♂Claude Giroir

Claude Giroir (about 1699 – 18 March 1768) was an Acadian of Pisiguit^W, the parish of the Assomption on the Minas Basin, who married at Port-Royal in 1726. His name survives a generation later in the register of the Acadian refugee camp at Restigouche, where his daughter, already a widow, married in 1759. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Giroir (born about 1738).

Early life

Claude was the son of Pierre Giroard, a habitant of the parish of the Assomption of Pisiguit, and Marie Comeau. His mother died while he was a child: his father married again in 1709, to Marie Douaron, so Claude grew up with younger half-siblings. On his father’s side he descended from the founding generation of Port-Royal: his grandparents were Jacques Girouard and Marguerite Gautrot, and his great-grandfather Francois Girouard had arrived in Acadia about 1640.

Marriage

On 3 June 1726 Claude married Magdeleine Vincent in the church of St. Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal, which the British, who had held the town since 1710, called Annapolis Royal. The priest, René Charles de Breslay^W, recorded the groom as 27 years old and “living in the parish of Pegighit”, the son of Pierre Giroard and of the late Marie Comeau; the bride was 18, the daughter of Clément Vincent and Magdelaine Levron. Among the witnesses was Jean Trahan of Pisiguit, whom the register calls Claude’s brother-in-law.

The couple had at least seven children, born between about 1729 and 1747 by the ages a census later gave for them: Joseph, Margueritte, Marie, Silvain, Bazille, Antoine and Procède.

Isle Madame

By the spring of 1752 the family was living on Isle Madame, off the southern coast of Cape Breton Island in Île-Royale^W, the French colony that took in many Acadians from the peninsula after 1749. The census taken there that April by the Sieur de la Roque lists “Claude Giroir, ploughman, native of la Cadie, aged 55 years, married to Madeleine Vincent, native of Port Royal, aged 44 years”, and records that “they have been in the colony three years”, that is, since about 1749. It counts five sons and three daughters but names only seven children, aged 23 down to 5: Joseph, Margueritte, Marie Joseph, Silvain, Bazille, Antoine and Procède.

The census also notes that the family had been granted rations for those three years and owned three oxen, two cows, a calf, a pig and five fowls. They had been settled on land chosen for them by Monsieur de Villejoint, but the soil would not repay cultivation: they cleared ground and made a garden, and the cabbage and turnip seed did not come up well even with a great deal of manure.

Restigouche

After the deportation of 1755 their daughter Marie appears at Restigouche, on the Baie des Chaleurs, where Acadians who had escaped the deportation gathered in 1758–61. There, on 5 November 1759, the Récollet^W missionary F. Étienne married her to Joseph Bourgeois, son of Paul Bourgeois and Marie Josèphe Brun of Malpeque, on Île Saint-Jean^W. The act describes her as the widow of Aimé Laurot and the “daughter of Claude Giroir and of Magdeleine Vincent, of Acadia”. Marie and Joseph later settled in Spanish Louisiana.

Death

Magdeleine Vincent died at Saint-Charles-de-Bellechasse, in the Province of Quebec^W, on 26 February 1768 and was buried in the parish cemetery the next day; her husband Claude Giroir died there three weeks later, on 18 March, and was buried on 20 March. His burial act gives his age as eighty and names no wife. The records do not show when or by what route the couple came to Bellechasse from Acadia.

Notes

Claude Giroir’s burial act names no wife and gives his age as eighty, which would put his birth about 1688; his age of twenty-seven at the 1726 marriage puts it about 1699, and the 1752 census, which gives him as fifty-five, puts it about 1697. Two earlier records thus agree with each other against the burial act, which would make him about seventy-one in 1768; the records do not explain the difference. In the same census Magdeleine is forty-four, which is close to her baptism in 1709. He is taken to be Magdeleine Vincent’s husband because she was buried as the wife of Claude Giroir in the same parish three weeks earlier, and her act gives her age as sixty against fifty-nine by her baptism.

The records spell the family name in many ways, among them Giroire, Girouar and Giroüard. One modern index of the 1759 marriage gives the bride’s father as “Charles”; the register itself reads “Claude”, as do the other indexes of the act.