♂François Daigle

François Daigle (born about 1740 – died before 27 September 1790) was an Acadian exile who lived in France, at Cherbourg and Le Havre, and whose family later settled in Spanish Louisiana. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son François-Alexandre Daigle (born 1763).

Acadia and exile

François was one of the nine children of Abraham Daigle and Anne Boudrot, who had married at Grand-Pré in 1727. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, he was born about 1740, probably at L’Assomption de Pigiguit^W. In August 1752 the family was counted at Havre-de-la-Fortune on Île Saint-Jean^W (now Prince Edward Island), in the census taken by the Sieur de la Roque, where his father, a plowman, had been for two years. François, written François Marie, was twelve. With him were his brothers Aimable, Jean, Jean Eloy, Pierre and Nicolas and his sisters Marguerite and Marie Rosalie, and a ninth child, Joseph, aged five.

Cormier has him deported from the island to Cherbourg, in Normandy, in 1758, at eighteen, in the removal of the Acadians. The marriage act of 17 January 1761 at Cherbourg, read on the register, describes him as a minor, the son of the late Abraham Daigle and the late Anne Boudrot, “tous originaires de l’Acadie”, and names Jeanne Holle as his bride, the daughter of the late Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, “bourgeois de Cherbourg.” His elder brother Jean Daigle, aged twenty-eight, consented as his guardian; the bride signed the act and the groom made his mark. Father Donald Hébert’s printed abstract and Cormier’s summary place the marriage in the parish of Très-Sainte-Trinité, a name the act itself does not give. Jeanne does not appear to have been an Acadian: Cormier takes the phrase to mean that she and her parents were from Cherbourg, and her marriage joined an Acadian refugee to a family that had not been deported at all.

A marriage contract drawn up at Cherbourg on Sunday 7 December 1760, about six weeks before the wedding, names both sets of parents: his, Abraham Daigle and Anne Boudrot, and hers, Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme. It describes him as originally from Acadia. His bride’s mother was among those present, and in 1790 his widow produced the contract at Manchac when the estate was settled.

France

On 9 August 1761 François was on the list of Acadian refugees at Cherbourg who were receiving subsistence. Against his name the list gives him as “en état de travailler”, able to work, and his allowance was stopped.

The couple’s eldest son, François-Alexandre, was born on 7 February 1763 and baptized at Cherbourg the next day. His baptismal entry calls his father “habitant de l’Acadie” and “marinier de profession”, a mariner. Four of the children were baptized at Cherbourg between 1761 and 1769, the last of them, Marie-Jeanne-Jacqueline, in September 1769, so the family was still there then; his elder brother Jean stood godfather to Marie-Thérèse. In Poitou, according to the Archigny register’s record of their daughter Marie-Thérèse’s marriage on 19 November 1776, François and Jeanne were described as former residents of Acadia, then of the parish of Archigny, and François was present at the wedding. By 15 September 1772 the family was at Le Havre, where a roll of the Acadian refugees in France recorded “François Daigre, 32, carpenter, of Havre”, and Jeanne, 33, who sewed and spun. Six children were listed with them, the youngest an infant born on 3 July 1773, a birth the roll must have added after its date.

Louisiana

Cormier finds the family on a September 1784 list of Acadians at Nantes and, citing Hébert’s passenger lists of 1785, gives François’s trade as plowman, at age forty. In 1785, in Cormier’s account, François, Jeanne and four of their children sailed to Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont, the third of the Seven Ships that carried Acadian exiles from France to Spanish Louisiana, which reached New Orleans in late August; most of its passengers went on to Manchac.

The passenger list of the Beaumont, printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1973, enters the family as the sixteenth household: François, a laborer of forty, and his wife Jeanne, forty-seven, written Aulai on the list, with four children, Louis, a caulker of eighteen, Jeanne of sixteen, Adelaide of fifteen and Louise of ten. Their eldest son, François-Alexandre, already married with two young children of his own, crossed on the same ship as the head of a separate household, and a younger son, Louis-François, a calker, also crossed. Cormier gives the Spanish list of the Acadians at Fort Bute^W, near Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, in 1788 as counting François with five persons in his family, four and a half barrels of corn and one of rice.

François Daigle was dead before 27 September 1790, when the marriage records of two of his daughters name him as already deceased; the records give no place or date of death. On 27 September 1790 two of those daughters, Marie-Jeanne-Jacqueline (recorded as Maria Juana) and Marie-Louise, married in a double wedding at St. Gabriel, the first to Francisco Arbour, son of the late Francisco Arbour and Marie Henry, and the second to Isidore Le Tullier; the second record calls the bride’s mother, Jeanne, of Manchac. Cormier identifies Isidore’s brother Jean-Charles as the husband of a third Daigle daughter, Flore-Adélaïde, whose marriage at Pointe Coupée on 21 July 1790 names her as “of Havre”, two months before. Cormier also records the marriage of the son Louis-François to Marie-Rose Molaison in 1790.

The inventory of his goods, taken at Fort Bute, Manchac, on 20 October 1790, records that he had “died intestate”. The estate was divided the next day, 21 October, among his widow and six children. His widow took the sum named in the marriage contract and half the common property, and the rest was divided in six equal parts. The share set aside for Marie-Thérèse, who was “absent in France”, went to her mother on condition that she send it on to her.

Notes

The 1761 act names François’s parents as Abraham Daigle and Anne Boudrot, without ages, dates or places; Cormier writes the mother’s name Anne-Marie Boudreaux. The Mines parish registers record an Abraham Daigle and Anne Marie Boudrot, married in 1727 and described in 1731 and 1737 as of the parish of L’Assomption at Pigiguit, and the census of 1752 enters a François Marie of twelve in the household of Abraham Daigre and Marie Boudrot, whose other children match baptisms in those registers; that census joins the two. The census is printed in the Canadian Archives report for 1905, which names all nine children, the ninth being Joseph, aged five. The act of 1761 calls Jean, aged twenty-eight, the only elder brother, though the census names an older Aimable; no record says what became of Aimable. Cormier’s account of François’s birthplace and his 1758 deportation rests on his compilation; his entry for 1752 agrees with the census. The act names Jeanne’s parents as Thomas Holley and Scholastique Le Gentilhomme, “bourgeois de Cherbourg.” Her surname is written Holey on the 1772 roll and Hollet or Holeyte in the 1790 records. The mariner of the 1763 entry, the carpenter of the 1772 roll, the plowman of Cormier’s 1785 summary and the laborer of the Beaumont list have not been reconciled. The Beaumont list gives his age as forty, where the census of 1752 gives twelve; the birth is kept at about 1740, the census being the earlier record. The groom of 1790 is Francisco Arbour in the Diocese of Baton Rouge abstracts, the son of “Francisco, decd. & Maria Henry”; Henry is his mother’s surname, not part of his own. The marriage contract of 7 December 1760 writes his mother’s name as Houdort, and gives his native place as “the parish of Saint Jean in Cadiz”, taken for Acadie. The editor of the English translation dates that contract 1730; its text reads 1760. The Cherbourg list of 9 August 1761 survives in a nineteenth-century transcript held by the Library and Archives of Canada.