Services held for priest
By BRUCE SCHULTZ
Acadiana bureau
MIRE -- Services were Friday morning for Catholic priest Donald Joseph
Hebert, considered a pioneer among Louisiana genealogists.
Hebert, 57, died in his home Tuesday.
The funeral was at Assumption Catholic Church, where he was pastor.
Entombment was in the church cemetery under direction of Gossen Funeral Home
in Rayne.
"His passage is a great loss," commented Carl Brasseaux, history professor at
the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and assistant director for the
Center of Louisiana Studies.
"His work has been invaluable."
Brasseaux said that, before Hebert published numerous volumes of genealogical
information, tracing a family tree was a time-consuming, difficult process.
"You have to understand, before Father Hebert came along, it would have taken
a normal individual a few years to 20 years to develop even a skeletal
genealogy," he said. "Now it takes 45 to 90 minutes."
Hebert published numerous books requiring painstaking work of poring over
records, many written in difficult-to-read handwriting with peculiar idioms
and place names, Brasseaux said.
Among his books was a 12-volume set containing church and civil records
indices from 1794 until 1920.
The 41-volume set of Southwest Louisiana records was a collection of
abstracts from the church and civil records from the southwest Louisiana
parishes, and it included Catholic and Protestant churches, and courthouse
records of genealogical and historical value, starting in 1756.
Hebert also compiled genealogy for southeast Louisiana families, Brasseaux
said.
Just before his death, he was awaiting a new publication of records for
Louisiana families that moved to southeast Texas, Brasseaux said. It was his
96th publication.
Hebert attended Immaculata Seminary in Lafayette and St. John Seminary in
Little Rock, Ark.; and was a 1968 graduate from Notre Dame in New Orleans.
He was ordained June 1, 1968, and in that year he served as assistant pastor
at St. Francis Regis Catholic Church in Arnaudville until his assignment as
assistant pastor in 1970 at St. Anthony Catholic Church in Eunice.
It was in 1970 that he started his genealogical work.
In 1975, he became pastor at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Cecilia. Five
years later, he returned to St. Anthony as pastor.
In 1984, he became administrator of Annunciation Catholic Church in Duralde.
He was named pastor of Our Lady Queen of All Saints in Ville Platte in 1985.
In 1989, he was chosen as pastor for Assumption in Mire, where he served
until his death.
He was named consultor for the Diocese of Lafayette in 1977, and he served on
the diocesan school board for two terms starting in 1987.
He is survived by a sister, Barbara Hebert of New Orleans.
A Web site detailing all of his publications can be found on the Internet at
http://www.genweb.net/acadian-cajun/hebpubl.htm#top