♀Françoise Guérin

Françoise Guérin (born about 1710) was an Acadian exile who was widowed in the 1758 deportation from Île Saint-Jean^W, and, in old age, crossed the Atlantic a second time to Spanish Louisiana. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Josèphe Thériot (born 1749).

A family in Acadia

Françoise, “native of the same place” as her husband, married François Thériot 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 couple moved with their children from mainland Acadia to Île Saint-Jean, settling at Baye de Mordienne. A government census there in April 1752 recorded Françoise, then forty-two, as François’s wife, with all eleven children and a farm of oxen, cows, sheep, a mare, pigs and fowl.

Widowed in 1758

When the British deported the Acadians of Île Saint-Jean in 1758, François died during the crossing to France, according to Stephen A. White’s genealogical dictionary of the Acadian families, as quoted on a published family tree. Françoise brought six of her children (Marguerite, Pierre, Theodose, Cyrille, Gertrude and Anne Josèphe) into Saint-Malo on 1 November 1758 aboard Le Duc Guillaume; a port record describes the widow, then about forty-two, as “without profession, ill,” admitted to hospital on 4 November and discharged a month later. The same source lists four of her other children, Isabelle, Perpetue, Joseph and Jean-Baptiste, as dying in 1758.

She settled at Saint-Servan, where she supported herself spinning; a roll of Acadian exiles taken there in September 1772 still found her, aged sixty-two, “spins for a living,” living alongside two of her grown children. On 3 April 1767 she was present, with three of her sons, when the priest at Saint-Servan rehabilitated her daughter Gertrude’s marriage to Joseph Blanchard, contracted on 4 February 1766 in good faith but invalid because the two were related in the fourth degree; she declared that she could not sign her name. The register of her daughter Anne’s marriage to Pierre Landry on 1 June 1767 names her as the bride’s mother.

A second crossing

In 1785, close to eighty years old, Françoise crossed the Atlantic a second time, sailing to Spanish Louisiana aboard La Ville d’Archangel with two of her daughters. The Spanish authorities issued the household tools at New Orleans on 17 January 1786, the last date she is known to have been alive; no record of her death, in Louisiana or elsewhere, has been found. Her own daughter Anne’s family had crossed on the same ship as a separate household.

Notes

A compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, by Steven A. Cormier, gives her age on the 1785 crossing as seventy-five and her origin as Cobeguit; an earlier French roll gives an age that implies she was closer to seventy-nine in 1785. The two ages, drawn from memory decades apart, do not agree; the earlier French roll, which gives the age closer to eighty, is the one given above. The same compilation and other secondary sources give her parents as Jérôme Guérin and Élisabeth Aucoin; the claim rests on these secondary works alone.