♂Clément Benoist

Clément Benoist (born about 1677) was an Acadian who grew up at Port-Royal and spent his married life at Pigiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, where he and his wife, Anne Babin, raised their children in the years after France gave up the colony to Britain. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Alexis Benoit.

Port-Royal

Clément was born about 1677 at Port-Royal, the third of the ten children of Martin Benoist and Marie Chaussegros, settlers from France. The Port-Royal census rolls follow him through his boyhood and youth in his parents’ house: he was 9 in 1686, 15 in 1693 and 21 in 1698, and in 1701, at 24, he was still living at home, the eldest of the children there.

Pigiguit

About 1704 Clément Benoist married Anne Babin, then about sixteen, and the couple made their home at Pigiguit, south of the Minas Basin. The census of 1707 counted their household at Les Mines with one boy and one girl. On 21 June 1709 their son Charles was born; he was baptized on 20 July, with Charles Babin and Marguerite Landry as his godparents, and the entry stands in the register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines.

France ceded the Acadian peninsula to Britain in 1713, and at the end of 1714 a general census of its settlements listed Clément, aged 37, and Anne on the river of Pigiguit with two sons and three daughters. Children were still being born to them in the early 1730s. Their son Alexis, through whom the family line descends, was probably one of the younger children.

Clément died before 23 June 1748. That day their daughter Brigitte died, aged about sixteen, and when she was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles, the register named her father as deceased.

The family

Their daughter Catherine married Michel Rivet at Pigiguit in 1741, as his second wife. The British later carried Michel and his whole family off to Maryland, where he and Catherine both died.

Notes

Sources

Clément’s ages come from the Port-Royal census rolls of 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1701, in his father’s household each time, as printed in Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes; the 1686 roll writes him “Clement 9”. Lanctôt also prints the household counts of 1707 (“Clément Benoît et sa femme, 1 garçon de moins de 14 ans, 1 fille de moins de 12 ans”) and 1714, and Bona Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres gives the 1714 entry as “Clément Benoit, 37 ans, fils de Martin, marié a Anne Babin. Enfants : Deux garcons et trois filles, dont: Charles, 5 ans.” Charles’s baptism (SGA-1, 8) and Brigitte’s burial (SGA-3, 50b) are those of the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, as abstracted by the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which writes the father Clement Benois and Clement Benoit. Catherine’s marriage and her death in Maryland come from the declaration her sister-in-law Marie-Rose Rivet, widow of René Landry, made at Bangor on Belle-Île-en-Mer on 22 February 1767, printed by Casgrain and Rameau in 1890, which calls her “Catherine Benoist, fille de Clément Benoist et d’Anne Babin”.

Marriage and children

No marriage record survives. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens has Clément marry Anne Babin about 1704, and Lanctôt dates the marriage to 1704 at Pigiguit; the census of 1707 is the first to show them married. Arsenault names three of their children, Charles (1709), Catherine (about 1712) and Brigitte (1732). Lanctôt identifies the 1714 household as Charles, 5, Catherine, 3, and Brigitte, a few weeks old, but Brigitte’s burial in 1748 at about sixteen fits Arsenault’s 1732.

His son Alexis

Alexis is not on Arsenault’s list. Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (1999), as quoted in an online family tree, places him among the children of Clément and Anne Babin, “listed before a sibling born probably around 1722”, and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana cites the same page of White for Alexis and his wife, Hélène Comeau. No baptism of Alexis is known.

His death

The date of his death is not recorded. The 1748 burial gives the latest limit, and Lanctôt draws the same conclusion from it: “Clément mourut avant le 23 juin 1748”.