♂Alexis Brault

Alexis Brault (22 September 1721 – 17 July 1811) was an Acadian, born at Grand-Pré, who was exiled to Massachusetts and in 1767 took his wife and children to the Province of Quebec^W, where he died a farmer at L’Acadie, south of Montréal. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Firmin Breaux (1749–1808). At Boston his name heads the petition of 2 June 1766 in which the Acadians held in Massachusetts asked to be carried to Canada. It went to the governor with a list of some 890 people who wished to go.

Birth at Grand-Pré

Alexis was born at Grand-Pré on 22 September 1721 and baptized on 1 November that year in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, with Etienne Como and Isabelle Theriot as sponsors. The register names his parents as François Breau and Marie Comeau; it also records a sister, Marguerite, born in October 1723. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians makes the same identification, and the age of 45 given for Alexis on the 1767 passenger list to Québec fits a birth in 1721 or 1722. No other Alexis Breau was baptized in the Minas registers before 1748.

Acadia and the exile

Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians places Alexis Brault and Marguerite Bariault, whom it writes Bariot, at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph near Grand-Pré, and gives their marriage about 1745, with their sons Joseph, Jean-Baptiste and Firmin born in the years that followed. A compilation by Steven A. Cormier on the Acadian families of Louisiana has the family deported to Massachusetts in the autumn of 1755 and, citing published lists of the exiles, finds Alexis with his wife and six children at Weymouth and Hingham, south of Boston, in 1760–61, and in Massachusetts again in August 1763.

The Massachusetts lists name the family at closer dates. On 21 April 1759 a list gives “Alexis Brow and Family now in Milton consisting of eight Persons” and orders them removed to the Town of Hull. On 22 August 1760 the Suffolk County division of the French neutrals enters “Elixes Brow” with his wife Margaret and the children written Joseph, Firmin, Battis and Charles.

The petitions at Boston

After the peace of 1763 the exiles at Boston pressed to leave. On 1 December 1764 Alexis signed, as “allexis bronx”, a petition of the Acadian heads of families asking the governor for a general passport to Saint-Domingue; the list sent with it has “allexis Broux” with nine of his family. On 1 January 1765 Alexis was one of five men who signed a petition to the governor, Francis Bernard^W, who had stopped the Acadians from sailing to the French islands. Since their last request, they wrote, seventy-two of them had been given 94 pounds of mutton, two loads of wood and a few bushels of peas, potatoes and turnips: “Sir if you do not take compassion on us we believe we shall perish with cold and hunger.” Bernard told his council that he had held them back out of humanity, believing that few would survive the climate of Saint-Domingue^W.

The Acadians then turned north, to the land that James Murray^W, governor of Quebec, offered new settlers in a proclamation of 1 March 1765. Alexis signed their request of 8 February 1766 to be carried to Canada with a year’s provisions. When Murray’s answer came, his name stood first on the petition of 2 June, which declared the Acadians “in general resolved to take the oath of fidelity” and asked for help with food for their first months in Canada. On the list that went with it he was entered as Alexis Bro, with nine persons.

Who carried the request to Québec and brought back the answer is disputed. Pierre Belliveau’s history of the exiles in Massachusetts has Alexis returning with Murray’s answer. André-Carl Vachon, in his study of the exiles who accepted Murray’s offer, rejects this and names the brothers Étienne and Joseph Hébert as the two messengers the province paid to make the journey.

To Quebec

According to Vachon’s reconstruction of the passenger lists, the family left Boston on the sloop Swallow about 13 April 1767 and reached Québec on 6 May: Alexis, aged 45, Marguerite, 42, their sons Joseph, Jean-Baptiste and Charles, and four daughters, Marie, Élisabeth, Marguerite and Françoise-Rose. Within weeks they were at L’Assomption, north-east of Montréal, and there, between 17 May and 9 June, the four daughters, aged from four to twelve, were baptised. Françoise-Rose, born, as the register put it, in “the province of Boston”, had already been baptized, and the priest supplied the ceremonies; Marie was baptized conditionally.

Between 1767 and 1774, Vachon writes, the family moved from L’Assomption to join the Acadian settlers at L’Acadie, who went to church at La Prairie and Saint-Philippe. The registers of those two parishes name Alexis and Marguerite as parents in seven acts between 1774 and 1779, beginning with the marriages of Joseph at Saint-Philippe on 25 July 1774 and of Jean-Baptiste at La Prairie on 21 November 1774.

Marguerite died before her husband. Alexis died at L’Acadie on 17 July 1811 and was buried there the next day; the register calls him a farmer and the widower of Marguerite, and gives his age as about eighty.

The son in Louisiana

Pierre Firmin Breaux did not go to Quebec with his parents. Arsenault and Cormier both name him as a son of Alexis and Marguerite. Cormier writes that he was counted with them in Massachusetts but did not go north with them, and came instead to Louisiana in February 1765 with his uncle Sylvain Breau and the Broussard party from Halifax. He is not in Vachon’s list of the household in 1767, and a history of Breaux Bridge finds him in 1766 a bachelor of 19 on the Côte Gelée, in the Attakapas country. The family’s exile thus ended at two ends of the continent: the parents near Montréal, and the son on Bayou Teche, where, by the same history, the village of Breaux Bridge later grew up on his land.

Notes

The records write his name Brault, Bro, Brost, Broe, Braux and Breau, and his wife’s Bariau, Bario and Beriaut in the Quebec registers. In the index of the four L’Assomption baptisms of 1767 her name is read as Bellau or Beliau; the ages of the four girls match Vachon’s list of the family to the year, and Vachon gives the first of those baptisms as the family’s first record in Quebec. A dictionary of the Belliveau families lists among the Acadians received at Saint-Jacques-de-l’Achigan in 1767 “Alexis Brault, of Grand-pré, 45 years old, Marguerite Belliveau, 4 children”, brought on the brig Pitt; this is very probably the same household, though it names a different ship from Vachon’s. The 1767 baptisms and the Quebec marriage and burial acts are known from the index of the Drouin collection, not from the register pages themselves.

The 1721 baptism is known from a printed abstract of the Minas registers, not from the register itself, and no later record names his parents. That it belongs to this Alexis rests on Arsenault’s identification and on his age: Vachon’s list gives him 45 in 1767, which points to a birth in 1721 or 1722, while the burial register’s “about eighty” points to about 1731 and is most likely the outlier. Cormier gives his age at death as 90. Arsenault also has him at Saint-Philippe-de-Laprairie in 1767, where the baptisms place the family at L’Assomption that spring.

He is not the Alexis Breaux who married Madeleine Trahan, was exiled to Maryland and settled in Louisiana, nor the Alexis Brault who married Marie-Josèphe Thibodeau and was on Île Saint-Jean in 1752.

Arsenault’s account of Pierre Firmin Breaux gives his marriage to Marguerite Breaux at Donaldsonville on 13 April 1769, names his parents as Alexis and Marguerite Bariot, and gives his home parish as Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards.

The petition of 1 January 1765 is quoted from the English translation printed in Belliveau’s history; it was signed “Allexis Braux”.

The Milton list of 21 April 1759, the Suffolk County list of 22 August 1760 and the petition of 1 December 1764 are printed in the Bulletin de la Société historique franco-américaine (1950). The 1764 petition is a separate document from the one of 1 January 1765. In the 1760 list the printed columns interleave, so the town written against the family is not clear from the page; the list’s heading names Weymouth, Hingham and Hull.