♀Anne Girouard

Anne Girouard (born 24 February 1729) was an Acadian of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) who married Justinien Dupuis there in 1751 under a Church dispensation, because the bride and groom were blood relations, and whose only known son survived the deportation to found a Louisiana family. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Dupuis (1752–1803).

Early life

Anne was born on 24 February 1729 at Port-Royal, the daughter of Guillaume Giroir and Marie Bernard; the parish register of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) spells her name Giroard at her baptism and Giroir at her marriage. She was baptised at home by a layman, Pierre La Noue, and was not brought to the church for the formal ceremonies until 23 April 1730, fourteen months after her birth. A lay baptism was the Church’s provision for a newborn in danger of death or out of reach of a priest; the ceremonies a priest would have performed were supplied afterwards in church. The register does not say why she was baptized at home or why the church ceremonies waited more than a year. Her godmother was Marguerite Giroard, a daughter of Alexandre Giroard.

Marriage

On 3 February 1751, after the three customary banns, Anne married Justinien Dupuis, son of Pierre Dupuis and Jeanne Richard, at Port-Royal. The witnesses were Pierre Dupuis, Charles Dupuis, Guillaume Giroir and Basile Giroir. On the same day her brother Pierre Giroir married Justinien’s sister Theotiste Dupuis, the register entering the two marriages one after the other. The priest recorded a dispensation from the impediment of kinship “in the third to fourth degree”, meaning that the couple shared an ancestor: one of them was a great-grandchild of that ancestor and the other a great-great-grandchild. No record states how they were related, but the family as rebuilt from the parish register and the Acadian censuses matches the degree exactly: both descend from Francois Gautrot, Anne in three generations (through her father Guillaume and her grandmother Marguerite Gautrot) and Justinien in four. Two of those links rest on census households rather than on baptisms. Their son Joseph was baptized at Port-Royal on 9 January 1752, with Pierre and Isabelle Dupuis as godparents; he is the only child of the couple the register contains.

Exile

The Acadians of the Annapolis Royal district were deported by the British from 1755. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Joseph was an only son who went into the deportation with his parents, and by then Anne and Justinien had already died in the exile. No register gives a place or date for either death. By 1764–65 it was Joseph’s aunt Anne Gaudet, the widow of his uncle Michel Dupuis, who brought him and two girl cousins to Louisiana.

Joseph settled among the Acadian exiles at Cabahannocer (the present St. James Parish), where he married Marie Poirier on 7 February 1774; the St. James marriage register names the groom’s parents as “Justinien & Anne Giruar, Acadians”. Cormier’s compilation has him later cross to the Attakapas prairies, where he died in December 1803, while a FamilySearch profile gives his death as 5 December 1803 at St. James.

Notes

No record of Anne Girouard’s death has been found. The account of her death in exile rests on Cormier’s compilation alone. Another account within the same compilation, drawn from Bona Arsenault’s Généalogie des Acadiens, has Justinien’s family, and not only his son, at St. James, Louisiana, in 1774, which would mean the couple survived the exile. Cormier does not reconcile the two versions, and no Louisiana register naming Anne herself has been found. Arsenault’s parentage for Anne, as a daughter of Guillaume Girouard and Marie Bernard, agrees with her baptism and marriage records.