♀Isabelle Davoy

Isabelle Davoy (about 1699 – 12 October 1765) was an Acadian of Minas, a daughter of Jérôme Darois and Marie Garault, who married René Trahan at Grand-Pré in 1717 and, as his widow, Sylvain Breau at Beaubassin in 1734. She was probably the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Jean Trahan (1719–1799).

Early life

She was probably born about 1699, the eldest of the ten children of Jérôme Darois, who had come from Paris, and Marie Garault, a daughter of Port-Royal, who settled at Saint-Charles-des-Mines on the Rivière des Habitants. Most records write her surname Darois; the copy of her second marriage gives Davoy. In 1706, during Queen Anne’s War^W, when she was a small girl, her father is said to have been captured by the British at Minas and held with his family as prisoners of war in Boston. After the war the family came home to the Rivière des Habitants.

Marriages

On 8 November 1717, at Saint-Charles-des-Mines in Grand-Pré, she married René Trahan, a son of Jean-Charles Trahan and Marie Boudrot; the register writes her Elisabet Darois. Pierre Terriot and Jean Trahan signed as witnesses, and René made his mark. Their son Jean was born on 18 March 1719, the first of their children.

René is said to have died about 1733, before he was forty. On 6 June 1734, in the chapel of Sainte-Anne at Beaubassin^W, Isabelle married Sylvain Breau, the unmarried son of François Breau and Marie Comeau of the Rivière aux Canards. The marriage needed a church dispensation for a relationship of the third degree between them. Sylvain was some fourteen years younger than his bride, and no children of the marriage are on record. The one surviving text of the act, a later copy, calls her the widow of a Richard rather than of René Trahan.

Louisiana

Early in 1765 Isabelle, then about sixty-six, and Sylvain left Halifax with the party of Acadians led by Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil. They sailed by way of Saint-Domingue^W and reached New Orleans in February; her son Jean and his three children came in the same party. In April Sylvain was among the Acadians who exchanged their card money at New Orleans, and the couple then followed the Broussards across the Atchafalaya Basin to the Attakapas District^W, where the party settled on the banks of the Bayou Teche.

An epidemic struck the Teche settlements that summer and fall. Isabelle and Sylvain are said to have died on the same day, 12 October 1765, and were buried together at what the burial record calls “au dernier camp d’en bas”, the lower place, on the Fausse Pointe near present-day Loreauville.

The family

The register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines records three children of René and Isabelle, born between 1719 and 1723: Jean, Marie and Paul. The couple are said to have had a son Michel, born about 1726, and a daughter Ursule as well. Ursule married Joseph-Grégoire Broussard, a son of Alexandre Broussard dit Beausoleil, and was a widow with three children among the Acadian prisoners at Halifax in August 1763. Early in 1765 Jean, Michel and Ursule all came to Louisiana with the party led by Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil. On 8 April 1765, at New Orleans, Ursule married Joseph Girouard, in one of the earliest Acadian marriages in the colony; she was buried in the Attakapas country on 10 October 1765, two days before her mother, and Joseph died twelve days after her.

Notes

Sources

Her birth about 1699 rests on her age, 66, when she reached Louisiana in February 1765, as Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives it; Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which lists her first among Jérôme Darois’s ten children, gives about 1697. Her parents are named by Arsenault, by Cormier and in a modern abstract of her marriage of 1717. Her father’s birth in Paris and the family’s home at Saint-Charles-des-Mines come from Arsenault; the capture of 1706, the captivity in Boston and the return home come from Cormier.

The marriage of 1717 and the births of her children are in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines as published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, volume 1a. Most of the marriage entry is lost, and the volume completes it from a transcription made in 1895, which names her parents Jerome Darois and Marie Jareau; the abstract names her mother Marie Gareau. René’s death about 1733 comes from Arsenault. The marriage of 1734 is in the register of Beaubassin. Sylvain’s ages, 21 at the marriage and 52 in 1765, the journey of 1765, the exchange of card money, the settlement on the Teche and the couple’s deaths on the same day come from Cormier, who takes Sylvain’s burial on 12 October 1765 “au dernier camp d’en bas” from Donald J. Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records. Arsenault gives the second marriage no children and Sylvain’s death at St. Martinville on 12 October 1765.

Michel and Ursule come from Cormier, who places Michel “probably” in this family and names Ursule a daughter of René Trahan and Élisabeth Darois; the Attakapas Gazette (1971) also gives Ursule these parents. Ursule’s burial on 10 October and her husband’s on 22 October 1765 are as Cormier gives them.

Her name and her first husband

The surviving text of the marriage of 1734, a later copy, writes the bride “Hisabelle Davoy” and calls her the widow of a Richard. Arsenault, Stephen A. White and Cormier all make Sylvain Breau’s bride Isabelle Darois, daughter of Jérôme Darois and Marie Garault and widow of René Trahan, and White records the same dispensation of the third degree that the copy gives; the family tree follows them, and keeps the copy’s spelling as her name. Her son Jean’s burial in 1799 calls his mother Isabelle Jérôme, after her father’s given name, which Cormier gives as the dit name of that branch of the Darois family.

The line to Floyd

The line runs from Jean Trahan through Anne Trahan (died about 1774), the wife of Charles Guilbeau. No record names Anne’s parents; she is placed in Jean’s family by the godparents and witnesses of her children’s baptisms and of the marriage of Jean’s son Germain.