♂Guillaume Trahan

Guillaume Trahan (died September 1755) was an Acadian farmer of Pigiguit, in the parish of l’Assomption in the Minas Basin of Acadia. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Trahant (1708–1756).

Acadia and marriage

About 1691, at Port-Royal, Guillaume married Jacqueline Benoit, a daughter of Martin Benoist and Marie Chaussegros. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Jacqueline had already been married once, and widowed, before this marriage. The couple moved from Port-Royal to Pigiguit, where they raised at least eight children, among them Joseph, born in 1708. On 5 November 1731, at their son Joseph’s marriage in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, both parents were recorded as being “of the parish of l’Assomption de Pigiguit.”

Deportation and death

Guillaume died at Pigiguit in September 1755, according to a sworn declaration made in 1767 by three of his grandsons before French authorities at Belle-Île-en-Mer — the year the British began the mass deportation of the Acadians. His wife did not die at Pigiguit: the same declaration records that Jacqueline died that year among the Acadians deported to Virginia, so that the couple’s lives ended, within months of each other, in two different places on two different continents.

Notes

A 1767 declaration and Cormier’s compilation both make Guillaume a son of an earlier Guillaume Trahan, an immigrant from France, by his second wife, Madeleine Brun; that parentage rests on those two compiled sources alone, not on a register naming Guillaume as their child. The marriage to Jacqueline is dated “about 1691” by the compilation; no marriage register for it is known. A compiled genealogy places his birth about 1667; no baptism is known, and no birth date is given for him.