♀Agnès Dugas

Agnès Dugas (born about 1685) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, a daughter of Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois, who married Michel Thibodeau there in 1704 and raised at least fourteen children through the first decades of British rule. In 1724 and 1725 her two eldest daughters, Marguerite and Agnès, married two brothers, Alexandre and Joseph Broussard, who went on to lead Acadian partisans against the British. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through her daughter Marguerite Thibodeau (born 1705).

Early life

Agnès was born at Port-Royal about 1685, one of the younger children of Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois, and the census of 1686 lists her as an infant in their household. Her mother died between 1693 and 1698, and by the census of 1698 her father had married again, to Marguerite Bourg; Agnès, then twelve, was living in his household.

Marriage and family

Michel Thibodeau and Agnès Dugas were married at Port-Royal on 13 November 1704, and the register names the bride as the daughter of Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois. Six weeks later, on 26 December, her father-in-law, the miller Pierre Thibodeau, died. In October 1710 a British and New England force captured Port-Royal^W, which became Annapolis Royal, and the family stayed on under British rule. The census of 1714 lists them in the parish of Port-Royal, Michel aged 36 and Agnès 29, with four sons and two daughters. They had at least fourteen children, born between 1705 and 1728.

The Broussard marriages

On 7 February 1724, at Port-Royal, their eldest daughter, Marguerite, married Alexandre Broussard, the son of the late Jean-François Broussard and Catherine Richard. Nineteen months later, on 11 September 1725, her sister Agnès married Alexandre’s brother Joseph^W, so that the Broussard and Thibodeau families were joined twice over. The brothers were called Beausoleil, after the hamlet above Port-Royal where they were born, and in the wars of the 1740s and 1750s they led Acadian partisans against the British.

When their son Michel married Anne-Marie Richard at Grand-Pré on 18 September 1729, the register entered both the bride and the groom as of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal. Her husband was probably buried at Port-Royal on 24 November 1734. The date and place of her own death are not known.

The family

Three of the sons, Michel, Joseph and Benjamin, were among the Acadians carried to South Carolina in the deportation of 1755. André-Carl Vachon’s history of the deported Acadians records that Michel and Joseph escaped in 1756 and made their way north by river and portage to Fort Duquesne^W, and from there to Québec, where they stayed; Benjamin, one of five Acadians who fled from John Williams’s plantation on the Santee, was deported to England. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy has Michel marrying a second time at Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce on 24 January 1763.

Notes

Her birth

No record of her birth or baptism survives; the register of Port-Royal begins in 1702. Her ages on the census rolls place her birth about 1685: one copy of the roll of 1686 lists “Agnesse” aged one, another aged four, and she was twelve in 1698 and twenty-nine in 1714. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 526) and Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (tome I, p. 199) both give 1686, and a Thibodeau genealogy in the Attakapas Gazette (1985) gives 1685.

The marriage

The marriage of 13 November 1704 is entered in the Port-Royal parish register (Nova Scotia Archives, An Acadian Parish Remembered, RG 1 vol. 26 p. 273), which names the bride as Agnès Dugat, daughter of Claude Dugat and Françoise Bourgeois. Arsenault (vol. 2, p. 808) gives the same date and place. Lanctôt gives 3 October 1704 and calls her Marie-Agnès.

Her husband’s death

The burial date comes from Arsenault’s genealogy (vol. 2, p. 808), a compilation: “Il fut inhumé à Port-Royal, le 24 novembre 1734.” The 1985 Attakapas Gazette genealogy also gives his death as 1734.

The marriages of 1724 and 1725

The Port-Royal register enters the marriage of 7 February 1724 (RG 1 vol. 26 p. 335), naming the bride as Margueritte Thibaudault, daughter of Michel Thibaudault and Agnes Dugas, and the marriage of 11 September 1725, of Joseph Brossard, 23, to Agnes Tibaudeau, 19. The brothers’ part in the resistance rests on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana and on John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005).

The line to Floyd

No record names the parents of Anne Trahan (died about 1774), the daughter of Marguerite Thibodeau’s daughter Marguerite Broussard on the line to Floyd. She is placed in that family by an argument from the godparents and witnesses at her children’s baptisms, so the line is probable rather than proved.