♂Jacques Saulnier

Jacques Saulnier (born about 1685) was an Acadian, the eldest son of a sailor of Les Mines, who later made his home at Petitcoudiac. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Saunier (1741–1772).

Early life

He was born about 1685. In the census of 1693 at Les Mines, the settlements of the Minas Basin, he was a boy of eight, the eldest of four children in the household of Louis Saulnier, a sailor of 30, and his wife Louise Bastinaux, written Peltier. In the same census the entry just before theirs was that of Jean Hébert and Jeanne Doiron, a young couple with a baby son, whose daughter, it is believed, became Jacques’s second wife nearly fifty years later.

First marriage

About 1724 he married Anne Hébert, probably a daughter of Jean Hébert and Marie-Anne Doucet. Their daughter Marie-Josèphe was born on 14 September 1725 and baptized at Grand-Pré on 25 November; her godfather was Marcel Sonier, most likely Jacques’s younger brother. The couple are said to have had at least five more children, Claude, Pierre, Jean, Joseph and Marguerite, born between the middle 1720s and about 1740. In later years the family lived at Petitcoudiac, a settlement on the river of that name in present-day New Brunswick.

Second marriage

About 1740 Jacques Saulnier, then a widower of about 55, married a second Anne Hébert. By the reckoning of the genealogist Stephen A. White, Jacques Saulnier’s two wives were two different women of the same name. Their daughter Anne Saunier was born about 1741. No parish register survives from Petitcoudiac for those years, and no other child of the marriage is known.

In 1767 Marguerite Dupuis, an Acadian exile at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, declared that her son Basile Babin had married at Halifax “Marie SOIGNIEV, daughter of Jacques and Anne HEBERT of Petkoudiak”, that is, Anne Saunier, and had “left for Mississippi with their family”. The records do not say when or where Jacques died.

Notes

Sources

His age and his place in his father’s household are from the 1693 census of Les Mines, which lists “Louis SAUNIER, sailor, 30”, his wife “Louise PELTIER” and the children “Jacques 8, Genevieve 6, Marguerite 4, Paul 2”. Louis’s is the only Saulnier household with a Jacques in the censuses of 1686 to 1714. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2nd edition, volumes 3 and 4) and Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s dictionary name him “fils de Louis et de Louise Bastinaux, de Grand-Pré” and say he lived at Petitcoudiac; Stephen A. White’s corrections to his Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (2011) give the same parents, writing her Louise Bastineau dit Peltier. Marie-Josèphe’s birth and baptism are from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré registers, which write her parents “Jacque Sonier and Anne Hebert”. The 1767 declaration is quoted from a published English translation of the Belle-Île-en-Mer declarations.

The two wives named Anne Hébert

Arsenault and Beliveau know a single wife, Anne Hébert, married about 1718. White dates the first marriage about 1724 and the second about 1740, and gives the first wife as a daughter of Jean Hébert and Marie-Anne Doucet. He separates the two women by a dispensation granted in Louisiana in 1799 for a marriage between descendants of Joseph Saulnier and of Anne Saunier, which shows both to be Jacques’s children, and by two mitochondrial DNA tests on Anne Saunier’s female line, which rule out the first wife and match the line of Jeanne Hébert, wife of Augustin Guédry. From this he makes Anne Saunier’s mother a second Anne Hébert, a daughter of Jean Hébert and Jeanne Doiron. The second wife rests on that inference; no record of her own has survived.

There is a difficulty of dates. The 1693 Port-Royal census gives Jean Hébert and Anne Doucet a daughter Anne aged 5. If she was Jacques’s first wife, she was about 51 when Joseph was born, about 1739, by his age of 27 in the 1766 census of Cabanocé in Louisiana; either that age is too low or the first wife was a younger daughter of the same couple. Which wife was the mother of Marguerite, who married Joseph Cormier about 1759, is not settled.

The children’s dates

The abstract gives Marie-Josèphe’s baptism as 25 November 1725; White, who calls her the eldest child of the first marriage, gives 25 December 1725. Beliveau places Claude’s birth about 1724, before her. Arsenault gives Pierre as born in 1730 and Jean in 1732.

His daughter Anne

The 1767 declaration names Anne Saunier’s parents as Jacques and Anne Hébert. Earl E. Vallot’s genealogy of her second husband, Michel Cormier (1967), names them, from a 1769 declaration of her goods, as Etienne Saunier, Jacques’s younger brother, and Marie Anne Darios, and Arsenault names Pierre Saunier and Madeleine Haché-Gallant of Petitcoudiac. White and Steven A. Cormier name Jacques Saulnier and Anne Hébert, as the declaration does, and the 1766 census at Cabanocé lists her with her brother Joseph Sonnier, aged 27.