♂Abraham Comeau

Abraham Comeau (born about 1679) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who, under British rule, swore the oath of allegiance in 1729 and two years later joined his neighbors in refusing the governor’s order to have their lands surveyed. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie-Louise Comeau.

Early life

Abraham was probably born at Port-Royal about 1679, the son of Pierre Comeau and Jeanne Bourg. The censuses of 1686, 1693 and 1698 list him in their household there, aged 7, 12 and 18, the eldest son of a family that by 1698 had thirteen children at home.

Marriage and family

About 1702 he married Marguerite Pitre, the daughter of Jean Pitre and Marie Pesselet. The two families were already joined: Marguerite’s brother Claude Pitre had married Abraham’s eldest sister, Marie Comeau. At the census of 1714 Abraham, aged 35, and Marguerite were living in the parish of Port-Royal with their young children, among them twin daughters, Françoise and Anne, a year old; the roll lists them next to Claude Pitre and Marie Comeau and close to Abraham’s parents.

The couple are said to have had twelve children, born between about 1703 and 1727; the youngest, Catherine, was born on 2 May 1727. Their daughter Marie-Louise Comeau married Joseph Préjean at Port-Royal in 1723 and settled with him at Chipoudy, on Shepody Bay.

Under British rule

The British had taken the town in the Siege of Port Royal^W in 1710 and renamed it Annapolis Royal. In December 1729, soon after Governor Richard Philipps^W returned to the colony, Abraham Comeau was among the Acadians of the Annapolis River who swore the oath of allegiance to King George II.

On 11 November 1731 the inhabitants of the river answered an order from Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong^W to have their lands surveyed, and Abraham Comeau set his mark to their refusal. Their lands, they wrote, were all bounded by their contracts, and most of them were too poor to pay a surveyor. They reminded the lieutenant governor that when they took the oath they had been promised they would not be disturbed in the possession of their property, and asked him to keep the surveyor no longer on their account. It was a written refusal of a British governor’s order, made on the strength of the oath itself.

The summer of 1747

The summer of 1747 brought three deaths to the family within six weeks. Their son Charles was buried at Port-Royal on 4 June 1747 and their son François on 18 June, each recorded as a son of Abraham and Marguerite. Marguerite died on 12 July and was buried the next day. The records do not give a cause for any of the three deaths, nor the date or place of Abraham’s own death.

The family

Anne Comeau and Elizabeth Comeau married two Vincent brothers from Pisiguit^W, Pierre and Jean, at Beaubassin^W in 1733 and 1734, a compiled family history records. In 1767, among the declarations made by Acadian exiles on Belle Île, off the coast of Brittany, the Vincent family recorded that Pierre had died in Canada and Jean on the coast of the Miramichi, and that Anne and Elizabeth were then at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, with their families. Catherine Comeau married Grégoire Bourgeois at Port-Royal on 10 February 1749; the same family history records that he was deported to Massachusetts with his family in 1755.

Notes

Birth and parents

Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives his birth as 1679 and calls him “fils de Pierre et de Jeanne Bourg”; Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (1994) gives his birth at Port-Royal in 1679. His ages in 1686, 1693 and 1698, and his age of 35 in 1714, are as Lanctôt and Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres print the rolls. Two men named Pierre Comeau were raising families at Port-Royal at the time: Pierre l’aîné, the husband of Jeanne Bourg, and his younger brother Pierre, the husband of Jeanne Bourgeois. The census households, and Arsenault’s entry for Marguerite Pitre, which names Abraham’s father as “Pierre, l’ainé”, place him with the elder.

Marriage and children

Arsenault gives the marriage as “vers 1702” and Lanctôt as 1702. Arsenault lists twelve children: Marie-Louise 1703, Jean 1704, Jeanne and Jean-Baptiste 1708, Marie-Marguerite 1710, Françoise and Anne 1713, Elizabeth 1716, Charles 1718, Madeleine 1720, François 1722 and Catherine 1727. Lanctôt calls the eldest daughter Marie-Josephte and gives her birth as 1702. The two published versions of the 1714 roll differ on the daughters at home: L’Acadie des ancêtres names four, Jeanne, Marie-Marguerite and the twins, and Lanctôt counts five. That the couple were listed beside Claude Pitre and Marie Comeau rests on the order in which Lanctôt prints the households. Catherine’s birth date comes from the Nova Scotia Archives database of the Port-Royal register. The marriage of Jean-Baptiste Comeau and Angélique Corne at Grand-Pré on 27 September 1729 names his parents as “Abraham Comot and Margueritte Pitre, of the parish of St Jean Baptiste du Port Royal”, as a published abstract of the Grand-Pré register gives it.

The oath and the refusal

The oath of December 1729, the inhabitants’ petition to Philipps asking to take it, and the refusal of 11 November 1731 are printed, with the names of those who signed, in Placide Gaudet’s Acadian Genealogy and Notes (Canadian Archives report, 1906). Abraham Comeau’s name stands among the signers of the petition and of the oath, and in the 1731 refusal it follows “Marque de +”. Lanctôt also names him among the inhabitants who refused the survey in 1731.

The burials of 1747

The three burials are entered in the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal. The register gives Charles’s age as about 23 and François’s as about 25; Arsenault’s years, 1718 and 1722, would make Charles the elder. Lanctôt gives Catherine’s marriage in 1749 as that of the daughter “d’Abraham Commeau et de feu Marguerite Pître”, which marks only her mother as dead.

The Vincent marriages

The Belle Île declaration names Anne as “fille d’Abraham Comeau et de Marguerite Pitre”; it gives Jean Vincent’s wife only as Elizabeth Comeau, and Lanctôt identifies her as the couple’s daughter. Lanctôt gives the two Vincent marriages at Beaubassin as 25 June 1733 and 24 May 1734 (25 May on another of his pages), and records that both couples settled at Petitcoudiac and took refuge at Miramichi in 1755. He gives Grégoire Bourgeois’s full name as Joseph-Grégoire.