♀Agnes Daigle

Agnes Daigle (about 1752 – February 1812) was an Acadian woman who appears at seventeen in the Louisiana census of 1769 living in another family’s household as a “cousin”, with no parent beside her, and who married two years later into the Theriot family of St. James, on the Mississippi River. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Rosalie Theriot (born 1778).

Early life

She was the daughter of Paul Daigle and Marie Hebert, as her marriage entry records. Her parents’ names match those of Paul Daigle and Marie-Josèphe Hébert, who married at Beaubassin^W in 1748 and had come to Île Saint-Jean^W by about 1750. When the island was counted in 1752, the family was at Malpèque: Paul, a plowman aged twenty-nine, his wife Marie, aged twenty-two, and their two daughters, Marie, aged four, and Agnes, aged eighteen months. They farmed on verbal permission from Monsieur de Bonnaventure and already kept oxen, cows, sheep and a horse. A compiled Acadian genealogy identifies the Louisiana woman with that younger daughter, although no single record follows her from the island to Louisiana.

The marriage act of 1748 names the groom as the son of Paul Daigle and the late Anne Arsenault, and the bride as the daughter of Joseph Hébert and Anne Boudrot, both of Beaubassin. If the identification holds, these four were Agnes’s grandparents. Her father’s mother was already dead when he married.

By 1769 she was in Louisiana without her parents. On 14 September the census of the Acadian settlers along the Mississippi listed her, as “Agnaise Daigle, cousin 17”, in the household of Joseph Sonnier and his wife Marie Landry. Children who reached Louisiana in the 1760s without their parents were common: many Acadian families were separated at the expulsion of 1755, and the exiles were scattered through the British colonies, France and the French islands before some reached Louisiana.

Marriage and family

On 23 April 1771 she married Thomas Theriot at St. James; the marriage entry calls her “Marie”, but every later record names her Agnes. The census of 1752 shows that her parents had an elder daughter Marie, so the clerk may have written her sister’s name, or a double name. Their first child, Caesar, was born in August 1772 and baptized at Ascension; later children were baptized at St. James, the last, Margarita, in November 1791; no baptism has been found for their sons Joseph and Charles. In 1801 she stood godmother to her own granddaughter Celestina Dupuis, daughter of her daughter Rosalie.

Death

She was buried at St. James on 12 February 1812, described in the register as “age 73 yrs. of Acadia, widow of Tomas Terrioult”.

Notes

Her burial gave her age as 73, which would place her birth about 1739; the census of 1769, taken while she was single, gives seventeen, about 1752. Ages at burial were usually supplied by relatives and were often too high. The census of Île Saint-Jean in 1752, which gives her as eighteen months, places her birth about 1750 or 1751 and so agrees with the census of 1769 and with her parents’ marriage in 1748 against the burial age; an online tree also gives 1751. That census was taken by the Sieur de la Roque and is printed in translation in the Report of the Public Archives of Canada (p. 155); the household appears at Malpèque.

A compiled online profile also gives her a marriage in 1768 at Bonaventure, Quebec, to François Richard dit Plate, a man who lived until 1813. That marriage most likely belongs to her elder sister Marie: a compiled genealogy of the Richard family (Stephen White’s, as quoted on WikiTree) gives François Richard a wife Marie Daigle about 1768, while Agnes was single in Louisiana in 1769 and the St. James register of 1771 does not describe her as a widow.

The same compiled genealogies, quoted on WikiTree, give Agnes and Marie two younger brothers, Paul and Fabien, placed in Nova Scotia and the Gaspé, and a younger sister Marguerite who may be a half-sister, since their mother appears to have died before about 1760, when their father married again. No record that names their parents has been found.