♂Alexandre Bourg

Alexandre Bourg^W (born about 1671) was an Acadian of Grand-Pré, on the Minas Basin, known as Belle-Humeur, who was the notary of the Minas settlements under the British governors from at least 1714 until 1744. In April 1730 it was he who certified the copy of the priests’ attestation that Governor Richard Philipps^W had promised the Acadians they would not have to bear arms against the French or the Indians. That exemption was the promise on which the Acadians’ claim to be neutral came to rest. He was probably the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anastasie Bourg (born 1708).

Port-Royal and Grand-Pré

He was born about 1671, a son of François Bourg and Marguerite Boudrot of Port-Royal. His father is said to have died about 1684, and his mother married again. At the census of 1693 Alexandre was twenty-two and held six arpents of his own at Port-Royal, with his sister Anne, nine, living with him; his brother Michel and his mother and her second husband, Jean Babineau, were his neighbors on the roll.

He married Marguerite Melancon, a daughter of Pierre Melancon and Marie Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, probably about 1694, and the couple made their home at Grand-Pré. They had twelve children, born between about 1695 and 1722; their daughter Anastasie was baptized at the church of St. Charles aux Mines on 22 May 1708. In 1709 Alexandre signed as a witness when his wife’s sister Elisabeth Melancon, the widow of the royal notary Allain Bugeaud, married Rene LeBlanc at Grand-Pré. Rene was the man who would one day take his place.

Notary of Les Mines

Port-Royal fell to the British in 1710. When his daughter Marie married Bernard LeBlanc on 7 February 1714, the register of St. Charles named her parents as “Alexandre Bourg, Notary, and Marguerite Melanson, habitans de la Grand Pree”. During Dummer’s War^W in the 1720s he is said to have petitioned the French authorities at Quebec to repay him and his neighbors for cattle and provisions the Mi’kmaq had taken from them by force.

In the spring of 1730 the Acadians of the Minas settlements swore allegiance to King George II. Their two priests, Charles de la Goudalie and Noël-Alexandre de Noinville, set down in writing that Philipps had promised them they would be exempted from bearing arms “against either the French or Indians”, and that they in turn had promised never to take up arms against England. Bourg collated the copy on 25 April, a paper meant, in its own words, to be “available and useful to them wherever there shall be need or reason for It.”

Philipps is also said to have made him procureur du roi, the king’s attorney, for Mines, Piziquid, Cobequid and Chignecto: the one man charged with collecting the quit-rents^W owed to the Crown in all four districts, reporting twice a year for three shillings in every pound he gathered. He was still signing the marriage register of Grand-Pré as a witness in 1738, entered by the priest as Alexandre Bourg, notary.

The war of 1744

War returned to Acadia in 1744. A French force from Louisbourg laid siege to Annapolis Royal^W and then came back to Les Mines, asking the inhabitants for grain and beef. Bourg, by then a deputy of the Minas region, is said to have been among the leading men who signed a letter to its commander, de Gannes, pleading that the harvest had been poor and that feeding his men would force them to kill all their cattle and eat their seed grain for the next year. “We are,” the letter said, “under an easy and peaceful regime and we have every reason to be content with it.”

That December the Council^W at Annapolis Royal resolved that he be suspended from his office as notary public, and named Rene LeBlanc, the widower of his wife’s sister, to the post in his place.

Last years

Marguerite died in the parish of St. Charles in 1745. In his last years Alexandre is said to have been among the Acadian refugees at Port-Toulouse^W, on Île-Royale^W, with his daughter Anne’s husband, the merchant Joseph LeBlanc dit Le Maigre. He died in 1760 at Richibouctou, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore of present-day New Brunswick. When Joseph LeBlanc set down the family’s descent on Belle-Île-en-Mer in France in 1767, he gave Alexandre’s age at death as “about a hundred and two” (âgé d’environ cent deux ans); his age at the census of 1693 makes him nearer eighty-nine.

The family

Their daughter Anne, born about 1699, married Joseph LeBlanc dit Le Maigre and died at Miquelon on 13 June 1766, as her husband declared the next year. Their youngest son, Joseph, born and baptized at Grand-Pré on 8 May 1722, married Marie Landry about 1744 and was deported with his family to Pennsylvania in 1755. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana has him reaching Louisiana from Halifax in 1765 and dead by that July, when his widow remarried at New Orleans.

Notes

Sources for his early life

His birth in 1671, his parents, his settling at Grand-Pré and the name Belle-Humeur come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 450), which places the marriage to Marguerite Melancon about 1694 (vol. 3, p. 1116). The census of 1693 agrees on his age; it is quoted from a published transcription. His father’s death about 1684 is Arsenault’s date. Joseph LeBlanc’s declaration of 1767 also names him a son of François Bourg.

The weddings of 1709 and 1714 and Anastasie’s baptism are in the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s Catholic Church Records, vol. 1A, which abstracts the first registers of St. Charles aux Mines (SGA-1, 59; SGA-1, 43; SGA-1, 4). Placide Gaudet’s study of the Acadian notaries (1911) identifies the Rene LeBlanc of 1709 with the notary of 1744 and notes that the two men had married sisters. The witness of 1738 is at the marriage of Joseph Melançon and Magdeleine Hébert on 20 January (SGA-2, 185), as described in Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Melançon family; he signed again at Joseph’s second marriage in 1748 (SGA-3, 52a-52b), where the priest wrote no title beside his name.

The certificate of 1730

The certificate is printed in Placide Gaudet’s Acadian Genealogy and Notes (Report concerning Canadian Archives for 1905, vol. 2, 1906, pp. 24-25), from an enclosure in Philipps’s letter of 2 September 1730. Gaudet’s summary dates it 29 April 1730; the translation closes “Signed: de la Goudalie, parish priest; Noel de Noinville, priest and Missionary, collated by Alexander Bourg Belle-Humeur, this 25th April”. The French text reads “Debourg Bellehumeur, collationné le 25 avril”. John Frederic Herbin’s History of Grand-Pré calls him “the king’s receiver, their notary”.

His offices

The appointment as procureur du roi and the terms of the rent collection are from N. E. S. Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian (2005), p. 325, which says Philipps made it and that Bourg “does not appear to have been a deputy” at the time. John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005) names Lieutenant-Governor Lawrence Armstrong instead, and is the source for the petition (p. 166), which he sets in the fighting with the Mi’kmaq under Lieutenant-Governor Doucett, in the 1720s. The letter of 1744 and its words are Griffiths’s account and translation (p. 343), from the papers of de Gannes’s defense at Louisbourg; she calls him a deputy there.

The suspension is quoted by Gaudet (1911) from the Council’s minute of 17 December 1744, old style (28 December by the new calendar), printed in Thomas B. Akins’s Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia (1869), p. 152: “résolu que Son Honneur le président suspende ledit Alexandre Bourg de ses fonctions comme notaire public … et qu’il nomme en même temps Renny Le Blanc pour exercer cette charge”, signed by Paul Mascarene.

His last years and death

His time at Port-Toulouse is from Régis Brun’s Les Acadiens avant 1755 (2003). His death and his wife’s are from Joseph LeBlanc’s declaration at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767, printed in the Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique: “Le dit Bourg mort à Richibouctou en l’année mil-sept-cent soixante, âgé d’environ cent deux ans. La dite Melançon morte en la ditte paroisse Saint-Charles en l’année mil-sept-cent-quarante-cinq.” Arsenault counts his family among the first Acadian families at Richibouctou. Twenty-two in 1693 and Arsenault’s 1671 both point to an age of about eighty-nine in 1760.

His children

The couple’s children and their years are those of compiled genealogies, chiefly Arsenault’s; other compiled genealogies give them more. Anne’s marriage and her death at Miquelon are in her husband’s declaration of 1767. Joseph’s baptism, his deportation and his death are from Cormier’s compiled history of the Bourg family, which cites a list of the Acadians in Pennsylvania of 20 June 1763 naming him with his wife and six children; Arsenault also has him deported to Philadelphia with his family.

The line to Floyd

The descent runs through Anastasie’s daughter Marie Josephe Godin, whose parents are named by Stephen A. White’s inference from the name Lincour that she carried; none of the records of her own life names them, so the line is probable rather than proved.