♂Clément Vincent

Clément Vincent was an Acadian habitant of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal, the town the British renamed Annapolis Royal after 1710. On 3 June 1726 two of his daughters were married in the parish church on the same day, and he stood as witness at both weddings. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Magdeleine Vincent (born 1709).

Family

He was probably born about 1676, a son of Pierre Vincent and Anne Gaudet. He married Magdeleine Levron, and the surviving register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which begins in 1702, records the baptisms of eleven of their children between 1704 and 1726, seven sons and four daughters. Three died as infants, and the register records their burials: Paul in October 1717, Marguerite in April 1719 and Claude in September 1722. The nominal census of 1707, as transcribed, counts Clément’s household as a wife, a boy under fourteen and a girl under twelve, and the census of 1714, again as transcribed, counts two sons and three daughters. Both counts fit the children the register shows alive at those dates.

The baptisms

Marie Joseph was born on 2 January 1707; the priest wrote her father’s name as “Clermont”. Magdeleine was born on 1 January 1709 “between seven and eight in the evening” and was baptized the same day by a layman, Clemenceau. The Récollet^W missionary Justinien Durand supplied the ceremonies of baptism five days later. Such an emergency baptism was given when a newborn might not live to reach a priest; the register does not say why it was done here. A daughter Anne was born in June 1711. A Marie Joseph Vincent, presumably the eldest daughter, was godmother to the younger sons Claude, in 1721, and Pierre, in 1723. The last child in the register, François, was baptized on 28 October 1726, four months after the double wedding described below, and his godmother was his sister Anne.

The weddings of 1726 and 1727

On 3 June 1726 the missionary René Charles de Breslay^W married two of Clément’s daughters, one act after the other. Marie Joseph, aged nineteen, married Paul Michel, son of François Michel of the parish of the Assumption at Pisiguit^W. Magdeleine, aged eighteen, married Claude Giroard, twenty-seven, also of Pisiguit. Both acts describe Clément as a habitant of the parish, Magdeleine’s adds that her parents lived there, and at both he is named among the witnesses. The next year, on 20 October 1727, his daughter Anne married Alexandre Doiron of Pisiguit at Grand-Pré, and Clément again witnessed. All three daughters had married men from the Minas Basin settlements.

He was dead by 8 May 1752, when the marriage record of his son Pierre at Port-La-Joye, Île Saint-Jean, names him as the late father.

Notes

Birth

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2e éd., vol. 2, p. 819) gives “Clément, 1676” among the children of Pierre Vincent and Anne Gaudet, a compiled genealogy, so the birth year and the parentage rest on that printing. The 1698 Port-Royal census lists “Clement Vincent 22”, which fits a birth about 1676. WikiTree (Vincent-309) gives 1674 instead; the two dates are set side by side here and the difference is not resolved.