♂Alexandre Breau

Alexandre Breau was an Acadian of Pigiguit^W, in the Minas Basin of Nova Scotia, and the father of sons whom the British carried into exile in Maryland. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his sons Joseph Braux (died before 1790) and Jean-Baptiste Breau (born about 1727).

Pigiguit and the deportation

Alexandre was probably a son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin, who had married at Port-Royal and later settled at Pigiguit. He probably married Marie Dugas about 1716. She was the daughter of Abraham Dugast and Jeanne Guilbeau, and had first married René Landry at Grand-Pré on 16 November 1711; her son by René, Joseph Landry, was born of that marriage. The couple raised their family at Pigiguit. Their son Alexis married Magdeleine Trahant there, and three more sons, Jean-Baptiste, Honoré and Joseph, are said to have been theirs as well, born at Pigiguit between the mid-1720s and the mid-1730s.

On 3 November 1733 Marie’s son Joseph Landry married at Grand-Pré. The register names his parents as the late René Landry and Marie Dugas, and the first witness was her husband, written “Alexandre Bro” in the abstract, as the family name is often spelled in these registers.

When the British deported the Acadians of the Minas Basin in 1755, the four sons were carried with their families to Maryland. By 1763 Alexis, Honoré and Joseph were living among the Acadian exiles at Port Tobacco, and Jean-Baptiste at Oxford. The couple’s names were set down far from Maryland. On 11 February 1767 Pierre Trahant, Alexis’s father-in-law, then an exile at Locmaria on Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany, made a declaration of his family. In it he recorded that his daughter Magdeleine had been born at Pigiguit in October 1725 and married there to Alexis Brault, “fils d’Alexandre Brault et de Marie Dugast” (son of Alexandre Brault and Marie Dugast), and that the English had transported the couple to Maryland.

The family

Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana follows the brothers from Maryland to Louisiana. Jean-Baptiste came in 1766 and settled at Cabanocé, later St. James, on the Mississippi above New Orleans, and afterwards moved upriver to Ascension. In February 1768 Alexis and Honoré led an extended family of about 150 Acadians from Port Tobacco to Louisiana, and Joseph and his family came with them.

By Cormier’s account, the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa^W, insisted that the party settle at the isolated post of Fort San Luis de Natchez, far from the other Acadians. Alexis and Honoré refused, and when Ulloa threatened to deport them they went into hiding with their families while Spanish soldiers took the rest upriver. Cormier writes that the two brothers certainly encouraged the revolt that overthrew Ulloa that autumn, the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768^W. In late 1769 his successor let the families settle where they wished, and Alexis and Honoré made their homes at Cabanocé. Both brothers appear in the Dafford mural at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from Alexandre by two lines, both on his mother’s side: through Joseph Braux, of whom he is a sixth great-grandson, and through Jean-Baptiste Breau, of whom he is a seventh great-grandson. The two lines come down to Ida Serrette (1903–1990) and meet on the way in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), both descend from Alexandre and Marie. Both lines rest on the compiled parentage of those sons.

Notes

Sources

Alexandre and Marie are named as Alexis’s parents in the declaration Pierre Trahant made at Borderhouat, in the parish of Locmaria on Belle-Île-en-Mer, on 11 February 1767, printed by Casgrain and Rameau in 1890 in the third volume of the Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique. The declarant was the father of Alexis’s wife: the same declaration lists the children born at Pigiguit to “Pierre Trahant, fils de Guillaume” and his wife Magdeleine Comeau, Magdeleine among them.

Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives Alexandre, as Alexandre Brot, a birth year of 1701, makes him a son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin, and has him marry Marie Dugas about 1720. It names Alexis, born in 1725, and Jean-Baptiste, born about 1725, as their sons, and gives Joseph, born about 1728, and a Pierre, born about 1740, as probably theirs.

Steven A. Cormier’s compilation on the Acadians of Louisiana names four sons, Alexis, Jean-Baptiste, Honoré and Joseph-Charles, born at Pigiguit between about 1724 and about 1734, and has Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin marrying at Port-Royal about 1687 and moving to Pigiguit in the early 1700s. For the sons’ households in Maryland he cites the lists of the Acadians at Port Tobacco and Oxford made in July 1763; the 1768 party, Ulloa’s order and the move to Cabanocé are as he gives them.

Joseph

The line runs through Joseph. Cormier’s narrative calls Joseph-Charles the couple’s fourth son, but his table of the arrivals gives him as “son of probably Alexandre BREAUX & Marie DUGAS”, and Arsenault too gives the parentage as probable; no record naming Joseph’s parents is known. That the Joseph Braux whose daughter Marie Claire married at St. James in 1790 was Cormier’s Joseph-Charles is itself probable; his own page sets out the evidence.

Marie’s marriages

The Grand-Pré register abstract of Marie Dugas’s marriage to René Landry on 16 November 1711 names her parents as Abraham Dugas and Jeanne Guillebaud; this biography spells them Dugast and Guilbeau. The abstract of the 1733 marriage of their son Joseph Landry names his parents as “Rene Landry, decd. and Marie Dugas” and gives “Alexandre {+} Bro” as the first witness. The surname is written Bro, not Breau, so the identification with Alexandre Breau rests on the first name and the couple’s marriage.

White’s dictionary of Acadian families, page 273, gives Marie as the daughter of Abraham and Jeanne Guilbeau and the widow of René Landry, and has her marry Alexandre Breau about 1716. Arsenault, cited under Sources, gives the marriage about 1720; no register of that marriage is known.

What is not known

No baptism, marriage or burial record of Alexandre is known, and no record of his marriage to Marie is known. No baptism or burial record of Marie is known. It is not known whether either of them lived to see the deportation.

Names

The surname is written Brault in the 1767 declaration, Brot or Breaux by Arsenault, and Breau or Breaux by Cormier. Their son Alexis is a different man from Alexis Brault (1721–1811), the son of François Breau and Marie Comeau, who was exiled to Massachusetts and settled in Quebec.