♀Anne Darois

Anne Darois (born about 1720) was an Acadian, the daughter of a settler born in Paris, who married the widower Etienne Saulnier in 1740 and made her home with him at Petitcoudiac, where their son was born in the spring of 1755, months before the British began deporting the Acadians. She was the half-niece of Emmanuel Hebert (1656–1744), the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Life

She was born about 1720, one of the youngest of the ten children of Jérôme Darois, who had come from Paris, and Marie Garault, a daughter of Port-Royal. The family lived at Saint-Charles-des-Mines, on the Rivière des Habitants.

On 4 June 1740, at Beaubassin^W, she married Etienne Saulnier, a widower with two young daughters, Françoise and Marguerite. They made their home at Petitcoudiac, where their son Joseph Saunier was born on 30 April 1755. On 4 September 1755 Acadian militia fought British colonial troops on the river^W, and that autumn the deportations from the region were under way; even so, Joseph is said to have been baptised in the chapel of Petitcoudiac on 16 November 1755. Nothing more is certain of her after that year; one genealogy has her married again about 1756, as the second wife of Michel Hébert dit Manuel.

Anne Saunier, who married Michel Cormier in Spanish Louisiana about 1769, is probably not her daughter. A declaration of her goods made for that marriage is said to have named her parents as Etienne Saunier and Marie Anne Darios. Other genealogists place her in other Saulnier families.

Notes

Sources

Her birth, parents, marriage, her son Joseph and the family’s home at Petitcoudiac come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which gives her birth as 1720 in one entry and about 1720 in another, lists her ninth of Jérôme Darois’s ten children, and spells her mother Garault in one entry and Gareau in another. Joseph’s birth and baptism at Petitcoudiac, with his parents written “Estienne Saulnier (Sonnier) and Anne Darroy”, are printed in the Attakapas Gazette (1974).

Her daughter Anne

The claim that Anne Saunier was her daughter rests on Earl E. Vallot’s genealogy of Michel Cormier in the Attakapas Gazette (1967), which names her parents Etienne Saunier and Marie Anne Darios from the 1769 declaration of goods in the Opelousas colonial records. Arsenault does not list her among the couple’s children, but the couple and the date of their marriage agree with Vallot, and a census age of 25 in 1766 places her birth about 1741, soon after the 1740 marriage. Against this, the same 1766 census at Cabanocé lists her as the sister of a Joseph Sonnier aged 27, born before the 1740 marriage, whom Arsenault places in the family of Pierre Saulnier and Madeleine Haché-Gallant; Stephen A. White and Steven A. Cormier name Jacques Saulnier and Anne Hébert instead. Cormier makes Olivier Saunier, godfather of Anne’s son Amant in 1770, a son of Etienne and Anne Darois, and calls Anne Darois Etienne’s first wife. White and Cormier make Anne Saunier the daughter of Jacques Saulnier and Anne Hébert instead, and she is not counted here among Anne Darois’s children.

After 1755

Arsenault gives an Anne Darois, daughter of Jérôme and Marie Gareau, as the second wife, about 1756, of Michel Hébert dit Manuel, who married a third time at Québec on 18 May 1758. If she is the same woman, Etienne was dead by about 1756 and she by 1758. Arsenault adds that her father died at Petitcoudiac about 1750, and that her mother died in Virginia, where she had been deported.