♂Jean Brun

Jean Brun (about 1684 – 1 June 1751) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who married there in 1708, raised eight children in the parish and stayed on after the British took the town in 1710. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Josèphe Brun (born 1710).

Life at Port-Royal

Jean was the son of Bastien Brun and Huguette Bourg; his mother had died by the time he married. The census of 1707, a year before he married, lists him on his own beside his father and brothers, with one head of cattle, four sheep and a gun. On 2 October 1708, at Port-Royal, he married Anne Gautrot, from the parish of Les Mines^W, a daughter of Claude Gautrot and Marie Terriot. Their first child, Marie Josèphe, was born on 9 March 1710. That autumn a British and New England force captured Port-Royal^W, and the town became Annapolis Royal. The family stayed under British rule. The census of 1714 lists Jean Brun and his wife with a boy and a girl, presumably Marie Josèphe and Jean Baptiste, baptized in 1712, the first of seven more children baptized in the same parish between 1712 and 1730; the youngest, Amand Grégoire, was born in August 1730.

On 17 November 1727 their daughter Marie Josèphe, aged seventeen, married Paul Bourgeois, a young man living at Beaubassin. Jean stood as a witness, as did Claude Brun, named as the bride’s uncle. A month later, on 20 December 1727, Anne gave birth to a son, Pierre Paul, and the new son-in-law, Paul Bourgeois, was his godfather.

Anne died on 19 December 1734, about forty-five years old. Jean was a witness again in November 1737, at the marriage of their son Jean Baptiste. He died on 1 June 1751, about sixty-seven, still described as the widower of Anne, and was buried the next day at Annapolis Royal, four years before the British began deporting the Acadians.

Notes

The burial ages put Jean’s birth about 1684 and Anne’s about 1689. A compiled genealogy of the Acadians (Arsenault) gives 1682 for Jean and 1689 for Anne, names the same eight children, and makes Anne a native of Grand-Pré. The register spells her surname Gautrot, Gautro, Gotrot and Goterot. Several men named Jean Brun appear in the Port-Royal register in these years, so this page uses only the acts that name Anne Gautrot as his wife. The transcription of the 1737 marriage names the groom’s father as Jean Baptiste Brun, while its list of witnesses has Jean Brun, father of the groom. The census of 1714 names only “Jean Brun et sa femme”, without the wife’s name.