♂François Thériot

François Thériot (about 1703 – before 3 April 1767) was a plowman of Acadian birth, deported by the British from Île Saint-Jean^W in 1758. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Josèphe Thériot (born 1749).

A family in Acadia

Little survives of François’s early life beyond his own account to a government census taker, who recorded him only as “native of la Cadie,” with no parish named. He and Françoise Guérin married about 1729; compiled genealogies place the wedding at Cobequid, in mainland Acadia. They had eleven children, born between about 1730 and 1750: Marie, Marguerite, Pierre, Madeleine, Isabelle, Perpetue, Theodose, Cyrille, Gertrude, Anne Josèphe and Joseph.

Île Saint-Jean

About August 1751 the family left mainland Acadia for Île Saint-Jean and settled at Baye de Mordienne. A census taken there in April 1752 by the king’s surveyor, the Sieur de la Roque, found François, then forty-nine, farming with seven oxen, nine cows, eleven sheep, a mare, three pigs and four fowls, though the family had “not made an inch of clearing” on land granted only the year before. All eleven children were living with them, four sons and seven daughters, from twenty-two-year-old Marie to two-year-old Joseph.

Deportation and death

When the British deported Île Saint-Jean’s Acadians in 1758, François died at sea during the crossing to France, according to Stephen A. White’s genealogical dictionary of the Acadian families, as quoted on a published family tree; the same source lists four of the couple’s children as dying in 1758. The Saint-Servan parish register only confirms that he was already dead by 3 April 1767. On that day the priest rehabilitated the marriage of his daughter Gertrude and Joseph Blanchard, contracted on 4 February 1766 in good faith but invalid because the two were related in the fourth degree, and the act calls François dead. So does the register of his daughter Anne’s marriage to Pierre Landry on 1 June 1767.

Notes

A family tradition, recorded in the same genealogical dictionary, names his parents as Germain Thériot and Anne Pellerin, but no register confirms it. A Germain Thériot was farming four households away at Baye de Mordienne in 1752 and has sometimes been taken for the same man; the census shows him two years younger than François and married to a different woman, so he was at most a brother or cousin, not the father.