♂Claude Brun

Claude Brun (born about 1679) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, the eldest son of Bastien Brun and Huguette Bourg, who married Cécile Dugas there on 27 November 1709, on the same day that her sister Marie married his double first cousin, Abraham Bourg. He and Cécile had twelve children in the parish through the first decades of British rule. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Joseph Brun (born 1719).

Early life

Claude was seven at the census of Port-Royal in 1686, the eldest of five sons in the household of Bastien Brun and Huguette Bourg, with an elder sister, Jeanne. His mother died before the census of 1693, and his father, widowed, kept the farm with the children growing up around him. In 1701 Claude, by then a grown man, was still at home with his father, four of his brothers and his sister Marie.

Marriage and family

Claude Brun and Cécile Dugas married at Port-Royal on 27 November 1709. The register names the groom’s parents as Sébastien Brun and Huguette Bourg and the bride’s as Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois. The same day, Cécile’s sister Marie Dugas married Abraham Bourg, Claude’s double first cousin: Claude’s aunt Françoise Brun had married Abraham’s father, Bernard Bourg, a brother of Claude’s mother.

Their first child, Marie, was born on 17 December 1710, two months after a British and New England force captured Port-Royal^W, which became Annapolis Royal. The family stayed in the parish under British rule, and the census of 1714 counted the couple there with Marie, four, and a son, Vincent, two. Ten more children followed, the last of them, Pierre Paul, born on 25 April 1736, more than twenty-five years after the first. Two of the sons died young: Simon in May 1721, at about three and a half months, and Michel in December 1727, at eleven. A son born in 1730 was given the name Michel again.

Marie married Jean-Baptiste Martin in 1732, and Anne married Paul Doucet in 1738. Their son Joseph, born on 20 March 1719, married Marguerite Pellerin at Annapolis Royal on 29 July 1743, and the register named his parents as Claude Brun and Cécile Dugas.

Annapolis Royal

The census of 1714 placed Claude’s household beside those of his brothers Antoine and Jean and of a Sébastien Brun living on his own, most likely their father. In November 1727 Claude stood as a witness, named as the bride’s uncle, at the marriage of his brother Jean’s daughter Marie Josèphe. When his father died at Port-Royal on 15 August 1728, aged seventy, Claude and Antoine were the witnesses named at the burial.

When Governor Richard Philipps^W returned to the colony in 1729, the deputies and inhabitants of Annapolis Royal sent him a petition asking to be allowed to take the oath of allegiance to King George. Among the names beneath it are Antoine Brun, Jean Brun and Claude Brun, most likely the three brothers. The date and place of Claude’s death are not known.

Lines of descent

Claude reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent. Both run through his son Joseph Brun (born 1719) and reach Floyd on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850) and Jean Baptiste Daigle (born 1847), both descend from Claude.

Notes

His birth

His birth about 1679 rests on his age of seven in the census of 1686. The census of 1714, as Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 80) prints it, makes him 35, and Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 475) gives 1679.

The marriage and the children

Both marriages of 27 November 1709 are entered on the same page of the Port-Royal register, as transcribed in the Nova Scotia Archives’ An Acadian Parish Remembered; Claude’s was blessed by the priest Jean Loyard. Arsenault gives the same date and names eleven of the children, all but Simon, who died as an infant. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (tome I, p. 199) gives the date too, but names Claude’s parents as Claude Brun and Françoise Bourgeois; the register gives Sébastien Brun and Huguette Bourg. L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 180) also lists under 1704 “Claude Brun, 25 ans, fils de Sébastien, marié a Cécile Dugas”, five years before the marriage in the register.

The census of 1714

Lanctôt prints the Port-Royal entry as “Claude Brun et femme (Cécile Dugas), m.1, f.1”, one boy and one girl. L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 80) gives the children as Vincent, two, and Marie, four, which fits their baptisms in 1712 and 1710. Lanctôt takes the Sébastien Brun of that census to be the father of Antoine, Claude and Jean.

The petition of 1729

The petition is printed among the documents in Placide Gaudet’s Généalogie des familles acadiennes, in the Report concerning Canadian Archives for 1905 (vol. II, p. 130), directly after a letter of the priest de Breslay dated 23 December 1729. The names of Antoine Brun, Jean Brun and Claude Brun come within a few lines of each other in a long list of signers. That the Claude Brun on it was this Claude rests on the name and on his brothers’ names beside it.

The last record

At Joseph’s marriage on 29 July 1743 the register names him as “fils de claude brun et de cecile dugast ses peres et meres”, without calling either parent deceased; it is the latest record of Claude known.