♂Alexandre Broussard

Alexandre Broussard (about 1699 – 1765) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who settled on the Petitcodiac River, is remembered with his younger brother Joseph Broussard^W as a leader of the Acadian resistance to British rule, and died in Louisiana in 1765, a few months after bringing his family there. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through his daughter Marguerite Broussard (born 1726).

Port-Royal and the Petitcodiac

Alexandre was probably born about 1699 on the haute rivière, the upper reaches of the river above Port-Royal. On 7 February 1724, at Port-Royal, Alexandre Broussard, the son of the late Jean-François Broussard and Catherine Richard, married Marguerite Thibodeau, the daughter of Michel Thibodeau and Agnès Dugas. Nineteen months later, on 11 September 1725, Alexandre’s brother Joseph married Marguerite’s younger sister Agnès at Port-Royal, so that the Broussard and Thibodeau families were joined twice over. The couple’s first two children were baptized at Port-Royal: Joseph Grégoire, born on 1 April 1725, and Marguerite, born on 15 March 1726.

About 1730 the couple moved north to Chepoudy, a settlement on Shepody Bay at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where Marguerite’s kinsmen lived, beyond the reach of the British governors at Annapolis Royal, as Port-Royal was now called. About 1740 they and Joseph’s family moved again, up the Petitcodiac River, and founded a village they named Beausoleil after the hamlet near Port-Royal where the brothers had been born. Their other children included Jean Baptiste, Sylvain and Madeleine, and in 1752 the household on the Petitcodiac is said to have held five sons and two daughters.

War and exile

In the wars of the 1740s and 1750s the brothers took the French side. By the account of the historian John Mack Faragher, Joseph and Alexandre led a small band of Acadian partisans who painted and dressed themselves as Mi’kmaq^W fighters and joined Mi’kmaw attacks on British patrols, among them the raid on Dartmouth^W, outside Halifax, in 1751. In 1755 the two men commanded the Acadian militia together at the siege of Fort Beauséjour^W. After the fort fell they offered themselves to the British as go-betweens in peace talks with the Mi’kmaq, but Alexandre was soon a prisoner in the fort, renamed Fort Cumberland.

In October 1755, Faragher writes, he was one of twenty-one “special prisoners”, the leaders of the Acadian militia, who were shipped to South Carolina in shackles. That winter he escaped from his captors and made his way north on foot, by way of Fort Duquesne^W, the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, to Quebec. The local press called him a “general of the Indians”, and he later spoke of a trek of 1,400 leagues “to recover his native country”. Not every historian agrees: the Acadian scholar Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc gives the voyage and the escape to Joseph instead.

Back in Acadia, Alexandre joined Joseph as a leader of the guerrilla war in the country north of Chepoudy, with seven grown sons of the two brothers serving as their lieutenants. One observer at Miramichi called him “a great partizan” and “the most considerable person here”. By 1759 the refugees were starving. On 16 November that year the brothers came in to Fort Cumberland under a flag of truce to accept the British terms, asking that the children and the old be fed at the fort through the winter; the commander agreed, and kept Alexandre as a hostage until the rest of their people came in. The family spent the next years as prisoners of war in Nova Scotia, and in August 1763 Alexandre was listed among the Acadian prisoners at Halifax with his wife and four children.

Louisiana

When the war ended, the Broussards chose to leave British territory. In November 1764 a large party of exiles led by the two brothers hired ships at Halifax and sailed for Saint-Domingue^W, and early in 1765 they went on to New Orleans, where Alexandre was counted at sixty-six and Marguerite at sixty. On 4 April 1765 he was one of the eight “chiefs of the Acadians” who signed a contract before the notary Jean-Baptiste Garic with the cattleman Jean-Antoine-Bernard Dauterive. The Acadians were to settle near Dauterive’s land on the Bayou Teche, in the Attakapas District^W, and keep his cattle on shares for six years, and the chiefs bound themselves jointly and mortgaged all their property. His son Jean Baptiste signed with him.

The settlers reached the Teche that spring, and within months an epidemic swept their camps. Marguerite died on 4 September 1765, and Alexandre about two weeks later; he is said to have been buried on 18 September “au camp d’en bas”, at the lower camp. The Capuchin priest Jean-François de Civray, who recorded the burial, described himself in it as “curé de la nouvelle Acadie”, the priest of the new Acadia. Joseph died in the same epidemic in October.

The family

Alexandre and Marguerite’s eldest son, Joseph Grégoire Broussard, married Ursule Trahan and died at Halifax in 1763, while the family were prisoners of the British; his widow and their two children came to Louisiana with the family in 1765. Madeleine Broussard reached Louisiana that year with her second husband, Olivier Thibodeau, and was expecting a child; Cormier’s history records that she died of complications of the birth soon after the family arrived on the Teche, and that she and her newborn daughter were the first Acadians buried west of the Atchafalaya Basin. Jean Baptiste Broussard was elected co-commandant of the Attakapas District in 1768 and served until 1770, was in later life a warden of the church, and died in Lafayette Parish in October 1825, in his nineties.

Notes

Sources for his life

The marriage of 7 February 1724 is entered in the Port-Royal parish register (Nova Scotia Archives, An Acadian Parish Remembered, RG 1 vol. 26 p. 335), which names the groom’s father as the late François Brossard and his mother as Catherine Richard, and the bride as Margueritte Thibaudault, daughter of Michel Thibaudault and Agnes Dugas. The same register holds the baptisms of Joseph Grégoire (born 1 April 1725, baptized 3 April) and Marguerite (born 15 March 1726, baptized 17 April), and the marriage of Joseph Brossard, 23, son of the same parents, to Agnes Tibaudeau, 19, on 11 September 1725. The war years rest on John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), pp. 201, 271, 310, 356–357, 383–388, 395–397, 412 and 427–429, and on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, a compilation, which also gives the ages in 1765, the Halifax prisoner list of August 1763 (where he is written “Alexandre BROUSARE”) and the burial. A Broussard genealogy by John R. and Vita B. Reaux in the Attakapas Gazette (1971) gives the Halifax list as 12 August 1763 and the household of 1752. The terms of the Dauterive contract and the names of its eight signers come from a study of the contract printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1971.

His birth year

No baptism is known for him. Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes gives about 1699, which the Port-Royal censuses support: Cormier finds him aged 18 months in 1700 and 2 in 1701. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians and the Reaux genealogy give about 1703, which would make him younger than Joseph, born about 1702. Cormier follows White.

South Carolina

Faragher puts Alexandre aboard the warship that carried the “special prisoners” to Charles Town, with Joseph’s son Victor-Grégoire, and has Joseph break out of Fort Cumberland before the ships sailed. Cormier’s list of the 1765 arrivals records that “some say” Alexandre was deported, with a son Victor, but follows Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc, who holds that it was Joseph. LeBlanc also holds that only Joseph used the name dit Beausoleil, though Faragher, White and others give it to both brothers.

Where they lived

Cormier dates the move to Chepoudy about 1730 and places the family next at LeCran, now Stoney Creek, on the Petitcodiac, and from about 1740 at Village-des-Beausoleil, now Boundary Creek, New Brunswick. Faragher puts the move to Chepoudy in the 1730s and the founding of Beausoleil in 1740. The Reaux genealogy has Alexandre still at Stoney Creek in 1752 with his wife, five boys and two girls.

Death and burial

The family tree gives his death as 1765 at Attakapas. Cormier gives his burial “au camp d’en bas” on 18 September 1765, recorded on 22 September, citing Donald J. Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records, and adds that he died two weeks after his wife, “perhaps” of extreme fatigue and heat. The Reaux genealogy gives 18 September as the day of his death.

The line to Floyd

No record names the parents of Anne Trahan (died about 1774), Marguerite Broussard’s probable daughter. She is placed in the family of Jean Trahan and Marguerite Broussard by an argument from the godparents and witnesses at her children’s baptisms and at the marriage of Jean’s son Germain, and Cormier’s age for her in 1765 would place her birth before that marriage of 1744.

The children

The family tree carries five of the couple’s children. Cormier names more: the sons Victor, Anselme, Simon and Pierre, the daughter Anne-Henriette, and perhaps a daughter Théotiste. He calls Madeleine “Alexandre’s older daughter”, but no Madeleine appears among the Port-Royal baptisms, and Donald J. Arceneaux’s study of the first Attakapas settlement gives Olivier Thibodeau’s wife the name Marguerite. The family tree gives Jean Baptiste’s birth as 1727; Cormier places it about 1731, at Chepoudy or on the Petitcodiac, and notes that the priest who recorded his burial gave his age as 98 when he was closer to 94.