♂Charles Bourgeois

Charles Bourgeois (born about 1646) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, the eldest son of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois and the first husband of Anne Dugast, the first of three marriages that joined the Bourgeois family to the family of the gunsmith Abraham Dugast. He died young, by April 1679: on 26 April 1679 the register at Beaubassin records his widow, Anne Dugast, marrying Jean Aubin Mignault, and she raised their children at Beaubassin^W with her second husband. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Claude Bourgeois (born about 1674).

Life

Charles was born about 1646, the second of the ten children of Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan and their eldest son. When the census of Port-Royal was taken in 1671 he was still counted among them, “Charles 25”, between his sister Jeanne, 27, and his brother Germain, 21, though he already had a household of his own.

Charles Bourgeois and Anne Dugast had married by 1671, when the same census listed “Charles Bourgeois 25, sa femme Anne Dugast 17” with a daughter, Marie, a year and a half old, twelve cattle, seven sheep and two arpents^W of plowland. If the ages on the roll are right, Anne was no more than sixteen when Marie was born. Their household is entered on the page before that of her parents, Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet.

Theirs was the first of three marriages that joined the two families: Anne’s brother Claude Dugas later married Charles’s sister Françoise, and her sister Magdelaine Dugas married his brother Germain Bourgeois. Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from two of those three couples, from Charles and Anne through his mother’s mother, Amelia Pennison Daigle, and from Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois through his mother’s father, Pierre Anatole Serrett.

Compiled histories place Charles among the Bourgeois settlers at the head of the Bay of Fundy. Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadian families of Louisiana says that in 1672 Jacob Bourgeois sold part of his land at Port-Royal and, with his two elder sons and two of his sons-in-law, founded the settlement of Mésagouèche on the isthmus of Chignecto, next to which the seigneurie of Beaubassin was granted in 1676. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians says that Charles settled at Beaubassin. Two sons, Charles and Claude, were born about 1672 and 1674, and a second daughter, Anne, about 1679.

His widow and children

Charles died young. On 26 April 1679 the register at Beaubassin records his widow, Anne Dugast, marrying Jean Aubin Mignault, and in 1686 the census of Beaubassin lists her, aged 34, after her second husband, Jean-Aubin Mignault, 36, with three children entered as “Enfans d’Elle et de Charles Bourgeois”, Charles, 14, Claude, 12, and Anne, 7, and three younger Mignault children, Jean, 6, Cécile, two and a half, and Alexis, three months. The children’s ages point to Charles’s death about 1679, between the births of his daughter Anne and of Jean Mignault. The April 1679 marriage is the record that shows he was dead by then, and no record of his burial has been found. His daughter Marie is not in the household.

The boys grew up in their stepfather’s house at Beaubassin, and Claude, through whom the line descends, was still living there at twenty-two in 1698.

Notes

His birth year comes from his age on the 1671 roll. Placide Gaudet’s genealogy of the Acadian families (1905) and Cormier give the marriage as 1668 at Port-Royal, and Arsenault about 1670; Marie’s age in 1671 points to a marriage by about 1669. Gaudet has Charles dying at Beaubassin about 1678, and Arsenault gives the same year and dates Anne’s second marriage, at Beaubassin, to 26 April 1679. No record of his death is known; the 1679 marriage is known from Lea Normandeau-Jones’s printed abstracts of the surviving Beaubassin register entries of 1679 to 1686.

Marie is known only from the 1671 roll, as printed by Gaudet and in later transcriptions; Cormier gives the couple four children. The 1686 roll writes the second husband’s name “Jean Aubin Miguault”; the compiled genealogies spell it Mignault. Claude’s census entries of 1693 and 1698 are known from the transcriptions published on acadian-home.org.