♀Huguette Goujon

Huguette Goujon (died before 3 January 1718) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of Guillaume Blanchard and the mother of eleven children, whose marriages name her in the parish register. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through two of her daughters.

Marriage and family

No record of the marriage of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon survives, as the parish register of Port-Royal begins only in 1702; Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s compiled genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families dates it about 1672. Her husband was a son of the settlers Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, and was twenty-one and still at home with them in the census of 1671. The censuses from 1686 to 1701 find Huguette at home with him and name eleven children, five daughters and six sons, born between about 1674 and 1698.

Eight of the children married between 1707 and 1718, and each entry in the register names Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon as the parents. Isabelle married Claude Girouard on 5 February 1709, and Jeanne, the widow of Olivier Daigle, married Jean Prince on 30 January 1715.

Huguette was dead by 3 January 1718, when the register called both her and Guillaume deceased at the marriage of their son Charles. At Jeanne’s marriage in 1715 neither is so described, which does not show that either was then living. Régis Brun’s study of the Acadians before 1755 places her death about 1700, but the census of 1701 still lists her, at forty-six.

Her own family

The census of 1671 at Port-Royal lists the farmer Anthoine Gougeon, forty-five, and his wife Jeanne Chebrat, forty-five, with one child at home, Huguette Gougeon, aged fourteen. No act names Huguette’s parents, so her identification with that girl rests on the name, the age and the parish. Beliveau’s dictionary, which spells her surname Gougeon, as most compiled genealogies do, gives the same parents, as Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chabrat.

The Acadian genealogist Stephen A. White adds that Jeanne Chebrat had first been married to a Jean Poirier. In his view this explains why exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer, reciting in 1767 their descent from her husband’s brother Martin Blanchard, remembered a “Huguet Poirier” as the wife of a Guillaume Blanchard who had come from France.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon by two separate lines, both on his mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). One runs through their daughter Anne Blanchard (born about 1684), ten generations up from Floyd; the other through their daughter Jeanne Blanchard (born about 1681), eleven generations up. The two lines meet again in the marriage of Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857) and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (1827–1867), whose daughter Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850) was Floyd’s great-grandmother; both of her parents descend from this couple.

Notes

The spelling Goujon is the register’s, in the marriages of her children from 1707 to 1718, which appear in the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755. Edme Rameau de Saint-Père, reading the census of 1686, also wrote her “Huguette Goujon”, and elsewhere “Agathe ou Huguette Goujon”.

The censuses of 1686 to 1701 appear in the transcriptions published on acadian-home.org. They write her name Goujonne in 1686, Agate Goujon in 1693, Goujon in 1698, Agathe Goujon in 1700 and Goujoin in 1701, and her ages do not agree: 27 in 1686, 37 in 1693, 47 in 1698, 45 in 1700 and 46 in 1701.

The entry of 1671 appears on the surviving copy of the census roll, where the line ends “un enfan Huguette Gougeon aagée de 14 ans”; it agrees with the transcription Placide Gaudet printed with his genealogy of the Acadian families in 1905. An age of fourteen in 1671 would place her birth about 1657.