♂Guillaume Trahan

Guillaume Trahan (born about 1601) was one of the first French settlers of Acadia, who sailed from La Rochelle in 1636 aboard the Saint-Jehan with his wife and two children from Bourgueil in Touraine; he started a second family late in life, and in 1671 was raising three children under five with a wife at least thirty-five years younger than himself. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) through his son Guillaume Trahan (born about 1667), and his ancestor by 16 separate lines of descent in all, the others through his children Marie Trahan (born about 1672), Jeanne Trahan (born about 1631) and Jean-Charles Trahan (born about 1668).

France and the crossing

His family came from Montreuil-Bellay in Anjou. When his brother François was betrothed at Bourgueil on 5 September 1632, to Renée Pinsonneau of that town, the act called him the son of Nicolas Trahan and of the late Renée Desloges, “de la paroisse de St Pierre de Montreuilbellay”, and their father Nicolas was present. Their mother had therefore died by then, and their father was still living. Two printed family studies add sisters baptized at Montreuil-Bellay, Renée in February 1612 and Lucrèce in November 1614, and one of them names a third, Anne, probably the wife of Pierre Mollay.

On 13 July 1627 he married Françoise Corbineau in the parish of Saint-Étienne at Chinon, not far from Bourgueil; the register names him as the son of Nicolas Trahan and Renée Desloges, and his father stood as a witness. In April 1636 the family left La Rochelle on the Saint-Jehan, a ship carrying settlers recruited for the colony, whose roll lists “Guillaume Trahan, maréchal de tranchant, François Corbineau, son épouse, deux enfants et un valet, de Bourgueil”: a maréchal de tranchant, an edge-tool maker, with his wife, two children and a servant. The roll does not name his children, and historians identify his daughter Jeanne as one of them.

Port-Royal

He settled at Port-Royal. On 21 September 1639 a baptism there, of the governor’s daughter Marie d’Aulnay, named him as the father of her godmother Jeanne Trahan, and gave his trade as mareschal. Jeanne married the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois. After Françoise’s death Guillaume married Magdeleine Brun, a daughter of the settlers Vincent Brun and Renée Brode; the marriage took place at Port-Royal before 1667.

When Port-Royal capitulated to Sedgwick on 16 August 1654, Guillaume signed the articles as syndic of the inhabitants of Port-Royal, under the name “Guillaume Trouer”, the spelling the printed copy gives for him.

In 1671 the census-taker wrote him down as a “Mareschal”, a smith, as the roll of 1636 had, “aage de soixante ans ou environ”, and beside him his wife Magdeleine, “aagee de 25 ans”. “Leurs enfans trois”, the roll continues: Guilleaume, aged four, Jehan Charles, three, and Alexandre, one. His stated age of about sixty would put his birth near 1611, ten years later than the date given above; the transcription of the census adds that he was really about seventy. In the same census Jeanne Trahan, the wife of Jacob Bourgeois, was forty, with a son of her own named Guillaume.

The census of 1678 counts him at Port-Royal with his wife, Magdeleine Brun, four acres, six cattle, three boys and three girls. He died after that census and before the one of 1686, when his widow was named there as the wife of Pierre Joan.

Lines of descent

There are 16 separate lines of descent from Guillaume Trahan to Floyd, through four of his children: Guillaume, Marie, Jeanne and Jean-Charles. Of these, 15 run on Floyd’s mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990), and one on his father’s side, through Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929); the nearest is nine generations up. The link to Jeanne rests on a 1639 baptism as a compiled genealogy quotes it, and one line, through Judith Landry (born 1728), rests on an identification that is probable rather than proved. The lines meet again in Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926), whose parents Euphemie Dupuis and Firmin Serrette both descend from Guillaume, and last in Floyd’s parents, Jeffrey Delahorne and Ida Serrette, who both descend from him.

Notes

Parentage of Jeanne

The 1639 baptism at Port-Royal, quoted verbatim in Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, tome I, page 68, gives the godmother as Jeanne Traihan, daughter of Guillaume Traihan, mareschal, and of Françoise Corbineau. The entry comes through that compiled genealogy, and it gives his trade as mareschal, a farrier’s or smith’s trade. Godbout and White had reached the same parentage by reconstruction, from the Saint-Jehan roll and the Acadian censuses.

Marriages and dates

His marriage is in the Chinon register of Saint-Étienne (Archives d’Indre-et-Loire, 6NUM7/072/018); no baptism of Jeanne is known there. The birth year given is about 1601; two printed family studies give 1611, and the 1671 roll’s “about sixty” points the same way, while the transcription’s remark that he was nearer seventy points the other, so the date is uncertain; 1611 would have made him sixteen at his marriage in 1627. His second marriage to Magdeleine Brun is dated before 1667 on the family record; a printed family study dates it 1665. The 1671 household follows the manuscript census roll as it stands. Marie’s place as his daughter by Magdeleine Brun rests on compiled genealogies and on a declaration made at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 by a grandson of the couple; no act names her parents. His brother’s betrothal is in the Bourgueil register of Saint-Germain (Archives d’Indre-et-Loire, 6NUM7/031/005); the sisters rest on the printed studies (Massignon and Pourciaux, in the Attakapas Gazette), not on the registers of Montreuil-Bellay, which are old and incomplete.

The capitulation of 1654

The entry for 16 August 1654 is printed in the Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents historiques, and Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, tome I, also gives it. Both give the signature as “Guillaume Trouer”.

The death

The date of his death rests on the bracket between the census of 1678 and the roll of 1686. Lanctôt, Familles acadiennes, tome II, puts it about 1680, and Bona Arsenault about 1682; both are compiled dates within that bracket.