♂Bernard Bourg

Bernard Bourg (born about 1649 – died before 24 May 1725) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, a son of the early settlers Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry, who with his wife Françoise Brun raised at least eleven children; two of their daughters, both named Claire, married two brothers of the Dugas family. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three separate lines of descent, through three of his daughters.

Marriage

Bernard was born at Port-Royal about 1649, one of the eleven children of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry, and his parents’ entry in the census of 1671 already counts him, at twenty-two, among their four married children. The same census found the young couple in a household of their own: “Bernard Bour aagé de 23 ans, sa femme françoise Brun 19, un enfan qui s’appelle Marie”, with six cattle, two sheep and no land yet under the plow. Françoise was a daughter of the settlers Vincent Brun and Renée Brode. Their marriage was the first of three between the two families: Bernard’s sister Huguette later married Françoise’s brother Bastien, and his brother Abraham married her sister Marie, so the children of the three couples were double first cousins.

Family

By the census of 1686 Bernard, thirty-six, and Françoise had eight children, from fifteen years old down to one, among them Claire, four, Françoise, three, and Abraham, the youngest, and they worked three arpents^W with four cattle, six sheep and six hogs. The farm grew with the family: in 1693, with ten children at home, Bernard, forty-one, and Françoise, forty, had thirty arpents, one gun, eighteen cattle, twenty sheep and twelve hogs, and in 1698 thirty-five arpents and forty-five fruit trees.

The censuses name eleven children born between about 1671 and 1692. The historian John Mack Faragher, in A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), his history of the expulsion of the Acadians, takes Françoise as his example of the early marriages and large families of Acadian women: married at seventeen to Bernard, then twenty-two, she bore thirteen children in twenty-two years, two of whom died in infancy.

In 1693 both Claires were living at home, aged thirteen and one. The elder married Joseph Dugas, a son of Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois; on 24 October 1713 the younger married his brother, François Dugas, at Port-Royal, and in 1709 their brother Abraham had married the Dugas brothers’ sister, Marie. Their daughter Anne, thirteen in 1693 and seventeen in 1698, had married Charles Guilbeau by 1701; the roll of that year, known from an online transcription, lists the couple, he twenty-three and she twenty-one.

Later years

Between 1705 and 1717 the register of Port-Royal recorded the marriages of five of their children, each entry naming Bernard and Françoise as the parents: besides Abraham and the younger Claire, Françoise married Ambroise Melanson in 1705, Marie married Laurent Granger in 1711, and Renée married Clement Babineau in 1717. The census of 1714 still counted Bernard Bourg and his wife at Port-Royal. Bernard died before his wife; no record gives the day, only that it came before her burial on 24 May 1725. Françoise died on 23 May 1725 and was buried at Port-Royal the next day, aged seventy-five, as the widow of the late Bernard Bourg, after receiving the last sacraments; her son Abraham and her son-in-law Clement Babineau were the witnesses.

Lines of descent

Bernard reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three lines of descent, all on Floyd’s mother’s side. The first runs through his daughter Claire Bourg (born about 1682), making him the seventh great-grandfather. The second runs through his daughter Anne Bourg (born about 1680, died 1751), who married Charles Guilbeau; their son Joseph Guilbeau (1710–1765) carries the line on, and by it Bernard is the eighth great-grandfather. A third line most likely runs through his daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1674, died 1727), and by it too Bernard is the eighth great-grandfather. The lines meet again in Ida Serrette (1903–1990), whose parents Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) both descend from the couple, and again in Amelia Pennison Daigle, whose parents Melia Thibodeaux and Jean Baptiste Daigle both descend from the couple.

Notes

Bernard’s birth about 1649 rests on his age of twenty-two in his parents’ entry of 1671; his own entry on the same roll gives twenty-three, and his later ages drift: thirty-six in 1686, forty-one in 1693, fifty in 1698, forty-eight in 1700 and fifty-four in 1701. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives 1649 and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana about 1648; both place the marriage about 1670, and Cormier also counts thirteen children.

The household entries of 1671, 1686, 1693 and 1698 are taken from the original rolls; the censuses of 1700, 1701 and 1714 are known here only from an online transcription of the Port-Royal rolls. The transcription gives the household of 1671 nine sheep where the roll reads “deux brebis”, two, and the roll of 1714, as transcribed, names neither Bernard’s wife nor his children.

The elder Claire’s place in the family rests on the census of 1686, which lists a Claire of four in the household, and on Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which in one volume marries Joseph Dugas to Claire Bourg, daughter of Bernard and Françoise Brun, and in another marries both Claires to François Dugas; no record names her parents. The bride of 1713 was the younger Claire, for by then the elder had been Joseph Dugas’s wife for at least ten years, with children born in 1703 and 1708. Anne’s place as their daughter rests on her ages in the census of 1693 and 1698 and on two compiled works, Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana and Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres, whose 1714 entry names her “fille de Bernard Bourc” (the printed spelling of Bourg).

A grandson, Jean Mélançon, the son of Françoise Bourg and Ambroise Melanson, declared on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 that Bernard and Françoise had both died at Port-Royal. He called Bernard “venu de France”, come from France, though the census of 1671 counts him among Antoine Bourg’s children at Port-Royal.

The register of Port-Royal, which survives from 1702, holds no record of Bernard’s burial. None of the entries for his children’s marriages, the last on 11 January 1717, calls him deceased, as the same register does for other parents, so he most likely died between 1717 and 1725.

The third line

The line through Marie Bourg (born about 1674) rests on her being a daughter of this couple. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana calls her Marie-Claire Bourg, daughter of Bernard Bourg and Françoise Brun, and gives her marriage to Bernard Daigle as probably about 1691 at Port-Royal. Arsenault’s compiled genealogy dates the couple’s Marie to 1671, and the census of 1693 lists a Marie aged three in the household, so the birth year of this daughter is not settled by the records.