♂Charles Granger

Charles Granger (about 1711 – 29 September 1756) was an Acadian of Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia, who died as an exile at Falmouth, in England, the year after the deportation. He was the fifth great-grand-uncle of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), the brother of Jean Baptiste Granger (1713–1756), Floyd Amatus’s fifth great-grandfather.

Rivière-aux-Canards

He was born about 1711, a son of René Granger (1675–1740) and Marguerite Thériot (1678–1740). On 3 November 1733, aged about twenty-two, he married Françoise LeBlanc, a daughter of Jacques Leblanc and Catherine Landry, at Saint-Charles-des-Mines, at Grand-Pré; the register calls his parents of the parish of Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards. The couple lived at Rivière-aux-Canards, and the genealogist Bona Arsenault and a declaration made by their son in 1767 agree that six children were born there between 1736 and 1753.

Exile

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens records that Charles was deported to Falmouth and died there on 29 September 1756, and the declaration of 1767 gives the same day. He was the first of four brothers to die at Falmouth within about eight weeks: Jean Baptiste was buried on 23 October, and François and Claude died in November. That declaration was made on 25 February 1767 by his son Charles, who by then had a family of his own and lived at Thinere, in the parish of Bangor, on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, where the Acadians held in England had been sent. It names Charles as the husband of Françoise LeBlanc and says that she, his widow, was living at Kernest in the same parish with three unmarried children.

Notes

His birth year

His age of about twenty-two in the marriage entry of 3 November 1733 gives about 1711, and his son’s declaration of 1767 gives his birth year as 1711 in the same way. Arsenault gives 1713. The declaration says he was born in the same parish as his son, Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards, but the earliest record that places the family there is the marriage entry of 1733, and no record of his baptism is known.

Other men of the name

Three Charles Grangers appear in the Minas registers in these years: this Charles, who married Françoise LeBlanc; a Charles who married Marie LeBlanc, a daughter of Jean, in 1726; and a Charles, a son of Jacques Granger and Marie Girouard, who married Marie Joseph Daigre in 1738. The baptisms entered under “Charles Grange and Marie Leblanc” belong to the couple married in 1726, and those under “Charles Grange and Marie Joseph Daigre” to the third, so they are not counted among the children of this Charles; his own children come from his son’s declaration and from Arsenault.

Where his widow lived

The declaration made by her son places Françoise LeBlanc at Kernest, in the parish of Bangor. A declaration made the same month by two of her brothers puts her at a village in the parish of Sauzon, but the name is lost in the printed text.