♂Jean-Baptiste Breau

Jean-Baptiste Breau (born about 1727) was an Acadian exile who spent eleven years in Maryland and then settled on the Mississippi between St. James and Ascension in Spanish Louisiana. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Breaux (about 1747–1815).

His mother, Marie Dugas, was the daughter of Abraham Dugast and Jeanne Guilbeau and the widow of René Landry, whom she had married at Grand-Pré on 16 November 1711; a compiled dictionary of Acadian families has her marrying Alexandre Breau about 1716.

Pigiguit and Maryland

He was born about 1727 (other accounts give 1724 or 1725), most likely at Pigiguit^W. In the mid-1740s he married Élisabeth Henry there; Marguerite, born about 1747, was probably her daughter. After Élisabeth’s death he married Marie-Rose Landry, called Rose, and it was with Rose and the children that he was deported to Maryland when the British cleared the Acadians from Pigiguit in the fall of 1755. In July 1763 a report on the Acadians at Oxford, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, listed him as J. Bte. Braux with his wife Rose, two sons and five daughters.

The Acadian Coast

In 1766 the family came to Louisiana with the first contingent of Maryland exiles, who reached the colony in late September. Six children came with Jean-Baptiste and Rose: Marguerite, Madeleine, Jean, the twins Amand and Anne, and Esther. They settled on the left, or east, bank of the river near the line between St. James, then called Cabanocé, and Ascension, on the stretch of the Mississippi known as the Acadian Coast^W. The census of September 1769 found him on lot 152 at Cabanocé, and a year later the Ascension census credited him with six arpents^W of land. Marguerite married Pierre Firmin Breaux at Ascension on 13 April 1769.

The farm grew. By the Ascension census of 1777 he was working fourteen arpents on the east bank, with fifteen cattle, three horses, twenty-nine hogs and one enslaved person, and held six more arpents lying fallow across the river. Rose, their son Amand and their daughter Esther were still in the household. He had died by 14 January 1796, when Rose is said to have been buried at St. James as his widow.

Notes

Sources

Almost everything known of his life comes from two compiled genealogies. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians who came to Louisiana (the Breaux and Landry chapters) abstracts the 1763 Maryland report and the Louisiana censuses of 1769, 1770 and 1777, and gives the 1766 arrival and the six children. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2nd edition, page 2438) gives him as born in 1724, married about 1745 to Elizabeth Henry and secondly about 1752 to Marie-Rose Landry, and living on lot 152 at St. James in 1769. The marriage of Marguerite and Pierre Firmin Breaux at Ascension on 13 April 1769 appears in a published list of Ascension marriages, which gives the names only. Rose’s burial on 14 January 1796 is abstracted in the Diocese of Baton Rouge church records, volume 2, as “Rosa, age 74 years, widow of Juan Baptista Braux”; Cormier takes her for Jean-Baptiste’s widow, noting that the censuses of 1769 to 1777 put her birth nearer 1730.

His age

The date of about 1727 is an estimate. Cormier gives about 1725, from his age of forty-one on arrival in 1766; the census ages run forty-five in 1769, forty-four in 1770 and fifty-one in 1777. Arsenault and an online family tree give 1724.

Their mother

White’s dictionary of Acadian families (Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, p. 273) is a compiled work. It gives Marie as the daughter of Abraham and Jeanne Guilbeau, the widow of René Landry, and the wife of Alexandre Breau about 1716; Arsenault gives that marriage about 1720. The Grand-Pré register of 16 November 1711 records the marriage of René Landry and Marie Dugas, in a double wedding with his brother Jean-Baptiste Landry and Marguerite Gautrot (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a). The register writes her parents as Abraham Dugas and Jeanne Guillebaud. The register of 3 November 1733, for the marriage of her son Joseph Landry, names his parents as “Rene Landry, decd. and Marie Dugas”, and an Alexandre Bro is the first witness.

His parents

His parents are not settled. Cormier and Arsenault make him a son of Alexandre Breau and Marie Dugas, and a brother of Alexis and Honoré Breau, who led the Maryland Acadians’ voyage to Louisiana in 1768. Cormier himself asks why, if so, Jean-Baptiste’s family lived at Oxford while his brothers were at Port Tobacco. Wood’s study of the Acadians in Maryland seems instead to make him a son of a Jean-Baptiste Breaux who had died by July 1763 and of an Élisabeth Henry, and an online family tree follows that reading. Cormier’s own verdict on the question is that “much of this is tenuous”.

Which wife was Marguerite’s mother

Cormier makes Marguerite the daughter of the first wife, Élisabeth Henry, and Madeleine, born about 1749, the daughter of Rose; he dates the two marriages from those births. Arsenault leaves Marguerite out of Jean-Baptiste’s list of children and puts Madeleine and Jean under the first marriage, but on the next page, under Firmin Breaux, he names Marguerite’s mother as Marie-Rose Landry; a 1985 genealogy and the Wall of Names at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville also give Rose. Rose’s census ages would make her about seventeen at Marguerite’s birth. The 1769 marriage entry, as published, does not name the bride’s parents.