♂Jacob Bourgeois

Jacob Bourgeois (born about 1621) was a surgeon in seventeenth-century Acadia, the only man given that trade in the Port-Royal census of 1671, and the husband of Jeanne Trahan. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Bourgeois (1660–1747).

Life

The 1671 census of Port-Royal lists “Jacob Bourgeois, Surgeon, 50”, with his wife Jeanne Trahan, 40, and a large family: a married son and daughter, Charles and Jeanne, and eight children still at home, among them Germain, Guillaume, Marguerite, Françoise and Anne, then ten years old. The household held thirty-three cattle and twenty-four sheep. Histories of Acadia credit him with founding the settlement at Beaubassin, on the isthmus of Chignecto, in the early 1670s.

By 1686, aged 67, he and Jeanne were still living, and several of their married daughters appear on the same roll with their own households, among them Anne with her husband Rene LeBlanc and Marie with Antoine LeBlanc.

Notes

His place as Anne’s father rests on the censuses: she is the only Anne Bourgeois on the 1671 roll, and her ages agree with it through her burial in 1747. No act naming her parents survives. Online family trees give his birth in France about 1621 and his death about 1701; those have not been checked against a record.