♂Jean Baptiste Granger

Jean Baptiste Granger (1713 – October 1756) was an Acadian of Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia, who was deported by the British in 1755 and died the next year while held with the Acadian exiles at Falmouth, in Cornwall. He was one of four brothers who died there within eight weeks in the autumn of 1756. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Granger (c. 1743 – 1811).

Early life

He was born in 1713 at Port-Royal, in Acadia, the year the Treaty of Utrecht^W ceded Acadia to Britain, a son of René Granger and Marguerite Thériot. His grandfather, Laurent Granger, had been born at Plymouth, in England, and had made abjuration^W, formally renouncing the Protestant faith, in order to marry Marie Landry at Port-Royal. Some time after his birth the family moved to the Minas district and settled at Rivière-aux-Canards, where both his parents died in 1740.

Marriage and family

About 1740 he married Magdeleine Landry, whose parents, Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon, lived at Grand-Pré, in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines. The couple made their home at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, where their five children were born between 1741 and 1752: Marie Marguerite, Anne, Simon-Joseph, Pierre-Simon and Jean-Baptiste.

Deportation and death

In 1755 the British expelled the Acadians of Minas. The Grangers were carried first to Virginia, which refused the exiles and sent them on to England; they reached Falmouth on the ship Fanny on 17 June 1756 and were held there, where the Acadians sent to Cornwall were lodged on the edge of the neighboring town of Penryn. Both he and his wife died there that year. He was buried on 23 October 1756 at St Gluvias, the parish church of Penryn, whose Anglican register enters him as “Jean Baptiste Grangé, neutral”, the English term for the Acadians, whom the British called the French Neutrals. The exiles were buried in the churchyard in unmarked graves; a modern plaque in the church commemorates them. Three of his brothers died at Falmouth the same autumn: Charles on 29 September, François on 1 November and Claude on 20 November.

His children

His children survived the internment. In January 1763 Anne married Jean Chrysostome Trahan at Falmouth, and when the Acadians held in England were sent to France that May, her youngest brother, Jean-Baptiste, sailed in her household. By 1767 the orphaned younger boys were living with their married sisters on Belle-Île-en-Mer: Pierre-Simon with Marie Marguerite and her husband, Jean Baptiste Thériot, at Le Cosquet in the parish of Locmaria, and Jean-Baptiste with Anne and her husband at Kerlan in the parish of Bangor. Simon-Joseph was then still in England.

Notes

How his life is known

His birth year, his parents and his family come from the sworn declarations the Acadian exiles made on Belle-Île-en-Mer early in 1767. The one made at Le Palais by his nephew Joseph Simon Granger, closed on 2 March 1767, lists the children of René Granger and Marguerite Thériot, all born at Port-Royal, from Marie in 1699 to “Jean Granger, né en mil sept cent treize, marié à Magdelaine Landry”, and records that he and his wife died at Falmouth in 1756. The declarations of his two sons-in-law, Jean Baptiste Thériot on 15 February and Jean Chrysostome Trahan on 26 February, name the same parents and the descent from Laurent Granger, “né à Plymouth en Angleterre”, and list his children with their births: Marie Marguerite on 8 January 1741, Anne in 1743 or 1744, Simon-Joseph on 3 March 1745, Pierre-Simon on 8 October 1750 and Jean-Baptiste in 1752. The Thériot declaration also names his wife’s parents. The censuses of Port-Royal from 1698 to 1701 list René Granger and Marguerite Thériot as a married couple, and the Grand-Pré marriages of five of his brothers and sisters between 1717 and 1729 name them as the parents, one of the entries calling his mother Marie.

His name

His daughters’ family declarations of 1767 and the Penryn register call him Jean Baptiste; the Le Palais declaration calls him plain Jean, but names the same wife, the same daughter at Le Cosquet and the same deaths at Falmouth.

His birth year and marriage

Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians (volume 3) gives his birth as 1715, against the 1713 of the Le Palais declaration, and puts his marriage about 1740, the year before the first child was born. No record of the marriage or of the children’s baptisms survives: the register of Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards is lost, and the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register have no entry for the couple or their children.

Other men of the name

A Jean Baptiste Granger born on 18 August 1710, a son of Jacques Granger and Marie Girouard, and a Jean Baptiste Grange whose wife was Marie Joseph Gautrot both appear in the Grand-Pré register; nothing ties either to Magdeleine Landry, and the declarations name René as this man’s father. A Jean Baptiste Granger listed in Maryland in 1763 with a wife named Marie Josephe was another man.

His brothers’ deaths

The dates of his brothers’ deaths come from the Le Palais declaration. For Charles its text gives a corrupt year (“soixante-dix”), which cannot be right, since the Acadians had left Falmouth in 1763; another entry for him gives 1756. François’s burial appears in the same Penryn register on 3 November, two days after the date his family gave for his death.

His wife’s burial

No burial for his wife, Magdeleine Landry, has been identified in the published list of the Penryn burials. The register enters married women under their husbands’ surnames, the list names several Grangé women but no Magdeleine, and it describes itself as incomplete.