♂Bastien Brun

Bastien Brun (born about 1656) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, a son of the settlers Vincent Brun and Renée Brode, who married Huguette Bourg, while two of his sisters married two of her brothers. Widowed before he was forty, he raised their seven children on his own. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), by three separate lines of descent, through his sons Claude Brun and Jean Brun (1684–1751).

Early life

Bastien first appears in the census of Port-Royal taken in 1671, fifteen years old and unmarried, in the household of his parents, Vincent Brun and Renée Brode. He was the only son among their five children: his elder sisters Magdeleine, Andree and Françoise were already married, and his younger sister Marie, twelve, was still at home.

Marriage

Bastien Brun and Huguette Bourg married at Port-Royal before 1677; no record of the wedding survives, and compiled genealogies place it about 1676. The marriage was one of three between the two families: Bastien’s sisters Françoise and Marie Brun married Huguette’s brothers Bernard and Abraham Bourg, so the children of the three couples were double first cousins. By the census of 1678 the couple had a daughter of two and a son of one, six acres of land and eight cattle. The census of 1686 lists Bastien, thirty-two, and Huguette, twenty-eight, with six children, Jeanne, Claude, Abraham, Vincent, Jean and Antoine, from nine years old down to one, and twelve cattle. A seventh child, Marie, followed about 1687.

Huguette died young, after Marie’s birth and before the census of 1693, which lists Bastien as a widower with all seven children at home. When their son Jean married at Port-Royal on 2 October 1708, the register named his parents as Sébastien Brun and Huguette Bourg and marked her as deceased.

Widower

Bastien kept the farm with the children growing up around him. In 1693 he worked ten arpents^W and kept twelve cattle, twenty sheep and ten hogs; by 1698 the land had doubled to twenty-one arpents, and the household had sixty fruit trees. Dudley LeBlanc’s The True Story of the Acadians (1932), quoting a history of the apple industry in Nova Scotia, takes that census of Port-Royal as the earliest official record of orchards in the province, and his orchard of sixty trees is among those it names.

In 1701, still a widower at forty-five, he had six of the children with him: five grown sons, Claude, Abraham, Vincent, Jean and Antoine, and Marie, thirteen. A census of 1714 lists a Sébastien Brun on his own, next to the households of Antoine, Claude and Jean Brun; Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled Familles acadiennes takes him to be their father. He died at Port-Royal on 15 August 1728, aged seventy, and was buried the same day. The register names Antoine Brun and Claude Brun, his children, as witnesses.

Lines of descent

Bastien and Huguette reach Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three separate lines of descent, through two of their children. Two of the lines run through their son Claude Brun, born about 1679, and one through their son Jean Brun (1684–1751). Each line is ten generations long, and all three come down the mother’s side of Floyd’s family, through Floyd’s mother Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

The lines meet again twice. They meet in Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857), whose parents Mathilde Valentine Landry (1805–1879) and Placide Cyrille Thibodeaux (1802–1838) both descend from Bastien and Huguette. They meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), Ida Serrette’s mother, whose parents Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) and Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) both descend from them.

Notes

Bastien’s birth about 1656 rests on his age of fifteen in 1671, and the census of 1686 gives him thirty-two; both entries come from the original rolls. His later ages drift, thirty-eight in 1693 and forty-five in each of 1698, 1700 and 1701. The compiled genealogies of Bona Arsenault and of J.-Hervé Belliveau give his birth as 1654. Later records call him Sébastien.

The censuses of 1678, 1693, 1698, 1700, 1701 and 1714, and the children’s names in 1686, are known here only from an online transcription of the Port-Royal rolls. Lanctôt’s printed extract of the 1686 entry names the same children, and Arsenault gives the same seven, Jeanne, Claude, Abraham, Vincent, Jean, Antoine and Marie.

Two entries do not fit his widowhood. The transcription of a list of 1703 counts a wife in his household, and Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres gives for 1703 Sébastien Brun, sixty, married to Huguette Bourc, thirty-six, ages that fit neither of them. No second marriage is known, and the records do not explain the entry. The register of Jean’s marriage in 1708 marks only his mother as deceased; his father is named without that word.