♂Abraham Poirier

Abraham Poirier (died before 1765) was an Acadian father who appears on a 1752 refugee roll at Baie-Verte and is named, with his wife, in the 1774 marriage record of his daughter Marie Poirier at St. James, Louisiana. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Poirier.

The marriage record

His daughter Marie’s marriage at St. James, Louisiana, on 7 February 1774 names her parents as “Abraham & Maria Josephe Bourg” without further detail: no place, no date, nothing more. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Abraham descended from a Chignecto family. Cormier’s lineage line for the descendants of Abraham’s son Pierre (Jean, Michel, Michel fils) makes Abraham a son of Michel Poirier fils and Madeleine Bourgeois, who married at Chignecto about 1698; seven of their sons, Cormier says, married into the Arseneau, Brun, Savoie, Gaudet, Bourg, Cyr, Nuirat and Belliveau families. Cormier names Abraham’s first wife as Marie-Josèphe Bourg of Chignecto and gives the couple a daughter, Marie, born about 1756; he also names a second wife, Agnès Belliveau, and a son, Pierre, born probably at Halifax about 1764. Pierre’s own marriage at Attakapas in 1787, as Cormier reports it, names his parents as Abraham Poirier and “Ana Benibo,” which is Belliveau.

Stephen White dates the couple’s marriage to about 1751, with no place named. The January 1752 refugee roll of Baie-Verte lists “Abraham POIRIER and his wife”, two people in all. As White transcribes a 1755 Tintamarre roll, the household then counted a man, a woman and one girl. The Sainte-Anne-de-Ristigouche register records Abraham Poirier’s marriage to Agnès Belliveau on 8 February 1761.

Two children who came as orphans

Neither Abraham nor either of his wives is recorded as having reached Louisiana. The Cabanocé census of 1769 lists Marie, aged 16, as an orphan in the household of Michel Poirier; the census gives no relationship, and Cormier marks the age as too high for a girl born about 1756. She married in 1774. Of Pierre, Cormier writes that he came to Louisiana “probably as an orphan in 1765 with an older half-sister,” presumably Marie. The census of 1777 counted him at St. James, aged 13, as an orphan living in the household of Jean-Baptiste Leger and his wife Cécile Poirier, whom Cormier calls Pierre’s second cousin. Cormier’s compilation is not consistent about how Marie came: one passage brings her from Maryland in September 1766, while his entry for her has her come in 1765, from Halifax by way of Saint-Domingue, with a query. The censuses call both children orphans, which suggests that Abraham had died by 1769, but no record gives the year. Neither Cormier’s compilation nor any known record says what became of Abraham.

Notes

A Restigouche marriage register of 8 February 1761 records an Abraham Poirier of Beaubassin^W, son of Michel Poirier and Madeleine Bourgeois — the same ancestry Cormier gives this Abraham — marrying Agnès Belliveau, the same woman Cormier names as this Abraham’s second wife. Cormier, following Arsenault and White, takes the two as one man and dates the marriage to January 1761. Stephen White’s 2019 study likewise gives this Abraham both marriages. The one point against it is the register itself: the groom is not described as a widower, as he should have been if he had already married and lost Marie-Josèphe Bourg. Abraham’s descent from Michel Poirier and Madeleine Bourgeois, his birthplace, his first wife’s place of origin, and his children’s birth years all rest on the compiled accounts of Cormier and White.

Rolls and the 1751 marriage

The January 1752 entry is Stephen White’s transcription of the Rolle général des familles réfugiées (G1 vol. 466), roll 1752r-22, which gives “Abraham POIRIER and his wife”, two souls. White’s 2019 study gives a 1755 Tintamarre count (Recensement de Beaubassin 1755, Jolicoeur, roll 1755-307) as one man, one woman, no boys and one girl, three in all; the link of that count to this household is White’s own identification. White’s union of about 1751 appears as “v1751” (vers 1751), with no place given.