♀Anne Boudrot

Anne Boudrot (born about 1677) was an Acadian woman of the parish of Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, the wife of Pierre Arseneau and the mother of at least six children. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Arsenault (died before 1748).

Her parents

Her mother was Marguerite Bourgeois, and her father was Marguerite’s first husband, Jean Boudrot. In the Beaubassin census of 1686, the household of Mirande and Marguerite Bourgeois holds “Enfans du premier Lict de Marguerite Bourgeois: Marie 9”, a daughter of her first marriage aged nine. In the Beaubassin census of 1693, the household of “Maniel Mirande” and Margte Bourgeois lists “Anne 15” among the children, and a girl of that age fits her age of twenty-three at Beaubassin in 1700.

Beaubassin

The census of Beaubassin in 1700 found Pierre Arseneau, aged 24, living with his wife Anne Boudrot, aged 23, and a son Pierre, aged two; the couple had married before 1698. They were still at Beaubassin at the census of 1714, where their household held six children, among them their daughter Anne.

Their daughter’s marriage

On 18 November 1720, at Beaubassin, their daughter Anne married Paul Daigle, son of the late Olivier Daigle and Jeanne Blanchard of the parish of Port-Royal. The register names the bride as “Anne Arseneau fille de Jean Arseneau et d’Anne Boudrot aussi ses pere et mere de cette paroisse”: her parents belonged to Beaubassin, and, unlike the groom’s father, neither is called late. Her own parents are not named in it, and no record of the deaths of Pierre Arseneau or Anne Boudrot has been found.

Isle Saint-Jean

The family had probably moved from Beaubassin to the Isle Saint-Jean^W, now Prince Edward Island, by about 1728. The census of the island taken in 1734 places the household at Havre de Malpèque: Pierre, with his wife, four sons and a daughter. The roll gives his age as 62 and his wife’s as 60, but by his birth about 1676 he would have been about 58, so the ages run high. Their son Charles’s household, with his wife and four children, stood beside theirs.

He was most likely last counted on the island in 1735. The date and place of the death of Pierre Arseneau are unknown.

Notes

The marriage record of 1720 calls the bride’s father Jean, while the censuses of Beaubassin in 1700 and 1714 name him Pierre; he appears here under the name the censuses give. An online family tree also gives Anne Arsenault’s father as Pierre.

The 1734 island census

The census of the Isle Saint-Jean for 1734 writes the head of the household as “Pierre Arceneau 62, sa femme 60”, with four sons aged 24, 18, 15 and 10 and a daughter aged 20; beside them stands “Charles Arceneau 30, sa femme 30”, with four children. The roll spells the surname Arceneau; the spelling Arseneau is used here. The roll gives Charles an age of 30, but his birth is given as 1714, which would make him 20. The four sons’ ages do not fit the birth years given for the couple’s children either.

Malpèque after 1728

The move to Malpèque about 1728, and the later island rolls of 1730 and 1735 on which the family is last seen, come from a compiled history, WikiTree’s Arseneau-15 citing White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, and from transcriptions of those rolls; they are not the 1734 census itself. The marriage records of two sons, Joseph in 1739 on the island and Abraham in 1741 at Beaubassin, do not describe the parents as deceased, so a death after 1735 is not ruled out.

Parentage

The census does not name Marguerite Bourgeois’s first husband, but the record of her second marriage does: when she married Emmanuel Mirande at Beaubassin on 30 November 1679, the register called her “veuve de Jean Boudrot”. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives the same first husband, as Jean Boudrot of Beaubassin, son of Michel and Michelle Aucoin, and so does White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes as quoted in a WikiTree profile. The link between the first-bed daughter and Anne is an identification by age and household: “Marie 9” in 1686 and “Anne 15” in 1693 are most likely the same girl, which the census rows do not state.

Arsenault’s genealogy elsewhere, in volume 3, names Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg of Port-Royal as her parents. The Beaubassin census rows point instead to the household of Marguerite Bourgeois. The Charles Boudrot household at Port-Royal in 1686 did have a daughter Anne, aged eight, and his household at Les Mines in 1693 lists a daughter Isabelle, 16, most likely the same girl under a second name: she was in another settlement from the Anne of the Beaubassin roll.