the capital and all back interest due on an annuity of 7200 livres. Genevieve surely sensed that it ultimately wasn't necessary to demand an inventory of her mother's property because, in 1764, the sum total of all assets belonging to the estate of Pierre Bettemont and Charlotte Delormel remained precisely what it had been in 1719, when she had been deported: an annuity purchased with the life savings of Genevieve's great-aunt and bequeathed by her to the couple's children, of whom, in 1764, Genevieve was the sole survivor. In their entire lives, Genevieve's parents had acquired nothing on their own.
"But she did learn something from the inquiry, since two facts came to light because of that 1764 petition. Genevieve learned that her mother was still alive. She also learned that her mother had done something expressly forbidden by Genevieve's great-aunt and had sold the principal on the annuity to a merchant in Bordeaux, who all through the decades had paid Charlotte Delormel interest. Genevieve continued to monitor the situation. She learned that in January 1767, her mother had collected interest on the annuity. Sometime between then and March 6, 1769, Charlotte Delormel died. At that point, Genevieve, by then a widow, had a new petition drawn up in her name alone. On it, she was identified as 'Dame Genevieve Bethemont.' The spelling of her family name was that found in official Parisien documents, while the honorific reflect the respect accorded Genevieve after a half-century of exemplary life in the colony to which she had been deported as an impoverished fourteen-year-old. The money eluded her still, but Genevieve was not one to give up.
"On February 15, 1775, after a thirty-one-year-long struggle, Genevieve Bettemont, by then seventy, at last profited from her legacy - precisely seventy years after her great-aunt had drawn up the will she had hoped would guarantee a good life for her great-niece Genevieve, then but an infant. The investment landscape in France had stabilized after the collapse of Indies Company stock, and when interest on annuities was raised to pre-devaluation levels, the funds became once again an attractive investment. As a result, nearly a century after her aunt had purchased the annuity that had determined the course of Genevieve's life in France, Genevieve was able to find a buyer willing to take over the investment. The 2300 livres she cleared from the transaction settled her score with her family in France. On February 4, 1778, nearly sixty years after La Mutine landed, Genevieve's score with the French monarchy was settled as well. On that day, 'le Roi,' Louis XVI, the grandson of the king who had presided over her exile, officially approved the sale of the annuity, clearing the way for a deported woman to receive funds on which her life had once depended. A royal quittance, or receipt, was drawn up, an incontrovertible proclamation of the fact that the money was Genevieve's legal due.
"By then, Genevieve was a wealthy woman, among the wealthiest of all the survivors. In 1784, after sixty-four years in John Law's colony, at age seventy-nine Dame Genevieve Bettemont died. On November 25, a 'full and complete' inventory of her belongings, the kind of detailed accounting of which Genevieve would have approved, was drawn up. The inventory was directed by Marie Daudin's son Jacques Massicot, then the German Coast's legal authority and considered a close neighbor geographically, even though he lived seven and a half miles away. Genevieve's surviving children, Antoine and Genevieve, were present; Francois Verret represented his brother Joseph and his wife, Marguerite Le Borne. The inventory is a clear indication of Genevieve Bettemont's status in her community. Genevieve had had dealings with the German Coast's elite residents: the estate of D'Arensbourg himself owed money to Genevieve's. It reveals above all her prosperity. Since 1763, when France was defeated in the Seven Years' War, the German Coast had been under Spanish rule, so the valuation was done in piastres, pieces of eight. Total value: 14,978 piastres or between 75,000 and 90,000 livres, far surpassing even Marie Daudin's handsome aggregate. Like Marie Daudin's, Genevieve Bettemont's estate left her many grandchildren provided for. In Louisiana, she accomplished what her great-aunt had hoped to do in Paris.
"Genevieve's death also marked the end of an era. Genevieve was the last survivor of all, the final witness to the financial madness of 1719 that facilitated the deportation of these women who had proved crucial to the birth of a colony. Genevieve was also the last eyewitness to all they had endured - the chain gang, the shackles, starvation on Ship Island. With her passing, the founding generation of deported women came to an end."
THANKS go to a correspondent, Stephen Dubret, who referred me to this book. Whether your ancestor was one of these woman or you are just interested in early Louisiana history, this book makes a truly eye-opening and engaging read. As the author's knowledge and research is so extensive, I felt that to summarize sections would have done her a disservice. These extracts are obviously subject to her copyright. Please ensure full credit is given to Joan DeJean if any of the above is used in your own genealogy research.
Parents of Jacques Antoine Le Borne
Parents of Genevieve Bettemont
Back to Wendy’s Ancestral Tree
Last updated: 27 July 2025.