♂Claude Boudrot

Claude Boudrot (born about 1663) was an Acadian farmer, a son of the Port-Royal settlers Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, who made his life in the young settlement of Les Mines^W on the Minas Basin, and who on 19 September 1712 saw two of his daughters married at Grand-Pré in a double wedding. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Michel Boudrot.

Port-Royal

Claude Boudrot was born at Port-Royal about 1663. When the census of 1671 was taken there, he was “Claude aagé de 8 ans”, the second youngest of the eight unmarried children still at home with his parents, the farmer Michel Boudrot, then seventy-one, and Michelle Aucoin.

As a young man he is said to have been one of the first companions of Pierre Terriot, who in the early 1680s led a band of young men from Port-Royal to the marshes of the Minas Basin. Their first work was to build aboiteaux^W, dikes with sluices that kept out the tides, so that the salt marsh could be drained and sown.

Les Mines

By January 1686, when the census-taker reached the Minas Basin, Claude and Anne-Marie Thibodeau were entered there, as transcribed, as “jeunes mariés”, newly married, aged twenty-three and twenty, with no children yet. They are said to have farmed on the river later called the Rivière-des-Habitants, a few miles north-west of Grand-Pré. In 1693 the couple had five children in the house, Claude, 10, Michel, 8, Jacques, 6, Françoise, 3, and Magdelaine, 1, with eight arpents^W of land in use and a gun. By 1700 the household counted three sons and six daughters.

Claude and Anne-Marie had at least nine children, born between the mid-1680s and about 1698. Their son Michel was most likely the Michel Boudrot who married Cécile LeBlanc and raised a large family at Grand-Pré, and it is through him that the family’s line descends.

The weddings of 1712

Anne-Marie had died by the summer of 1712: when their son Joseph married Françoise Comeau at Grand-Pré on 27 July that year, the parish register named his mother as dead. Less than two months later, on 19 September 1712, two of their daughters were married in the same parish on the same day: Anne to Augustin Hébert, and Marguerite to François LeBlanc. The register notes the double wedding, and Augustin and Anne stood among the witnesses at Marguerite’s.

By 1730 Acadia had been a British possession for seventeen years. In April of that year Claude Boudrot is said to have been among the men of Les Mines who swore a qualified oath of allegiance to the British king, together with several of his sons and two of his sons-in-law.

Death

Claude Boudrot most likely died early in 1740. A Claude Boudrot, aged about eighty by the register’s count, was buried in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré on 7 March 1740.

Lines of descent

Claude Boudrot reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines, both through his son Michel Boudrot and both on Floyd’s mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). On the nearer, through Michel’s daughter Marguerite Boudrot, he is Floyd’s sixth great-grandfather; on the farther he is his eighth great-grandfather. The lines meet again in Ida’s parents, Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), who both descend from him.

Notes

His age

The census of 1671 gives him eight years, which places his birth about 1663; Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens and Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled Familles acadiennes both give 1663. The transcribed ages of later censuses agree: twenty-three in January 1686, thirty in 1693 and thirty-seven in 1700. Anne-Marie’s ages drift more: twenty in 1686, twenty-four in 1693 and thirty-five in 1700. The burial register of 1740 makes him some years older than the censuses do.

The settlement of Les Mines

That Claude was among Pierre Terriot’s first companions rests on the compiled genealogies. Lanctôt (Familles acadiennes, volume 1, pages 73–76) makes him seventeen when the party left Port-Royal, describes the building of the aboiteaux, and places Claude and Anne-Marie on the Rivière-aux-Vieux-Habitants, about seven kilometres north-west of Grand-Pré. Arsenault (volume 1, pages 84–85) lists him among the first settlers of Grand-Pré in 1682, and (volume 3, page 1108) says that he lived at Rivière-des-Habitants. The census entries of 1686, 1693 and 1700 are quoted from Lanctôt’s transcriptions; his two volumes give the household of 1693 six and eight cattle, so the livestock is left out here.

The boy Claude of 1693

The household of 1693 includes a Claude aged ten, although the couple had no children in January 1686. Lanctôt suggests that this boy was a nephew, a son of Claude’s widowed brother Charles Boudrot, whom the couple took in. Arsenault instead gives the couple a son Claude born in 1686, and in December 1708 the Grand-Pré register named Claude Boudrot as the grandfather of the younger Claude’s newborn son, at whose baptism he stood godfather. The records do not settle which is right.

His son Michel

No record names the parents of the Michel Boudrot who married Cécile LeBlanc. The link rests on the households of 1693 and 1700, which include a son Michel of the right age, and on the compiled genealogies of Arsenault and Lanctôt, which make him the son of Claude and Anne-Marie. A Michel Boudrot was among the witnesses at the burial of 1740.

Anne-Marie’s death

The Grand-Pré marriage records of July and September 1712 describe Anne-Marie Thibodeau as dead. Lanctôt places her death about 1700, the year in which his transcription of the census still lists her.

The burial of 1740

The burial of 7 March 1740 is identified with Claude by his name, his age and the parish; Arsenault gives the same date. Lanctôt gives his death as 7 August 1740, at seventy-three. The other Claude Boudrot of Les Mines in those years, the husband of Catherine Hébert, would have been in his fifties.

The oath of 1730

The oath of April 1730 and the names of the Boudrot men who took it are given by Lanctôt (Familles acadiennes, volume 1, page 77).