♂Étienne Comeau

Étienne Comeau (born about 1650) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal, the son of the cooper Pierre Comeau, who at 21 was already married to Marie Lefebvre and the father of a daughter when the census of 1671 was taken. He was an elder brother of Jean Comeau (born about 1656). He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Catherine Comeau (born 1671).

Port-Royal, 1671

The census of Port-Royal taken in 1671 names Étienne twice. In the household of his father, entered as “Tonnelier Pierre Commeaux aagé de soixante et quinze ans”, with “sa femme Rose Bayon aagée de quarante ans” and nine children, he is the one child already married: “Estienne Commeau aagé de 21 an”. The roll does not say whether Rose Bayon was his mother or a stepmother. On the next page he heads his own household: “Laboureur Estienne Commeaux aagé de 21 an, sa femme Marie Anne Le Febvre aagée de 21 an”, with one child, “une fille aagée de trois semaines nommée Catherine”. His age places his birth about 1650. The parish registers of Port-Royal from before 1702 are lost, and no record of the marriage survives.

Family

Bona Arsenault’s compiled abstract of the 1686 census, published in 1955, lists “Etienne Commeaux, 36 ans, fils de Pierre, marié a Marie Lefebvre, 35 ans”, still at Port-Royal, with four children: Alexandre, Pierre, aged 3, Catherine, aged 14, and Marie, aged 10. Arsenault’s abstract of the 1693 census records Étienne as a widower, so Marie Lefebvre most likely died between 1686 and 1693.

The same compilation gives Catherine, in 1693, as the wife of Jacques Michel and “fille d’Etienne Commeaux”, and later records Alexandre as married to Marguerite Doucet and Pierre to Suzanne Brot. J.-Hervé Belliveau’s compiled genealogical dictionary names Catherine, wife of Jacques Michel, as a daughter of Étienne and Marie Lefebvre, and gives their daughter Marie as the wife of Claude Doucet, born in 1674, whom she married about 1696.

Les Mines

By 1714 Étienne had moved to Les Mines^W. Arsenault’s abstract of that year’s census lists him there as “Etienne Comeau, 64 ans, fils de Pierre, veuf de Marie Lefebvre”, next to his son Pierre, aged 31, with Pierre’s wife and two young sons. That is the last record of him found.

Notes

Arsenault’s abstract of the 1671 census gives Pierre Comeau’s age as 73 and Catherine’s as a few months; the roll itself reads 75 and three weeks. That Jean Comeau was Étienne’s brother rests on the son “Jehan”, aged 14, whom printed transcriptions of the 1671 roll place in Pierre Comeau’s household, where that line falls in a shadow on the filmed roll, and on Belliveau’s dictionary, which makes Jean the son of Pierre and Rose Bayol. Declarations made by Acadian exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 instead call Jean’s father another Jean Comeau who came from France.