♂Alexis Benoit

Alexis Benoit was an Acadian, the husband of Hélène Comeau and the father of Elizabeth Benois, who married Jean Baptiste Dupuis at Ascension on 7 February 1775. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Elizabeth Benois.

Exile

No record of Alexis and Hélène’s own marriage, in Acadia or afterward, has been found; what the registers give of the couple is their names as the parents of their daughter Elizabeth. The 1775 marriage entry at Ascension (ASC-1, 129) names Elizabeth’s parents as Alexis and Marie. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which cites the genealogist Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, names his wife Hélène Comeau and says that Alexis and Hélène married about 1749 and were deported to the British colony of Massachusetts in the general removal of the Acadians in 1755, where they were counted among the exiles at Newton in both 1757 and 1763.

Daughters left orphaned

Cormier describes Elizabeth and her sister Anne as two orphaned sisters, probably born in Massachusetts during the family’s exile there, who came to Louisiana by the mid-1770s. He suggests that they came by way of the French colony of Saint-Domingue^W (present-day Haiti), where a number of Acadian exiles from New England went in the early 1760s, but he calls this “only a guess”; he also asks whether the two sisters arrived together. Neither Alexis nor his wife is recorded as having made the journey to Louisiana with them, and no further record of either parent has been found. Elizabeth married Jean Baptiste Dupuis at Ascension, on the Acadian Coast^W, on 7 February 1775; her sister Anne instead settled in the Attakapas District, where, by Cormier’s account, she married Amand Broussard in May 1775.

Notes

The date of Alexis’s marriage, the couple’s exile to Massachusetts, and the account of their daughters’ passage through Saint-Domingue rest on Cormier’s compilation and the genealogist it cites; none of it is confirmed by a primary register, and two published volumes of abstracted church registers (the Acadian-era volume and the Louisiana volume for 1770 to 1803) have no Benoit–Comeau marriage. Cormier and White name his wife Hélène Comeau, and three baptisms of Elizabeth’s children at St. Gabriel name the children’s maternal grandparents “Alexos Benois” and “Elena Comau” (6 September 1797, SGA-11, 87), “Alexo Beunnua” and “Melen Como” (4 September 1799, SGA-11, 96) and “Alexi Benoit” and “Helene Como” (16 October 1801, SGA-11, 108). Only the 1775 marriage entry, ASC-1, 129, says Marie, and the tree carries Marie as an alternate name; the discrepancy has not been resolved. A compiled printing of the list of French in Massachusetts Bay Colony who desired to go to Old France, sent with a letter of 24 August 1763, enters the couple as “Alexis Benoit & Ellene” (Placide Gaudet, 1906, p. 136).