♂Charles Boudrot

Charles Boudrot (died before 21 July 1727) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal and later Les Mines, and the father of children by two marriages. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughters Marguerite and Marie Boudrot. He was also the brother of Floyd’s seventh great-grandmother Jeanne Boudrot (1646–1710).

Port-Royal

Charles Boudrot was born in about 1649, to judge by the ages the census-takers gave him. He was the son of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin. When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal, Charles, 22, was still unmarried and living at home. His father, a farmer of 71, and his mother, 53, had eleven children: three daughters already married and eight sons and daughters still at home, of whom Charles was the eldest and François, at 5, the youngest. Acadian exiles who made declarations on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 remembered that Michel had come from France with his wife, and that both of them died in Acadia.

Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadian families gives his first wife as Renée Bourg, a daughter of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry. No record of the marriage survives, but since Renée was still unmarried in 1671 and Charles’s eldest child was born in about 1675, they most likely married in the early 1670s.

The marriage did not last long. In a published transcription of the census taken at Port-Royal in 1686, Charles Boudrot appears as a widower of forty with seven children aged three to eleven, among them his daughter Anne, 8, and twin sons of 3. Renée had most likely died between about 1683, when the twins were born, and 1686. Charles was farming two arpents^W of land and kept nine cattle, twelve sheep and a gun.

Second marriage

Charles had married again by 1693, when the census of Les Mines lists him with a second wife, Marie Corporon, and children of both marriages. He was 43 and she was 20; with them were Charles, 18, Isabelle, 16, René, 14, and Françoise, 11, from the first marriage, and three young sons, Jerome, Denis and Paul, aged five, three and one. The household had two cattle, six sheep, fourteen hogs and a gun. Arsenault’s genealogy also gives Marie Corporon as his second wife, and has Charles settling later at Pisiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, without giving a date for the move.

Charles died between 2 October 1719 and 21 July 1727; the records do not say where. On 2 October 1719 he was living: he made his mark as the father of the bride at the Mines marriage of his daughter Marie Joseph. On 21 July 1727 the marriage record of his daughter Madeleine describes him as the late Charles Boudrot. His daughter Marguerite, widow of Jean Baptiste Babin, was buried at Port-la-Joye on Île Saint-Jean on 20 June 1751, aged seventy; the burial record names Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg as her parents.

Lines of descent

Charles Boudrot is an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, and both run down through his children. The first reaches him at ten generations above Floyd, through his daughter Marguerite. The second reaches him at eleven generations above Floyd, through his daughter Marie.

The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), Floyd’s maternal grandmother, whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux, both descend from Charles Boudrot.

Notes

The census entry of 1686 is cited from a published transcription; the 1693 household agrees with the copy of the original roll. Charles’s ages there, 40 and 43, point to a birth between about 1646 and 1650; Arsenault gives 1649, and his age of 22 in 1671 points to the same year. The list of 1693 does not include the daughters Marie, Anne and Marguerite of 1686, but does include an Isabelle, 16, and a Françoise, 11. By age these are most likely Anne and Marguerite under second names, and family trees give the same double names (Anne Isabelle, Marguerite Françoise). Marie had married by then.

Renée Bourg’s place as Charles’s first wife rests on Arsenault’s genealogy and on Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which names the same couple.

Charles’s parents rest on two records that agree. The census of 1671 lists him as Charles, aged 22, among the unmarried children in the household of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin. The declarations made on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767, published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1982, say that Charles Boudrot was the son of Michel Boudrot, who had come from France with his wife, Michelle Aucoin. In that passage the declarations name Charles’s wife as Magdelaine Bourg; elsewhere they name Marie Corporon.

Anne Boudrot and the Arseneau marriage

Arsenault’s compiled genealogy names his daughter Anne as the wife of Pierre Arseneau. The Beaubassin^W census rows of 1686 and 1693 place an Anne in the household of Marguerite Bourgeois, who by Arsenault’s genealogy was first the wife of his brother Jean Boudrot; the 1686 row lists her children of a first marriage, and the 1693 row names her second husband, Emmanuel Mirande. His own household at Les Mines in 1693 lists a daughter Isabelle, 16, most likely his Anne under a second name, so the two girls were in different settlements that year; his Anne’s later life is not known.