♂Bernard Daigle

Bernard Daigle (about 1670 – 22 January 1751) was an Acadian of Les Mines^W, the son of Olivier Daigre and Marie Gaudet, known from the register of the parish of St. Charles aux Mines at Grand-Pré as the father, with his wife Marie Bourg, of six sons baptized or married there between 1709 and 1727. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Abraham Daigle.

Family

Bernard was born about 1670, the son of Olivier Daigre, a farmer, and Marie Gaudet, who were living at Port-Royal in 1671. Olivier was then twenty-eight and Marie twenty, and Bernard, aged one, had two older brothers, Jean, aged four, and Jacques, aged two. The household kept six cattle and six sheep and had two arpents of cultivated land.

By 1693 the couple were at Les Mines: the census return itself lists Bernard Daigre, twenty-two, with Marie Bourg, his wife, nineteen, and a son, Bernard, six months old. The household had six cattle, two sheep, two hogs and six arpents of land. Régis Brun’s history of the Acadians before 1755, drawing on the 1693 roll of the inhabitants of Les Mines, lists Bernard Daigle and Marie Bourque among the first settlers of the Mines, on the river of Kenescout at Pigiguit^W. In 1731 and 1737 the register described the family of their son Abraham as of the parish of L’Assomption at Pigiguit.

The Grand-Pré register begins only in 1707, and no record of the couple’s marriage is known; the census of 1693 already finds them married, with a son; they therefore married before 1693, and Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy dates the marriage about 1692. The register records the births of two of the couple’s sons: René on 23 January 1709, baptized on 19 May, and Amand on 28 January 1712, baptized on 15 May, with a Bernard Daigre the younger (“le fils”) as his godfather. That younger Bernard was probably the couple’s son of the same name, who as “habitants de Pigiguit” married Angélique Richard on 22 October 1714.

Three more sons married in the parish in the 1720s, each entry naming Bernard and Marie as the groom’s parents. Jean Baptiste married Marie Magdeleine Landry on 10 November 1721; her father, Claude Landry, was also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne. Widowed, Jean Baptiste married Marie Anne Braud on 3 February 1727. François married Marie Boudrot, daughter of Claude Boudrot and Catherinne Meunier, on 8 November 1725, and Abraham married Anne Marie Boudrot, daughter of Michel Boudrot and Cecille Leblanc, on 5 November 1727. In 1731 René stood godfather to Abraham’s son Aimable, and the register calls him the child’s paternal uncle.

A transcription of the census of Les Mines taken in 1714 counts Bernard and his wife with eight sons and two daughters, ten children in all, a larger family than the six sons the register names. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy names ten children: Bernard, Pierre, Joseph, Jean, Charles, François, Abraham, Marie, René and Amand. Three of them are known only from that genealogy and the declarations: Pierre, who by Arsenault’s account married a Gautrot about 1716 and died at Saint-Malo in 1759; Charles, who married Françoise Doucet about 1723; and Marie, called Marie-Claire, who married Charles Hébert dit Emmanuel about 1728, and whom a declaration of 1767 calls “the daughter of Bernard Daigre and Claire Bourg”. A Charles Daigre witnessed the 1721 marriage of Jean Baptiste and the 1725 marriage of François, which shows his presence at those weddings, not his parentage. Another 1767 declaration, made by a relative of the family, is the record for the son Joseph, who married Magdeleine Gautrot; their children were baptized at Grand-Pré from 1725, though no register entry names Joseph’s parents. At Jean Baptiste’s wedding in 1721 a Bernard Daigre witnessed the marriage and signed his own name, but with a son of the same name in the parish the abstract alone does not show whether this was the groom’s father.

Bernard died at Port-La-Joye on Île Saint-Jean. The burial register there records his burial in the parish cemetery on 22 January 1751, aged eighty-four and without the sacraments. A 1767 declaration describes him as “of Port Royal who died at Port La Joye at Ile St. Jean”.

Notes

The censuses of 1671 and 1714 are known here from transcriptions published at acadian-home.org, not on the manuscript returns. The 1693 Les Mines return, on the manuscript itself at Library and Archives Canada, copy pages 90 and 91, lists the son as six months old. The transcription published at acadian-home.org reads “Bernard 1”, so its “aged one” for the son is a misreading of “6 mois”. Bernard is one year old in 1671 and twenty-two in 1693, which puts his birth in 1670 or 1671; about 1670 is used here. The burial record of 1751 gives his age as eighty-four, which would point to a birth about 1667.

Declarations made in 1767 by Acadians then at Belle-Île and printed in the Attakapas Gazette name the immigrant ancestor as Jean Daigre, who came from France and married Marie Gaudet at Port-Royal. The census of 1671 gives the head of the household as Olivier, with a son Jean aged four, and Olivier is the name used here; Marie Gaudet agrees in every source.

The Grand-Pré entries are known here from the abstracts published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s Catholic church records, volume 1A. They write the surname both Daigle and Daigre, and Jean Baptiste’s second marriage writes the father’s name “Barnard”. The 1693 census and the register write Marie’s surname Bourg; Brun’s list writes it Bourque. In the entry for François’s marriage in 1725, the signature of a Bernard Daigre stands where the groom’s would be expected; the abstract does not explain it.

Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families gives Jean Baptiste’s birth as 1698 and dates his first marriage 6 November 1721; the register abstract has 10 November, and that date is used here.

The line to Floyd Amatus Delahorne runs through Abraham’s son François Daigle (born about 1740). He appears as François Marie, aged twelve, in Abraham’s household on the 1752 census of Île Saint-Jean, which ties him to the couple who married in 1727.