♂Abraham Dugast

Abraham Dugast (born about 1616) was a gunsmith at Port-Royal in Acadia, the husband of Marie Judith Doucet and the father of eight children named in the census of 1671; three of their children married three children of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by twelve separate lines of descent, through five of his children.

Life at Port-Royal

No record of his birth or of his coming to Acadia survives. The historian John Mack Faragher counts Abraham among the single men who came out in the time of Charles de Menou d’Aulnay^W and, unlike most, stayed on, marrying the daughters of settlers and raising families. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians, drawing on the card file of Father Archange Godbout, calls him the king’s gunsmith and a native of Toulouse, gives him the title of lieutenant-general in Acadia, and has him at Port-Royal by about 1640. Later genealogists, Stephen White among them, have found no document behind the Toulouse origin, and his parents are unknown. A great-grandson, Alain LeBlanc, told the officials at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 only that Abraham had come from France with his wife.

Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet had married by about 1648, when their eldest daughter, Marie, was born. When the census of Port-Royal was taken in 1671, Abraham was entered as “Habraham Dugast”, aged 55, with the trade of armurier, gunsmith, written in the margin. Two daughters, Marie and Anne, were already married, Anne at seventeen to Charles Bourgeois, whose own household is entered on the page before; the other six children, from Claude, 19, down to a second Marie, 6, were unmarried. The family kept nineteen head of cattle and three sheep and farmed fifteen arpents^W of plowland.

The surgeon Jacob Bourgeois and his wife Jeanne Trahan headed the first household on the same roll, with ten children of their own. Anne Dugast married their son Charles, Claude Dugas married their daughter Françoise, and Magdelaine Dugas married their son Germain. Claude and Françoise were the parents of Joseph Dugas, through whom one of the lines continues.

No record of the death of either Abraham or Marie Judith survives. In 1767 a great-grandson, living in exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, declared that Abraham Dugast had come from France with his wife and that both had died at Port-Royal.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet by twelve separate lines, through five of their children: Claude Dugas, Abraham Dugast (born about 1661), Anne Dugast, Magdelaine Dugas and Marguerite Dugas. Eleven of the lines run through Floyd’s mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990), and one through his father, Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929); the nearest are ten generations up. The lines meet again in Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), and finally in Floyd’s own parents, both of whom descend from this couple. One line through Claude, by way of Judith Landry (born 1728), rests on an identification that is probable rather than proved. The Marguerite line rests on compiled works.

Notes

His birth year comes from his age on the 1671 roll; Arsenault also gives 1616. The roll spells the family name Dugast; the children appear in later records as Dugas or Dugast.

Anne’s marriage to Charles Bourgeois rests on the 1671 roll itself, which lists “Charles Bourgeois 25, sa femme Anne Dugast 17”. Claude’s marriage to Françoise Bourgeois rests on the census of 1686, which shows them as a couple aged 38 and 25. Magdelaine’s marriage to Germain Bourgeois rests on a transcription of the 1686 census of Beaubassin, where they appear aged 34 and 22, and on Arsenault. Arsenault agrees with the 1671 roll on every child and marriage.

Arsenault calls Abraham’s wife Marguerite-Louise Doucet and makes her a daughter of Germain Doucet dit Laverdure^W; the 1671 roll names her Marie Judith Doucet. The 1767 declaration, made from memory more than a century after the event, has Abraham bringing a wife from France, while Faragher and Arsenault have him marrying in Acadia; no record settles which is right.