♀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 (1778–).

Early life

She was the daughter of Paul Daigle and Marie Hebert, as her marriage entry records. On 14 September 1769 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. A compiled online family tree identifies her father as a Paul Daigle of Beaubassin, who died in 1759, and her mother as a Marie Josephte Hebert who died in 1768 at Caraquet, in present-day New Brunswick; that identification has not been proven from records.

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. Their first child, Caesar, was born in August 1772 and baptised at Ascension; the rest were baptised at St. James, the last, Margarita, in November 1791. She stood as godmother to neighbours’ children in the 1770s, and in 1801 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 age agrees with the online tree’s 1751 and with her parents’ marriage in 1748. 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 belongs to a different woman: in 1769 she was single in Louisiana, and the St. James register of 1771 does not describe her as a widow.