♀Anne Boudrot

Anne Boudrot (5 March 1709 – 16 December 1758) was an Acadian woman of Grand-Pré, the wife of Abraham Daigle and the mother of nine children, who was living with her family on Île Saint-Jean^W by 1752, and who died in the wreck of the British transport Ruby at Pico in the Azores in December 1758, more than two years before her son François married at Cherbourg, in Normandy, in 1761. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son François Daigle (born about 1740).

Acadia

Anne was born at Grand-Pré on 5 March 1709 and baptized there the same day, under the name Marie. She was a daughter of Michel Boudrot and Cécile LeBlanc of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré. On 5 November 1727 she married Abraham Daigle, a son of Bernard Daigle and Marie Bourg, in the register of that parish, where she is written Anne Marie Boudrot; bride and groom both made their marks.

The register records the baptisms of three of their children: Marguerite in 1729, Aimable in 1731, with Abraham’s brother René Daigle as godfather, and Marie Rosalie in 1737. In 1731 the parents are entered as of the parish of L’Assomption at Pigiguit^W, and in 1737 as “habitants de Quenecon” (farmers of Quenecon) in that parish.

Île Saint-Jean

The census taken by the Sieur de la Roque on Île Saint-Jean in August 1752 finds the family at Havre-de-la-Fortune. Abraham, written Abraham Daigre, is a plowman and a native of Acadia, aged forty-seven, who “has been in the country two years”; his wife, Marie Boudrot, a native of the parish of St. Charles, is forty-four. They had nine children, seven boys and two girls, of whom the census names eight: Marguerite, Aimable, Jean, Marie Rosalie, Jean Eloy, François Marie, Pierre and Nicolas, from a young woman of twenty-three to a boy of two. The ninth, a boy, is not named in the transcription of the census.

Among them is François Marie, aged twelve, the son who married at Cherbourg in 1761. His place in the household joins the couple of the Grand-Pré register to that wedding, a tie that had rested on Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana and the match of names. Jean, aged twenty in 1752, is most likely the brother who stood as his guardian at the wedding. Cormier places François’s birth about 1740, probably at L’Assomption, and has him deported from the island to Cherbourg in 1758, in the Île Saint-Jean campaign^W. Anne did not reach France; the records do not say whether Abraham made the same crossing, or when or where he died.

Death

In the deportation from Île Saint-Jean in 1758, Anne was aboard the British transport Ruby (le Rubis), which was run onto the rocks of Pico in the Azores. She died in the wreck on 16 December 1758. Her daughter Marie Rosalie, called Marie Rose, survived it and reached Cherbourg.

The marriage at Cherbourg

On 17 January 1761, after the publication of banns^W, the vicar of Cherbourg married their son François Daigle, then a minor, to Jeanne Holle (written Jeanne Holley in the register), daughter of Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, burghers of Cherbourg. The act names the groom as the son of the late Abraham and the late Anne Boudrot, “tous originaires de l’Acadie” (all natives of Acadia), so both parents had died by that day. François being a minor, the marriage was made in the presence and with the consent of Jean Daigle, aged twenty-eight, described as his only elder brother and his natural guardian; two of the groom’s cousins, Marie Hébert and Guillaume Labord, were also present. Jean Daigle signed the register, and the groom made his mark.

Notes

The 1761 act gives the parents’ names only, with no ages, dates or places. Its tie to the Abraham Daigle and Anne Marie Boudrot who married in 1727 rests on three records that agree: the census of 1752, whose household of Abraham Daigre and Marie Boudrot includes a François Marie of twelve and a Jean of twenty; the Grand-Pré baptisms of Marguerite, Aimable and Marie Rosalie, whose ages on the census (twenty-three, twenty-one and sixteen) fit them; and the 1727 marriage itself. The abstracts of the Grand-Pré register hold no other Abraham Daigle. The ages are not exact: the 1737 baptism makes Marie Rosalie fifteen in August 1752, not sixteen, and Jean is twenty on the census and twenty-eight nine years later.

The census is known here from a transcription published at islandregister.com and from the printed Canadian Archives report for 1905. It states nine children and names eight; whether the ninth was left out by the census or by the transcription is not known. The census age of forty-four points to a birth about 1708 for Anne, but her baptism at Grand-Pré on 5 March 1709 gives her forty-three in August 1752; census ages are not exact, as the note on Marie Rosalie above shows.

The Mines entries give her name as Anne Marie Boudrot in the 1727 marriage and the 1737 baptism and as Marie Boudrot in the baptisms of 1729 and 1731 and in the census; the 1761 act has Anne Boudrot, and Cormier calls her both Anne-Marie Boudreaux and Marie Boudrot. She is a different woman from the Anne Boudrot who was the wife of Joseph Hébert, also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne.

Her death is known from the Cherbourg marriage dispensations of 1759 to 1763: the 1761 dispensation (dated 25 June 1761) for her daughter Marie Rose (Marie Rosalie, born 1737), who survived the wreck of the Ruby, is the record of it.