♂Étienne Comeau

Étienne Comeau (born about 1680) was an Acadian of Port-Royal and later of Pigiguit^W, one of a pair of twins, who married Marguerite Forest and, left a widower, married again at the age of fifty. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through his daughter Hélène Comeau.

Early life

He was born about 1680 at Port-Royal, a son of Jean Comeau and Françoise Hébert, and was a twin. The census of 1686 lists him at six in his parents’ household with his twin brother Pierre, their elder sister Marie and two younger children: “Marie 8, Pierre et Estienne jumeaux 6, Jean 3, Anne 1”.

Marriage and family

He married Marguerite Forest, most likely about 1701. She was the daughter of Michel de Forest and Jacqueline Benoit, born about 1687 at Port-Royal, and had grown up in the household of her mother and her stepfather, Guillaume Trahan.

The couple lived at Pigiguit, in the Minas Basin, where their daughter Angélique was born. Angélique married René Granger. Hélène, who was probably also their daughter, married Alexis Benoit and was living with him in exile in Massachusetts in 1763, after the deportation of 1755.

Second marriage

Marguerite died before November 1730; by then Étienne was a widower of fifty in the parish of Sainte-Famille at Pigiguit, and both of his parents were dead. On 20 November 1730, at Port-Royal, he married Elizabeth Levron, aged 41, the widow of Yves Maucaer. The records do not show when or where he died.

Notes

Daughter Hélène

The tie of Hélène Comeau, the wife of Alexis Benoit, to this couple comes from Stephen A. White’s compiled Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, as quoted on a WikiTree profile. No register names Hélène’s parents, so the link is probable rather than proved. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives Étienne only one child, Angélique.

Daughter Angélique

Arsenault dates Angélique’s birth to about 1732, after the second marriage. In 1767, at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, her son Laurent Granger declared under oath that she was “née au dit Pigiguit d’Etienne Comeau et de Marie Forest”, and named Étienne as the son of Jean Comeau and Françoise Hébert of Port-Royal. The same declaration gives her eldest son, Alexis, as born in 1733, so she was born well before 1732 and was Marguerite’s daughter. The declaration calls her mother Marie Forest; the 1730 marriage entry and Arsenault call her Marguerite.

The two marriages

Arsenault dates the first marriage to about 1701; no register of it is known. He places the second marriage at Grand-Pré and elsewhere calls Étienne “de Grand-Pré”, of the parish of Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards; the entry of 20 November 1730 is in the Port-Royal register, which calls him “of the parish of St. Famille”. Arsenault also names the bride’s parents as François Levron and Catherine Savoie, and makes this her third marriage, after Michel Picot and Yves Maucaer, who was buried at Port-Royal on 17 June 1727.

Another Étienne Comeau

An older Étienne Comeau, born about 1650, a son of Pierre Comeau and Rose Bayon and the husband of Marie Lefebvre, lived in the Minas settlements in the same years, so a record there that names only “Étienne Comeau” can belong to either man.