♀Anne Trahan

Anne Trahan (died about 1774) was an Acadian exile and the first wife of Charles Guilbeau, with whom she reached Louisiana in 1765 among the first Acadians to settle on the Bayou Teche. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Ludivine Guillebaut (died 1815).

Exile and the Attakapas

Nothing is known of Anne’s parents or of her life before her marriage. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives her age as 26 when she arrived in the colony, which would place her birth about 1739. According to Cormier’s history, Charles and Anne Trahan married about 1760, probably at Restigouche, and soon afterwards were held with his family in a prison camp in Nova Scotia.

In February 1765 they reached Louisiana with the party of Acadians that Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil led from Halifax by way of Saint-Domingue^W, Charles aged 29 and Anne 26, with no children, and after a short stay at New Orleans they went on to the Bayou Teche country of the Attakapas. There the couple kept cattle, horses and pigs on land they held without title.

Three children of the marriage are known: Ludivine, whose year of birth is uncertain; Jean Charles, born in December 1771 and baptized the following July, with Paul Trahan and Marguerite Trahan as godparents; and Emilie, born on 20 December 1773. Anne died between Emilie’s birth and the census of 1774, which found Charles with no wife and three children. When he remarried in November 1775, the record of that marriage called him the widower of Anne Trahan.

Notes

Ludivine’s parentage

That Ludivine was the daughter of Charles and Anne is probable rather than proved, and no register entry of her baptism is known. Her marriage entry, in Donald J. Hébert’s abstract of the St. Martin church register, volume 4, entry 69, in Southwest Louisiana Records, names her parents as Charles Guilbeau and Anne Trahan, written Nanette Trahan. The marriage took place at Attakapas on 9 January 1793, as Cormier’s compilation gives the place; the abstract comes from the St. Martinville church volume, and Bona Arsenault places the wedding at Saint-Martinville. Three other sources name her parents. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians has “LUDIVINE GUILBEAUX, 1772, fille de Charles et d’Anne Trahan”, and records her marriage to Michel Cormier. Cormier’s history makes her a daughter of Charles’s first wife, Anne Trahan. And a published abstract of the 1799 baptism of her son Michel, as quoted online, names the child’s maternal grandparents as Charles Guillebaut and Anne Trahan, “all from Acadia”. The baptisms of her brother Jean Charles and her sister Emilie name the same couple as parents.

Dates and sources

Anne’s marriage, her arrival and her age rest on Cormier’s history; in the census of 1771, as Cormier abstracts it, the wife in the household is given as 23, which does not agree with the 26 of 1765. That census also counts a girl of one, whom Cormier takes, with a question mark, to be Ludivine. The published abstract of the Pointe Coupée register gives Jean Charles’s baptism as 15 July 1772 and his birth as 15 December 1772, five months after it; the abstract of the St. Martinville register and an online index of the same baptism both give his birth as 15 December 1771. Emilie’s birth at St. Martinville comes from a similar online index. The 1775 marriage record is known from a published abstract quoted in Cormier’s history.