♀Anne Dugast

Anne Dugast (born about 1654) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and Beaubassin^W, a daughter of the gunsmith Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet. She married first Charles Bourgeois, the first of three marriages that joined her family to the family of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois, and after his early death Jean Aubin Mignault, with whom she raised her children at Beaubassin. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Claude Bourgeois (born about 1674).

Life

Anne was one of eight children in her father’s household. By the census of 1671 she was seventeen and already married, as her elder sister Marie was, while Claude, Martin, Margueritte, Abraham, Magdelaine and a second Marie were still unmarried. Her husband, Charles Bourgeois, was twenty-five, the eldest son of Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan.

Charles Bourgeois and Anne Dugast had married by 1671, when the same census listed “Charles Bourgeois 25, sa femme Anne Dugast 17” with a daughter, Marie, a year and a half old, twelve cattle, seven sheep and two arpents^W of plowland. If the ages on the roll are right, Anne was no more than sixteen when Marie was born. The couple are entered on the page before her parents.

Theirs was the first of three marriages that joined the two families: Anne’s brother Claude Dugas later married Charles’s sister Françoise, and her sister Magdelaine Dugas married his brother Germain Bourgeois. Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from two of those three couples, from Charles and Anne through his mother’s mother, Amelia Pennison Daigle, and from Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois through his mother’s father, Pierre Anatole Serrett.

Widowhood and second marriage

Charles died young; compiled genealogies date his death about 1678. On 26 April 1679 at Beaubassin Anne married Jean Aubin Mignault, and the register there calls her the widow of Charles Bourgeois. The census of Beaubassin in 1686 lists her, aged 34, with no husband beside her, and with three children entered as “Enfans d’Elle et de Charles Bourgeois”, Charles, 14, Claude, 12, and Anne, 7, and three younger Mignault children, Jean, 6, Cécile, two and a half, and Alexis, three months. No record of Charles’s death or burial has been found. Her daughter Marie is not in the household.

Anne and Jean Aubin Mignault stayed at Beaubassin. In 1686 the household had two guns, eight arpents of land, twenty cattle, four sheep and fourteen hogs. In 1693 the household held her son Claude, eighteen, and her daughter Anne, fifteen, with four Mignault children, the youngest, Louis-Joseph, six months old. In 1698, with Claude still at home at twenty-two, her elder son Charles and his wife, Marie Blanchard, were living next door. She died at Beaubassin on 4 November 1740, about eighty-five years old, and was buried there the next day, 5 November.

Notes

Her birth year comes from her age on the 1671 roll; the 1686 roll makes her 34 and the transcription of 1693 makes her 42, a few years older than the 1671 age allows. The 1671 roll spells the family name Dugast and the 1686 roll Dugas; her siblings appear in later records as Dugas or Dugast. Her first marriage rests on the 1671 roll itself, which lists “Charles Bourgeois 25, sa femme Anne Dugast 17” on the page before her parents’ household. Her second marriage rests on a printed abstract of the Beaubassin register, Lea Normandeau-Jones, Finding Your Acadian Ancestors (2001), p. 49, which gives the groom as “Jean Aubin Meignaux of the Parish of Beauport” and the bride as “widow of Charles Bourgeois”. The 1686 census writes the surname “Miguault”, for her son Jean, and the compiled genealogies spell it Mignault. Placide Gaudet’s genealogy of the Acadian families (1905) gives the first marriage as 1668 at Port-Royal, and Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians also dates the second to 26 April 1679 at Beaubassin; no record of the first marriage has been found.

Marie is known only from the 1671 roll. The household’s holdings in 1686 and the censuses of 1693 and 1698 are known from the transcriptions published on acadian-home.org. Magdelaine’s marriage to Germain Bourgeois rests on a transcription of the 1686 census of Beaubassin; the census page itself has not yet been seen.

Her death and burial

The Beaubassin burial register, Library and Archives Canada copy, page 134, has the entry for 5 November 1740: Anne Dugas, widow in second marriage of the late Miniot, had died the day before, aged about eighty-five, and was buried that day. The register writes her second husband’s name as Miniot.