♂Antoine Gougeon

Antoine Gougeon (born about 1626) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, the husband of Jeanne Chebrat, and in 1671 the master of one of the best-stocked farms in the settlement. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), by two separate lines of descent, through their daughter Huguette Goujon (died by 1718). The records found do not say where he came from or when he reached Acadia.

Marriage and household

No record of their marriage survives, as the parish register of Port-Royal begins only in 1702; Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s compiled genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families dates it 1656, when Jeanne was the widow of Jehan Poirier. At the census of 1671 Antoine, a farmer, and Jeanne were both forty-five, with one child at home, Huguette, aged fourteen; they had twenty head of cattle, seventeen sheep and ten arpents^W of plowed land. The historian Naomi Griffiths counts theirs among the seven households at Port-Royal whose land and herds rivalled those of the colony’s surgeon, Jacques Bourgeois. Huguette became the wife of Guillaume Blanchard. No surviving act names her parents, so her place as their daughter rests on her name, her age and the parish, and Beliveau’s dictionary makes the same identification. No record of Antoine’s death has been found; Régis Brun’s study of the Acadians before 1755 places it about 1675.

Lines of descent

Two separate lines of descent run from Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chebrat to Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), and both run through their daughter Huguette Goujon. On the first line they stand eleven generations above Floyd; on the second, twelve. Both lines reach him through his mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990), on the mother’s side of his family.

The two lines meet again in the marriage of Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857) and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (1827–1867), the parents of Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850). Both of them descend from Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chebrat.