♀Anne Bourg

Anne Bourg (about 1680 – 12 March 1751) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal who spent some fifty years married to Charles Guilbeau, raised a large family as the colony passed from France to Britain, and died at Annapolis Royal in March 1751; her husband died eleven days after her. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Guilbeau (1710–1765).

Early life

Anne was probably the daughter of Bernard Bourg and Françoise Brun. She was eight in 1686, thirteen in 1693 and seventeen in 1698, each time in their household at Port-Royal. The family stayed close long after she married: in January 1714 she stood godmother to two of the triplets born to her sister Françoise and Ambroise Melanson, and in the 1720s and 1730s her grown children were godparents again and again to the children of her sisters Marie, Claire and Renée and her brother Abraham. Earlier genealogies gave her another father, and that question is set out in the Notes.

Marriage and family

By 1701 she had married Charles Guilbeau, son of Pierre Guilbeau and Catherine Thériot, and that year the couple, he 23 and she 21, had a household of their own at Port-Royal. Eight children are credited to them, from Marie in 1702 to Anne and Madeleine in 1712, and by 1714 the household counted four sons and three daughters.

Their son Joseph was born early in 1710. That autumn a British and New England force took Port-Royal in the Siege of Port Royal^W, and for the rest of her life Anne lived in a colony under British rule, its capital renamed Annapolis Royal. Between 1720 and 1734 seven of her children are said to have married there, three of them to sons and daughters of René Forest and Françoise Dugas and two to children of Jacques Michel and Catherine Comeau. Joseph’s marriage to Madeleine Michel on 2 January 1733 names him as the son of Charles Guilbeau and Anne Bourg.

Death

Anne Bourg died on 12 March 1751 and was buried at Annapolis Royal two days later, entered by the priest as seventy-five years old, which would place her birth about 1676, a few years earlier than the census ages suggest, and as the wife of Charles Guillebeau. Charles died on 23 March and was buried two days later as the widower of the late Anne Bourg. Both died four years before the deportation of the Acadians began in 1755.

Notes

Her parents

Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens places an Anne, born in 1683, among the children of François Bourg and Marguerite Boudrot, and it is that Anne, aged nine in the 1693 census beside her brother Alexandre and so born about 1684, who married Charles Melanson. Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives Charles Guilbeau’s wife as the daughter of Bernard Bourg and Françoise Brun, and Arsenault’s own L’Acadie des ancêtres does the same: for the 1714 census it calls her, aged 36, “fille de Bernard Bourc”.

The ages on the rolls fit that reading. Bernard Bourg’s household at Port-Royal lists Anne at eight in 1686, thirteen in 1693 and seventeen in 1698, and she is not in it in 1701, when Charles Guilbeau’s wife is recorded at twenty-one. The ages run from about 1676 to 1681: seventy-five at her burial in 1751, thirty-six in 1714 and the census ages above. Neither her burial nor her son Joseph’s marriage names her parents. The surviving Port-Royal register, which begins in 1702, after her birth and probably after her marriage, supports the Bernard Bourg reading. The marriage entries of Françoise (1705), Abraham (1709), Marie (1711), Claire (1713) and Renée (1717) each name Bernard Bourg and Françoise Brun as parents. Anne was godmother to Françoise’s triplets in 1714, and her children stood for the children of Marie, Claire, Renée and Abraham between 1725 and 1737. No Guilbeau appears in the entries checked so far for the family of François Bourg and Marguerite Boudrot. The parentage is therefore probable, though no record names it outright.

Sources for her life

Her burial on 14 March 1751, and her husband’s on 25 March, are in the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal; Joseph, Pierre and Joseph Guillebeau witnessed hers, and Pierre and Alexandre Guillebeau his. The priest gave Charles’s age as about sixty, though the census of 1701 had made him 23. The couple’s household appears in the Port-Royal censuses of 1701 and 1714. The children’s birth years and the marriages of all but Joseph are as Arsenault gives them; Joseph’s marriage of 2 January 1733 is in the Port-Royal register. Cormier gives the couple nine children, five of them sons.