♂Germain Thériot

Germain Thériot (born about 1662) was an Acadian settler of Port-Royal and Grand-Pré. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Thériot (born 1709).

Early life

Germain was born about 1662 at Port-Royal, Acadie, a son of Claude Thériot and Marie Gautrot. The Port-Royal census of 1671 lists him, aged nine, in his father’s household as a farmer’s son; the later censuses track him from there to a household of his own, married to Anne Richard.

Marriage and family

Germain married Anne Richard, a daughter of Michel Richard and Madeleine Blanchard, evidently in the mid-1680s; no marriage register survives for the couple, since it predates the earliest Grand-Pré register still on the shelf, which opens in August 1707. By 1709 the family was established at Grand-Pré, where a daughter, Marguerite, was born and baptized on 8 June of that year. The Grand-Pré register records a second daughter, Marie, who married Paul Melancon, son of Sieur Pierre Melanson and Marguerite Mius, on 8 November 1712, in a double wedding with René Landry and Marie Magdeleine Melanson.

Marguerite married René Blanchard, fils, son of René Blanchard and Anne Landry, at Grand-Pré in July 1726, at the age of seventeen. Germain signed the register as a witness to this wedding; it is the last record found of him. The Grand-Pré register records Anne’s burial on 10 May 1745, aged 75, as the wife of Germain Thériot. Marguerite’s own household was exiled to Maryland in 1755 and did not reach Louisiana until 1767, when the family was counted among the Acadians who settled at St. Gabriel.

Notes

No death or burial record has been found for Germain. At least four different men named Germain Thériot married into Acadian families of this generation; this Germain, aged about nine in the 1671 Port-Royal census and about twenty-three (with a fifteen-year-old wife) in the 1686 census, is distinguished from the others by his recorded age and by his wife’s name, not by the “Germain Thériot” name alone. Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians of Louisiana names Paul Melançon’s parents as Jean Melançon and Marguerite Dugas; the register names Pierre and Marguerite Mius, and the register is followed here. Cormier’s compilation also gives Marguerite’s marriage date as both 9 July and 27 July 1726, and records her in the 1763 Baltimore list of exiled Acadians under the surname “Thevreaux.”