♂François Alexandre Daigle

François Alexandre Daigle (7 February 1763 – 31 August 1817) was an Acadian exile, born at Cherbourg in Normandy during his family’s displacement to France, who married at Nantes in 1783, crossed to Spanish Louisiana in 1785 and raised a family of eleven children at Manchac and Baton Rouge. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Beloni Daigle (1791–1822).

Acadia to France

His father, François Daigle, had been deported from Acadia to Cherbourg in 1758, according to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, and married Jeanne Holle there on 17 January 1761, to a Jeanne who was herself the daughter of a Cherbourg couple rather than an Acadian by birth. François Alexandre was born at Cherbourg on 7 February 1763, about four in the afternoon, and was baptized there on 8 February. The register entry names his father as an inhabitant of Acadia and a mariner by trade, and his mother as Jeanne Holley, the register’s spelling; his marriage record of 1783 also reads “natif de la paroisse de cherbourg.” The Cherbourg register records four of the couple’s children baptized there between 1761 and 1769, the last in September 1769.

The family later moved to Le Havre, where a 1772 roll of Acadian exiles counted “François Daigre, 32, carpenter, of Havre,” his wife, and their children, including an eight-year-old François Alexandre.

On 23 September 1783 he married at the parish of Saint-Martin de Chantenay, near Nantes. The register calls him a mariner, the son of François Daigle and Jeanne Hollay, a native of Cherbourg, domiciled in fact in Chantenay for two years and by right in a parish of Poitou, and gives his bride as Rose Adelaide Bourg, a minor “decretée de justice,” daughter of the late Joseph Bourg and Rose Doiron and herself a native of Notre-Dame du Havre. Her parents were natives of Acadia, as their own marriage act of 1765 says. Cormier, citing Robichaux’s study of the Acadians at Nantes, adds that a daughter, Émilie-Adélaïde, was baptized at Chantenay on 12 November 1783 and a son, François-Joseph, there on 28 April 1785.

Louisiana

According to Cormier’s compilation, he was counted on a September 1784 list of Acadians at Nantes with his wife and an unnamed daughter. In 1785 the family sailed for Spanish Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont, and the ship’s passenger list enters them as its twenty-third family: François Alexandre Daigle, a laborer of 22; Rose Adelaide Bourg, his wife, 19; their daughter Émilie Adélaïde, 1; and their son François-Joseph, an infant. The ship reached New Orleans in late August, and most of its passengers went on to Manchac.

Cormier then gives the Spanish list of the Acadians at Fort Bute^W, Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, in 1788, where “Fraco. Alexo. Degle” appears with five persons in his family — and their holding was recorded with six barrels of corn and not a single unit of rice yet, the bare beginning of a farm built from nothing three years after landing.

Family

The children were born in several parishes. Jeanne Scholastique was born in July 1787 and Marie Christine in December 1789, both baptized at St. Gabriel; in September 1790 François Alexandre was back at St. Gabriel as a witness at his sister Maria Juana’s wedding. André Joseph, the son known as Beloni, through whom the line runs, was born on 15 November 1791 and baptized at St. James.

Daniel was baptized at Baton Rouge in 1795, the family still described as “of Manchac,” and Sara Dorothée, born in December 1796, was baptized there too. Marceline Eulalie was baptized on 4 October 1802 at the age of a year and a half; the entry names her grandparents on both sides, François Daigle and Jeanne Holle, and Joseph Bourg and Rose Doiron. Three more sons complete the family of eleven: Jean Baptiste, baptized at Baton Rouge on 3 November 1801 at about two and a half; Thomas, baptized there on 4 October 1802 at five weeks old; and Jean, whose baptism has not been found.

Rose Adelaide was buried on 19 July 1804 at St. Joseph Church, Baton Rouge, recorded as “wife of Alexander Dagle.” In November 1805 her property was inventoried for her eleven minor children, and on 26 November it was adjudicated to him, the widower having described himself as “father and tutor of eleven children.” The debts he declared included money he owed to his own mother and to his mother-in-law, Rose Doiron, so both women were alive at Baton Rouge that November. The older children began to marry the next year. Émilie Adélaïde married Étienne Hébert in 1805 and Jeanne Scholastique married Jean Baptiste Boissel in 1808; Marie Christine became the wife of Jean Baptiste LeBlanc. François Joseph married Brigitte Courtin in 1814 and Modeste Babin in 1824, and André Joseph married Adelaide Martin in 1816.

Death and estate

François Alexandre died without a will on 31 August 1817 in West Baton Rouge parish. On 15 September his son Joseph petitioned the probate judge, saying his father had left ten children and naming them: Joseph, Emelie, Scholastique, Mary, Belloney, Daniel, Celeste, and the minors Baptiste, Marceline and Jean. Two days later Joseph and Belloney, as adult heirs, asked that Jean Tullier be named administrator, and both signed. The inventory shows a modest estate: tools, clothes, and a lot in the village with a house on it, valued at $150, and no enslaved people. Everything was sold at auction, and a gold watch went to George Germain for $116.

All but Jean of the ten can be matched to baptismal entries, and Baptiste’s baptism names Rose as his mother. No baptism for Jean has been found; he was a minor in 1805 and again in 1817, and so was born after 1796. Thomas, baptized in 1802, is not among the ten, and he apparently died in the years between 1805 and 1817; no burial for him has been found.

Notes

Cormier’s Synthesis dates the marriage “c1782, France”; the act itself, in the register of Saint-Martin de Chantenay, gives 23 September 1783, and that date is followed here. His parentage does not depend on Cormier alone. The 1783 act names his parents (“fils de francois Daigle et de jeanne hollay”); the baptism of his daughter Marcelina Eulalia on 4 October 1802 at St. Joseph, Baton Rouge, names Francisco Daigle and Juana Holle as her paternal grandparents and Joseph Burgh and Rosa Doiron as her maternal grandparents; and the Le Havre roll of 1772 matches the household of his father and mother, and his own unusual given names, name for name. A same-era, unrelated Alexandre Daigle “of St. Malo,” who married Élisabeth Granger, is a distinct man and is not to be confused with him.

The passenger list of the Beaumont is printed in the Attakapas Gazette, volume 8 (1973), page 170, and reads “Laborer” where Cormier gives plowman. In the Louisiana registers the family name is written Daigle, Dagle and Daygle, and his wife’s Bourg, Burk, Burke, Burgh, Burquet and Borque; the children’s baptismal entries name them as Juana (Jeanne Scholastique, written “Juana Calosti”), Maria Cristiana, Andres, Daniel, Sara Dorothea and Marcelina Eulalia. The probate file is filed under “Alexander Daigle.” Several identifications in the 1817 petition are inferences. Belloney is taken to be André Joseph because the other adult sons are accounted for, and he signed “Belloney Daigle”; Mary is Marie Christine; Celeste is Sara Dorothée: the 1805 inventory names the daughter “Celeste Dorothée” among the heirs, and she appears as “Celeste Dorothee Daigle” at a baptism in 1818. Cormier counts six sons in the family, and the 1805 inventory names all six; the 1817 petition names five, and Thomas, the sixth, apparently died in the years between. Cormier also says only three raised families near Baton Rouge, and adds a Henry marriage among the daughters, which no record has been found to support. No burial has been found for François Alexandre in the Diocese of Baton Rouge volume for 1804 to 1818.

The 1805 inventory and its adjudication are in the Archives of the Spanish Government of West Florida, in an English translation. The translator’s note says the name Jean Baptiste is recorded twice in the list; the two entries are taken here to be Jean Baptiste and Jean, the two sons the 1817 petition names.