♂Germain Theriot

Germain Theriot (about 1646 – before 1680) was a farmer at Port-Royal, in French Acadia, and a son of one of the colony’s founding families. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), by two separate lines of descent, through two of his children — and his parents, Jehan Thériot and Perrine Rau, are Floyd’s ancestors by 19 separate lines.

Family

Germain was a son of Jehan Thériot and Perrine Rau; a compiled online tree places his parents’ marriage in France about 1635, which is not confirmed by a record. The census of Port-Royal taken in 1671 lists the elderly Jehan, then seventy, and Perrine, sixty, with their married children Claude, Jehan, Bonaventure, Germain, Jeanne and Catherine, and an unmarried son Pierre of sixteen. The same census lists Germain’s own household immediately before his parents’: “Germain TERRIAU, farmer, 25, his wife, Andree BRUN 25; their child: Germain 2”, with five cattle, two sheep and two arpents^W of cultivated land.

Marriage and death

Germain married Andree Brun; a compiled online tree dates the marriage to 30 January 1667 at Port-Royal; no register entry survives, since the Port-Royal registers before 1702 are lost. They had at least three children, Germain, Pierre and Catherine, born between about 1669 and 1672.

He died young. By the census of 1686 his widow had married Emmanuel Hebert and had five children by him, the eldest six years old, the youngest a baby of one month not yet baptized, so Germain had died by about 1680; a compiled online tree gives 1678.

Lines of descent

Floyd descends from Germain by two separate lines, both ten generations up, and both come down Floyd’s mother’s side through Ida Serrette. One runs through his son Pierre Theriot (born about 1671). That link is probable rather than recorded: the census of 1686 lists a Pierre of fifteen among Andree Brun’s children by her first marriage, with Germain, and that he is the Pierre Theriot who later settled at Cobequid^W rests on his first name and age. The other runs through his son Germain Theriot (born about 1669), who is listed as the couple’s child, aged two, in the census of 1671. The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), Ida Serrette’s mother, whose parents Melia Thibodeaux and Jean Baptiste Daigle both descend from him. The Pierre line also rests on a probable link from Amelia to her mother, Melia.

Notes

At least four men named Germain Theriot lived in Acadia in the late seventeenth century, among them this Germain’s own son and a nephew, the son of his brother Claude. They are told apart by their ages and their wives.

Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians of Louisiana dates the marriage to Andree Brun to about 1668 rather than 1667, and says Germain died at Port-Royal in the 1680s, probably in his late thirties. The census of 1686 already lists his widow as remarried, which sets his death before about 1680.