♂Etienne Saulnier

Etienne Saulnier (born about 1705) was an Acadian settler at Petitcoudiac who married twice and whose youngest known child was born there in the spring of 1755, months before the British began deporting the Acadians. He was the brother of Jacques Saulnier (born 1685), who was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Life

He was born about 1705, one of the youngest of the thirteen children of Louis Saulnier, a sailor, and Louise Bastinaux, of Grand-Pré. About 1728 he married Jeanne Comeau, a daughter of Abraham Comeau and Marguerite Pitre of Port-Royal, and they had two daughters, Françoise and Marguerite, in the early 1730s.

After Jeanne’s death he married again. On 4 June 1740, at Beaubassin^W, he married Anne Darois, born about 1720, a daughter of Jérôme Darois and Marie Garault. They made their home at Petitcoudiac, where their son Joseph Saunier was born on 30 April 1755. On 4 September 1755 Acadian militia fought British colonial troops on the river^W, and that autumn the deportations from the region were under way; even so, Joseph is said to have been baptised in the chapel of Petitcoudiac on 16 November 1755. Nothing more is recorded of Etienne after that year.

Anne Saunier, who married Michel Cormier in Spanish Louisiana about 1769, is probably not his daughter. A declaration of her goods made for that marriage is said to have named her parents as Etienne Saunier and Marie Anne Darios. Other genealogists place her in other Saulnier families.

Notes

Sources

His birth, parents, both marriages, the daughters of the first marriage, his son Joseph and the family’s home at Petitcoudiac come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which gives his birth as 1705 in one volume and about 1705 in another, and lists him twelfth of Louis Saulnier’s thirteen children. Joseph’s birth and baptism at Petitcoudiac, with his parents written “Estienne Saulnier (Sonnier) and Anne Darroy”, are printed in the Attakapas Gazette (1974). Arsenault spells her father’s wife Gareau in one entry and Garault in another.

His daughter Anne

The claim that Anne Saunier was his daughter rests on Earl E. Vallot’s genealogy of Michel Cormier in the Attakapas Gazette (1967), which names her parents Etienne Saunier and Marie Anne Darios from the 1769 declaration of goods in the Opelousas colonial records. Arsenault does not list her among Etienne’s children, but the couple and the date of their marriage agree with Vallot, and a census age of 25 in 1766 places her birth about 1741, soon after the 1740 marriage. Against this, the same 1766 census at Cabanocé lists her as the sister of a Joseph Sonnier aged 27, born before the 1740 marriage, whom Arsenault places in the family of Pierre Saulnier and Madeleine Haché-Gallant; Stephen A. White and Steven A. Cormier name Jacques Saulnier and Anne Hébert instead. Cormier makes Olivier Saunier, godfather of Anne’s son Amant in 1770, a son of Etienne and Anne Darois, and calls Anne Darois Etienne’s first wife. White and Cormier make Anne Saunier the daughter of Jacques Saulnier and Anne Hébert instead, and she is not counted here among Etienne’s children.

After 1755

Arsenault also gives an Anne Darois, daughter of Jérôme and Marie Gareau, as the second wife, about 1756, of Michel Hébert dit Manuel, who married a third time at Québec on 18 May 1758. If she is Etienne’s wife, he was dead by about 1756.