♂Abraham Daigle

Abraham Daigle (born about 1705, died about 1755) was an Acadian plowman of Pigiguit^W who, with his wife and nine children, was living on Île Saint-Jean^W by 1752, and who was dead before his son François married at Cherbourg, in Normandy, in 1761. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son François Daigle (born about 1740).

Acadia

Abraham was born about 1705, a son of Bernard Daigle and Marie Bourg. On 5 November 1727 he married Anne Boudrot, written Anne Marie Boudrot in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré, the daughter of Michel Boudrot and Cécile LeBlanc; bride and groom both made their marks.

The register records the baptisms of three of their children: Marguerite in 1729, Aimable in 1731, with Abraham’s brother René Daigle as godfather, and Marie Rosalie in 1737. In 1731 the parents are entered as of the parish of L’Assomption at Pigiguit, and in 1737 as “habitants de Quenecon” (farmers of Quenecon) in that parish.

Île Saint-Jean

The census taken by the Sieur de la Roque on Île Saint-Jean in August 1752 finds the family at Havre-de-la-Fortune. Abraham, written Abraham Daigre, is a plowman and a native of Acadia, aged forty-seven, who “has been in the country two years”; his wife, Marie Boudrot, a native of the parish of St. Charles, is forty-four. They had nine children, seven boys and two girls, and the census names all nine: Marguerite, Aimable, Jean, Marie Rosalie, Jean Eloy, François Marie, Pierre, Joseph and Nicolas, from a young woman of twenty-three to a boy of two.

The family was given land on the right shore of the harbor at Havre-de-la-Fortune, by word of mouth from the commandant, Bonnaventure. Its clearing was sown with two bushels of wheat, two of peas and one of oats, and the household kept two oxen, two cows, a calf, a ewe, three pigs and four fowls.

Abraham died on the island about 1755. In 1761, when his daughter Marie Rosalie sought a dispensation to marry at Cherbourg, the inquiry on 27 June described her as an orphan: her father had died on Île Saint-Jean about six years before, and her mother had been lost in the wreck of the same ship off Portugal.

Among them is François Marie, aged twelve, the son who married at Cherbourg in 1761. His place in the household joins the couple of the Grand-Pré register to that wedding, a tie that had rested on Cormier’s compilation and the match of names. Jean, aged twenty in 1752, is most likely the brother who stood as his guardian at the wedding. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana places François’s birth about 1740, probably at L’Assomption, and has him deported from the island to Cherbourg in 1758, in the Île Saint-Jean campaign^W; his mother Anne Boudrot was aboard the transport Ruby, which was wrecked at Pico in the Azores on 16 December 1758, and died in the wreck; the records do not say whether Abraham made the same crossing.

The marriage at Cherbourg

On 17 January 1761, after the publication of banns^W, the vicar of Cherbourg married their son François Daigle, then a minor, to Jeanne Holle (written Jeanne Holley in the register), daughter of Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, burghers of Cherbourg. The act names the groom as the son of the late Abraham and the late Anne Boudrot, “tous originaires de l’Acadie” (all natives of Acadia), so both parents had died by that day. François being a minor, the marriage was made in the presence and with the consent of Jean Daigle, aged twenty-eight, described as his only elder brother and his natural guardian; two of the groom’s cousins, Marie Hébert and Guillaume Labord, were also present. Jean Daigle signed the register, and the groom made his mark.

Notes

The 1761 act gives the parents’ names only, with no ages, dates or places. Its tie to the Abraham Daigle and Anne Marie Boudrot who married in 1727 rests on three records that agree: the census of 1752, whose household of Abraham Daigre and Marie Boudrot includes a François Marie of twelve and a Jean of twenty; the Grand-Pré baptisms of Marguerite, Aimable and Marie Rosalie, whose ages on the census (twenty-three, twenty-one and sixteen) fit them; and the 1727 marriage itself. The abstracts of the Grand-Pré register hold no other Abraham Daigle. The ages are not exact: the 1737 baptism makes Marie Rosalie fifteen in August 1752, not sixteen, and Jean is twenty on the census and twenty-eight nine years later.

The 1752 census is printed in the Report concerning Canadian Archives for the year 1905 (volume 2, page 128). It states nine children and names all nine: seven boys and two girls, Joseph, aged five (born about 1747), among them, listed between Pierre and Nicolas. A compiled genealogy by Bona Arsenault also lists a daughter, Marie-Madeleine, in 1752; she is not on the census, and no record of her is known. The 1761 act calls Jean the only elder brother, though the census names an older Aimable; no record says what became of Aimable. Cormier suspects that Jean is the Jean Daigle who, with his wife Marie-Judith Durel, had a son living near Nantes; it is a compiler’s guess, and no record read joins them.

The Mines entries write the surname both Daigle and Daigre. The wife is Anne Marie Boudrot in the 1727 marriage and the 1737 baptism, Marie Boudrot in the baptisms of 1729 and 1731 and in the census, and Anne Boudrot in the 1761 act; Cormier calls her both Anne-Marie Boudreaux and Marie Boudrot.

The birth year is an estimate from the census age of forty-seven in August 1752; a compiled genealogy by Bona Arsenault (volume 4, page 1369) prints 1706. The death date and place rest on the inquiry of 27 June 1761 at Cherbourg, which writes the daughter’s name as Marie Rose and gives no year for the death, only “about six years ago”; about 1755 is the inquiry’s own approximation. The same inquiry says the family had lived on the island for nine years, which does not square with the census’s two years for Abraham in 1752, so the body does not use that figure. The census prints the commandant’s name as Bunnaventure.