♀Catherine Vigneau

Catherine Vigneau (born about 1603) was the wife of the plowman Pierre Martin of Port-Royal in Acadia, and was living beside him on their farm, aged sixty-eight, when the census of 1671 was taken. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Andrée Martin (born about 1649).

Bourgueil and the crossing

Catherine was probably born at Bourgueil, in Touraine, about 1603, the daughter of Olivier Vigneau and Renée Courtin. On 30 June 1630, in the church of Saint-Germain de Bourgueil, she married Pierre Martin, the son of René Martin and Étiennette Poirier.

In the winter of 1635–1636 Claude de Razilly, the brother of Isaac de Razilly^W, recruited settlers for Acadia around Chinon and Bourgueil, and Pierre’s brother Robert is said to have been living at La Hève already, on the Atlantic coast of the colony. In April 1636 the family left La Rochelle on the Saint-Jehan, whose roll lists among the farm families “Pierre Martin, laboureur, avec sa femme et un enfant, demeurant à Bourgueil”: a plowman with his wife and one child, living at Bourgueil. The child was most likely their son Pierre, then five. By the count of the Acadian genealogies, of the six farm families from Bourgueil on board, only theirs and Guillaume Trahan’s stayed to leave descendants in Acadia.

Port-Royal

The ship reached La Hève at the end of May, and Charles de Menou d’Aulnay^W, who had succeeded Razilly as governor, moved the colony to a new site at Port-Royal. Soon after the family arrived there, Catherine gave birth, by the genealogies’ account, to twins, Mathieu and Marie. Pierre and Catherine made their farm on the north bank of the Dauphin River, the present Annapolis River, about three miles upriver from the fort, where they are said to have built their house at the edge of a broad tidal marsh and diked part of it, over the years, into farmland.

In 1671 Pierre was a plowman of seventy and Catherine sixty-eight, with seven head of cattle, eight sheep and two arpents of plowed land. Four of their children were married. Mathieu, a weaver of thirty-five and still single, kept a house of his own, and two sons-in-law, François Pellerin and Pierre Morin, seem to have worked the family farm with them.

On 9 August 1679 Alexandre Le Borgne de Belle-Isle^W, the seigneur of Port-Royal, granted Pierre and Mathieu forever the land and meadow they had brought under cultivation and lived on. Catherine seems to have died by 1686, when the census no longer named her or Pierre.

The family

Pierre and Catherine had at least seven children, four sons and three daughters. Their son Mathieu, born at Port-Royal soon after the family arrived, became a weaver. On 28 March 1689 the governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville^W, granted him the seigneury of Saint-Mathieu at Cobequid, at the eastern end of the Minas Basin, and called him “premier né en Acadie”, the first born in Acadia. Lanctôt’s genealogy points out that French children had been born in the colony before him, though in its view Mathieu and his twin Marie were the first born at the new Port-Royal; Mathieu left no children and died about 1724.

Notes

Birth and parents

The census of 1671 gives Catherine’s age as sixty-eight and Pierre’s as seventy, the source of the birth years about 1603 and about 1601. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (vol. 2, p. 160) has her born at Bourgueil in 1603, the daughter of Olivier Vigneau and Renée Courtin, and twenty-seven at her marriage; Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadian families of Louisiana gives the same parents. A published collection of Nova Scotia marriage records names her “Catherine Vignaux” as the mother of Andrée Martin at Andrée’s marriage of 24 April 1679, and the passenger list in Guy Perron’s account of the voyage spells her “Catherine Vignault”.

The marriage

Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 160) gives the marriage at Saint-Germain de Bourgueil on 30 June 1630, and Pierre’s parents as René Martin and Étiennette Payrier; Cormier has “June 1630”. Online family trees, citing Stephen White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, add a betrothal on 6 January 1630 in the same registers. An article in the Attakapas Gazette (1988, p. 117) calls that betrothal one of the oldest acts in the registers of Saint-Germain de Bourgueil and dates it “January 6, 1629 (sic for 1630)”.

The voyage of 1636

The roll of the Saint-Jehan was printed by Archange Godbout in 1944 (Mémoires de la Société généalogique canadienne-française, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 22–24); Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 161) and Guy Perron’s account of the voyage (Le blogue de Guy Perron, post 329, 2022) quote it. The roll does not name the wife; Perron’s list of passengers gives her as “Catherine Vignault”. Lanctôt identifies the child as the son Pierre, aged five, suggests Pierre was drawn to Acadia by his brother Robert at La Hève, and counts six Bourgueil families of whom only the Martins and the Trahans left descendants in the colony. Perron has the ship leave La Rochelle on 1 April 1636; Lanctôt has the recruits board it at Nantes. Cormier says the family came with three sons, Étienne, Pierre and Urbain, and that Étienne and Urbain died about 1636 as small children; the roll counts one child.

Port-Royal and the land

The twins, the move to Port-Royal and the site of the farm, near today’s Granville Centre, come from Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 163). John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (p. 64) describes the house at the edge of the tidal marsh, the diking, and the hamlet of Belisle where the children settled near their parents. Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 164–165) prints the deed of 9 August 1679, made before Jacques Courand, notary at Port-Royal, and signed by Mathieu Martin.

The census of 1671

Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 164) prints the entry: “Laboureur. Pierre Martin aagé de soixante et dix ans, sa femme Catherine Vigneau aagée de soixante et huict ans. Leurs enfans cinq, quatre de mariez. Un garson et trois filles, Pierre aagé de 45 ans, Marie aagée de 35 ans, Margueritte aagée de 32 ans, Andrée aagée de 30 ans, le non marié, Matthieu aagé de 35 ans. Leurs bestiaux à cornes 7 pièces, huict brebis, terres Labourables deux arpans.” He notes that the son Pierre was really about thirty-seven, and takes the households of François Pellerin and Pierre Morin as sharing the father’s farm. Mathieu is entered on his own as a “Texier”, a weaver.

Death

Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 165) notes that neither Catherine nor Pierre appears in the census of 1686. No date or place of her death is known.

The children

Cormier counts seven children, four sons and three daughters, the daughters marrying into the Morin dit Boucher, Bourg, Pellerin and Mercier dit Caudebec families. Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 163 and 166) gives Mathieu and Marie as twins born in 1636, the grant of 1689 and its words “premier né en Acadie”, and Mathieu’s death unmarried in 1724. Cormier puts Mathieu’s birth about 1639, calls him “by all accounts, ‘the first Frenchman born in Acadia’”, says he married in the early 1690s a wife whose name is not known, and has him die at Cobequid before April 1724 without children.