♂François Michel

François Michel was an Acadian whose children were baptised and married at Grand-Pré in the 1710s; his daughter Marie Joseph was married there in 1712 in a triple wedding, in which three couples were married together. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Michel.

Life

He is thought to have been born about 1670, and is said to have married Marguerite Meunier about 1695. By 1686 he was married to Madeleine Germon: the census that year lists him at La Hève, aged thirty-five, with Madeleine, forty. In 1693 the roll there gives him fifty, with a wife of forty-five.

By 1701 the family was at Les Mines, and the roll of 1707 there counts him with two boys and two girls under age, with thirteen cattle, twelve sheep and nine hogs.

In the spring of 1712 their daughter Isabelle, born on 9 February, was baptized at Grand-Pré on 3 April, and on 23 May their daughter Marie Joseph married Louis Sire, of Dunkirk in France. A François Michel, presumably the bride’s father, witnessed the wedding and made his mark. The next year the Treaty of Utrecht^W gave Acadia to Britain, but the family stayed: their daughter Marie was born and baptized at Grand-Pré on 18 July 1717.

The roll of 1714 places him at Pigiguit, with his wife, three males and four females. Marguerite Meunier died before 3 June 1726, when their son Paul, aged twenty-three, married Marie Joseph Vincent at Annapolis Royal; by then François was living in the parish of the Assumption at Pisiguit^W. The line descends through Marguerite, in all likelihood another of their daughters, who married Paul Doiron.

Notes

Arsenault’s account

Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians is the source for his birth about 1670 and for the marriage about 1695, of which no record is known. It calls him François Michel dit Laruine, takes him to be, it seems, a brother of Jacques Michel of Port-Royal, places Marie Joseph’s birth about 1696, and names two more daughters, Cécile and Marie-Madeleine, for whom no record is known. The ages on the rolls do not fit its birth year: he is thirty-five on the 1686 roll and fifty on the 1693 roll, which would put his birth in the 1640s or early 1650s. It is also the only source that places Marguerite, the wife of Paul Doiron, in this family: no record of her baptism or marriage is known, though her age of 46 on the 1752 census of Île Saint-Jean^W fits the year it gives for her birth, 1706.

The records

The printed abstract of Marie Joseph’s marriage names her mother but leaves her father’s name blank. The witness François Michel is most likely her father, since the baptisms of Isabelle and Marie name a François Michel as Marguerite Meunier’s husband, and Arsenault names François as Marie Joseph’s father. The abstract notes that her wedding was celebrated together with those of Antoine Prince and Anne Trahan and of François Prince and Catherine Benois. The register of Paul’s marriage names his mother as deceased and his father as François Michel of the parish of the Assumption at Pegighit, its spelling of Pisiguit; Paul’s birth about 1703 is reckoned from his age. No record of François’s death is known.