♂Claude Petitpas

Claude Petitpas (born about 1626) was a farmer of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal), in Acadia, now Nova Scotia, whom the census of 1686 lists as “Sieur de la Fleur, clerk of the court”. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Elizabeth Petitpas (born about 1670).

Port-Royal

The census of 1671, the first taken at Port-Royal, lists Claude Petitpas as a farmer of 45, with his wife Catherine Bagard, 33, and seven children, the youngest of them “Elisabet”, aged 1. The household had 26 cattle, 30 arpents of land and, by the acadian-home transcription, 12 sheep; Gaudet’s French edition of the census reads “onze brebis”, eleven, so the sources split. No other household in that census is entered with more land, and only two had more cattle. His parents and his origin are not recorded. He most likely married Catherine Bagard about 1658, and the eldest of their children, Bernard, was twelve at the census of 1671.

By the census of 1686 he was 60 and entered with a title and an office, as “Sieur de la Fleur”, clerk of the court. Few household heads in that census carry either; most are listed with nothing more than their ages, land and livestock, and his entry comes third in the Port-Royal list, after the seigneur and the royal prosecutor. The household then had 12 arpents, 22 cattle, 10 hogs and two guns, and nine children still at home, several of them born after 1671; the two censuses together name thirteen children.

He does not appear in the census of 1693, in which Catherine, then 56, is listed with Charles Chevalier and the younger Petitpas children; this suggests he had died by then, but no record of his death is known.

Notes

His wife’s surname is written Bagard in the census of 1671 and Bugaret in 1686 and 1693. His birth year is known only from his census ages, 45 in 1671 and 60 in 1686.

The marriage

The date of about 1658 comes from compiled works only: Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2:721) and White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes. Both are compilations, so the date is not taken from a register entry.