♂Antoine Dupuis

Antoine Dupuis (16 November 1723 – before 6 August 1765) was an Acadian born at Grand-Pré and later of Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia, who died in exile at Le Mirebalais in Saint-Domingue and whose children, orphaned by 1769, settled in Louisiana. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Baptiste Dupuis.

Early life

Antoine was born on 16 November 1723 and baptized on 21 November 1723 at Grand-Pré, in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines; the baptism names his parents as Antoine Dupuis and Marie-Josèphe Dugas. That parentage is proved. A sworn declaration made on 27 February 1767 on Belle-Île-en-Mer by his sister Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, widow of Pierre Theriot, names Antoine Dupuis and Marie-Josèphe Dugas as her parents and lists among their children an Antoine, “married there to Marguerite Boudrot, daughter of Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie LeBlanc, deported to New York”. The registers name Marguerite’s mother as Cécile LeBlanc, not Anne-Marie: a Marguerite Boudrot was born to Michel Boudrot and Cécile LeBlanc at Grand-Pré on 12 October 1725, and Michel Boudrot’s second wife, married in 1732, was Anne Prejean. The declaration gives the year of his birth as 1732, which does not agree with the 1723 baptism and is best read as a slip of memory by the deponent. His brother Joseph, whose marriage in 1769 names the same parents, witnessed the wedding of Antoine’s daughter Marie Madeleine on the same day. The abstract of Joseph’s marriage calls the mother “Marie Anne Dugas”.

Acadia and exile

Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot married at Rivière-aux-Canards, most likely between 1746 and 1750, though no register of the marriage survives. Antoine and his wife lived at Rivière-aux-Canards before the expulsion of 1755, according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana. Their children included Jean Baptiste (born about 1752), Simon-Joseph (about 1754) and Marie Madeleine (about 1755), all small children when the family was deported to the British seaboard colonies.

In September 1755 Antoine was probably among the men held in the church at Grand-Pré, where Winslow’s list names an Antoine Dupuis, with three sons and a daughter, in the village of Dupuis. Cormier’s compilation has the family still in Connecticut in August 1763.

Saint-Domingue

Cormier’s compilation follows the family from exile in the British colonies to Le Mirebalais in French Saint-Domingue^W in the early 1760s, where Antoine’s younger brother Joseph, born about 1736, followed his brothers. Cormier gives two of Antoine’s sons, Antoine and Pierre, as dying there in the autumn of 1764 (his narrative says September, his individual entries October), a few days after baptisms at Mirebalais that call them born “in New England”, and Antoine himself as dying at Le Mirebalais in August 1765, aged forty-six. The Le Mirebalais burial register records three of his sons that autumn, not two: Pierre, aged seven, on 21 September, Antoine, aged four, on 2 October, and Felix, aged ten, on 22 October 1764. The same register confirms Antoine’s own death: he was buried there on 6 August 1765, and the entry calls him “acadien”.

Cormier has Joseph taking four of Antoine’s children, including an infant born about 1765, to Louisiana, where Spanish officials counted them at New Orleans in July 1767, and on to the Acadian settlement at St. Gabriel. He calls them among the relatively few Acadians who reached Louisiana directly from Saint-Domingue.

The family in Louisiana

His daughter Marie Madeleine married Jean Baptiste Hébert on 27 March 1769; the Pointe Coupée register of the marriage names her parents as Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot, both already dead. His son Jean Baptiste married Élisabeth Benoit, a daughter of Acadian exiles born in Boston, at Ascension in 1775, where the register calls his parents Acadians. Cormier counts Joseph and two of Antoine’s sons, Jean Baptiste and Simon-Joseph, as the ancestors of most of the Dupuis families of the lower Mississippi Valley.

Simon-Joseph, the second son, married Louise Divine Landry at Ascension on 5 October 1778; the register calls him Simon and names his parents as Anthony and Margarita Budrot, Acadians. The youngest son, Pierre, born about 1765, is said by Cormier to have died unmarried at St. Gabriel as a young man. A Pedro, son of Antonio and Margarita Budro, was buried at St. Gabriel on 25 January 1781, and the tree takes him to be that Pierre.

Notes

The deaths in Saint-Domingue, the exile route and the children’s approximate birth years rest on Cormier’s compilation, which draws on published transcriptions of the Mirebalais baptisms and on a Belle-Île deposition. The compilation is inconsistent about the first place of exile, naming Connecticut in its narrative and New York in its individual entries. It also places Marie Madeleine’s marriage in May 1769 at St. Gabriel; the Pointe Coupée register gives 27 March 1769. The burial entry gives his age as 46, which would put his birth about 1719 and is about four years more than his 1723 baptism implies; the discrepancy is noted and not resolved. Cormier calls him Antoine, fils, a son of an elder Antoine Dupuis, and makes his brother Joseph a son of that elder Antoine by his second wife, Marie-Josèphe Dugas of Grand-Pré, which agrees with the baptism and with the Belle-Île declaration; the baptism, the declaration and the 1769 marriage together tie that baptism to Marguerite Boudrot’s husband. The declaration lists a Joseph among twins born in 1745, while Cormier gives Joseph’s birth as about 1736; the two are not reconciled here. He is not the Jean Baptiste Dupuis who married Marie Josèphe Granger and died at Le Mirebalais, a different man.

The marriage

The marriage is known only from compiled histories. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives it as about 1750 at Rivière-aux-Canards (volume 3, page 1164, and volume 2, page 446). White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes gives about 1746 (page 208, as cited on WikiTree at Boudrot-525), and a FamilySearch family record gives the same year. The register of Rivière-aux-Canards is lost, and the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s volume 1a (1707–1748) holds no act of the marriage.

The Grand-Pré list, 1755

Winslow’s journal prints a list of the men held in the church at Grand-Pré in September 1755 (pages 116 and 117 of the printed volume). Under the village of Dupuis the list has an Antoine Dupuis, with three sons, one daughter, four bullocks, six cows, six young cattle, 48 sheep, 16 hogs and three horses. The same village holds Pierre Boudro, Marguerite Boudrot’s brother. The identification with this Antoine is probable.

Connecticut and New York, 1763

Cormier’s compilation has the family still in Connecticut in August 1763. Arsenault, who places the family in New York, has the couple there that year with nine children; the tree lists seven children for them.