According to LeBlanc family oral tradition and recent genealogical research, Daniel LeBlanc was born about 1626 and emigrated from France sometime before 1650. About 1650, he also met and married Françoise Gaudet, daughter of an earlier settler and a widow with a small daughter from her previous marriage.
However, his exact place of origin and ancestry are not known. Neither the ship that he used to reach Acadia nor the specific date of his arrival can be confirmed. LeBlanc became a well-respected and relatively prosperous farmer in Portuguese-Royal.
In 1695, after a regime change, LeBlanc signed an oath of allegiance to the King of England.
Daniel LeBlanc died at Portuguese-Royal sometime between 1695 and 1698. By 1755, the descendants of Daniel and Francoise LeBlanc had created the largest family in Acadia.
Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Expulsion) of the 1750s scattered this huge family to the winds. Since most of the LeBlancs lived in the Minas settlements, dozens of them fell into the hands of the British in the fall of 1755 and ended up on ships bound for Maryland, Virginia, and other English colonies down the Atlantic seaboard.
Some were sent to Louisiana.
LeBlancs were among the first families of Acadia and some of the earliest Acadians to find refuge in Louisiana. After a brief stay in the city, during which one of them exchanged his Canadian card money for Louisiana funds, they followed the Broussards to the Atakapas District, where they helped created Louisiana Nouvelle-Acadie on the banks of Bayou Teche. All of the LeBlanc"s in Louisiana are direct descendants of Daniel LeBlanc and Francoise Gaudet.
lieutenant is now estimated that there are somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 descendants scattered over all the continents of the globe, the biggest concentration being in Canada (in the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec) and the United States of America (in Louisiana and the states of New England).
Along with his neighbors, he was caught up in the settlement’s shifting political fortunes resulting from international conflict between France and England. The first descendants of Daniel LeBlanc to emigrate to the colony reached New Orleans in February 1765 with the party from Halifax via Saint-Domingue led by Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil.
Around 1690, he became a member of a group of six commissioners who were charged with providing administrative and judicial oversight for the colony.
