♂Charles Guilbeau

Charles Guilbeau (27 November 1736 – 11 April 1809) was an Acadian exile and stock farmer who reached Louisiana in 1765 with the first Acadians to settle on the Bayou Teche, and who spent the rest of his life in the Attakapas district, at La Grande Pointe. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Ludivine Guillebaut (died 1815).

Exile

Charles was born at Port-Royal on 27 November 1736, a son of Joseph Guilbeau and Madeleine Michel. He had been baptized privately, and on 9 June 1737 the ceremonies of baptism were supplied there. Cormier’s history records that in December 1755, when he was nineteen, the family was put aboard the Pembroke to be deported to North Carolina, and that the passengers, his father among them, seized the ship and sailed it to Baie Sainte-Marie and then, in January 1756, to the lower Saint John River. Very few of the exiles ever escaped their transports this way. The family wintered at Sainte-Anne-du-Pays-Bas, up the Saint John, and by the late 1750s had gone on to the refugee camp at Restigouche.

According to Cormier’s history, Charles and Anne Trahan married about 1760, probably at Restigouche, and soon afterwards were held with his family in a prison camp in Nova Scotia.

The Attakapas

In February 1765 they reached Louisiana with the party of Acadians that Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil led from Halifax by way of Saint-Domingue^W, Charles aged 29 and Anne 26, with no children, and after a short stay at New Orleans they went on to the Bayou Teche country of the Attakapas. A census of 1766 most likely counted him in the District of the Pointe, with a woman, a man and a boy in his household. In 1769 the couple had three oxen, three cows with their calves, three horses and a pig, and on 9 December that year Charles took the oath of allegiance to the Spanish king, making his mark. By 1771 he held 12 arpents^W of land without title.

Three children of the marriage are known: Ludivine, whose year of birth is uncertain; Jean Charles, born in December 1771 and baptized the following July, with Paul Trahan and Marguerite Trahan as godparents; and Emilie, born on 20 December 1773. Anne died between Emilie’s birth and the census of 1774, which found Charles with no wife and three children. By then the herd had grown to 26 cattle, 10 horses and mules and 30 pigs.

Second marriage and later life

On 20 November 1775, at Attakapas, Charles married Marguerite Bourg, widow of Pierre Pitre and a native of Isle Saint-Jean^W; the marriage contract calls him the widower of Anne Trahan and a native of Port-Royal, and his brother François was one of the witnesses. The couple settled at La Grande Pointe, also called La Pointe, on the upper Bayou Teche near present-day Breaux Bridge, and had a son and several daughters.

Charles stood on the militia roll of the Attakapas on 1 May 1777 and again in August 1789. By 1785 his household numbered six free people and one enslaved male. In January 1793 his daughter Ludivine married Michel Cormier at Attakapas. Charles died at his home at La Pointe on 11 April 1809, aged 72, and was buried the next day.

Notes

Ludivine’s parentage

That Ludivine was the daughter of Charles and Anne is probable rather than proved, and no register entry of her baptism is known. Her marriage entry, in Donald J. Hébert’s abstract of the St. Martin church register, volume 4, entry 69, in Southwest Louisiana Records, names her parents as Charles Guilbeau and Anne Trahan, written Nanette Trahan. The marriage took place at Attakapas on 9 January 1793, as Cormier’s compilation gives the place; the abstract comes from the St. Martinville church volume, and Bona Arsenault places the wedding at Saint-Martinville. Three other sources name her parents. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians has “LUDIVINE GUILBEAUX, 1772, fille de Charles et d’Anne Trahan”, and records her marriage to Michel Cormier. Cormier’s history makes her a daughter of Charles’s first wife, Anne Trahan. And a published abstract of the 1799 baptism of her son Michel, as quoted online, names the child’s maternal grandparents as Charles Guillebaut and Anne Trahan, “all from Acadia”. The baptisms of her brother Jean Charles and her sister Emilie name the same couple as parents.

Dates and sources

His birth date and his parents’ names come from his baptism at Port-Royal on 9 June 1737, in the Drouin Institute’s LAFRANCE database, when the ceremonies were supplied for a child already baptized privately; it gives his birth as 27 November 1736 and writes the father’s name Guilbaud. Cormier’s detailed entry gives the same day and the place as Annapolis Royal, the British name for Port-Royal; Arsenault gives 1736 with no place. Cormier’s history also names his parents, calling the father Joseph Guilbeau dit L’Officier, and a Sons of the American Revolution patriot sheet published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1974 names them too. Cormier’s narrative gives his death as August 1809, the month of his succession; his detailed entry gives 11 April 1809, with burial the next day, the date followed here; an abstract of the burial record gives 12 April 1809, and his succession, dated 29 August 1809, says he was buried in March. The census figures, the oath, the militia lists and the 1775 marriage are as Cormier abstracts them; the 1777 roll is from the Attakapas Gazette. The 1766 census writes his name as “Carlos Guilbeau”; Cormier’s entry for Charles places that household under him.