♂Jean Chrysostome Trahan

Jean Chrysostome Trahan (1740 – 1815) was an Acadian farmer who was deported from Nova Scotia at about fifteen and married in England while held there as an exile. He spent twenty-two years in France and in 1785 brought his wife and seven children to Louisiana, where he was buried in Assumption Parish on Bayou Lafourche. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Julie Trahan (born 1765).

Early life and the Deportation

Chrysostome, as nearly every record calls him, was born in 1740 at Pigiguit^W, in the parish of l’Assomption, in Acadia. He was a son of Joseph Trahant and Marie Blanchard; his brothers Joseph and Pierre-Simon were older, his sister Aimée and his brother Paul younger. In 1755, when he was about fifteen, the British expelled the Acadians of the region. His grandfather Guillaume Trahant died at Pigiguit that September. The family seems to have been carried first to Virginia, where his grandmother Jacqueline Benoist died among the exiles, and in 1756 on to England, where they were held at Falmouth. Both his parents died there and were buried two days apart at St Gluvias in Penryn, on the edge of Falmouth, his mother on 1 September 1756 and his father on the 3rd.

Marriage in exile

On 10 January 1763, at Falmouth, he married Anne Granger. She had been born about 1743 at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, a daughter of Jean-Baptiste Granger and Magdeleine Landry, who had also both died at Falmouth. His elder brother Joseph had married at Falmouth, in 1757, a different Anne Granger of Rivière-aux-Canards, the daughter of Jean-Baptiste’s brother François. The two brothers’ wives were first cousins with the same name, from the same parish. The family’s sworn declaration of 1767 tells them apart only by their fathers’ names.

Belle-Île-en-Mer

When the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, the Acadians held in England were shipped to France. On 26 May 1763, four months after the wedding, the couple sailed from Falmouth to Morlaix on the king’s ship La Fauvette, taking with them Anne’s young brother Jean-Baptiste and a Paul Trahan, in all likelihood Chrysostome’s youngest brother, then eleven. Their first child, Julie, was born at Morlaix, in the parish of Saint-Martin, on 13 July 1765. By early 1767 they were among the Acadian families the French crown had settled on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the south coast of Brittany, living in the village of Kerlan in the parish of Bangor.

On 26 February 1767 he and his brothers Joseph and Pierre-Simon made a sworn declaration of their families, tracing their descent back to ancestors who had come from France to Port-Royal. It records that Jean-Baptiste Granger, then about fifteen, was still living in the Kerlan household; with both their parents dead, the younger Granger brothers lived with their married sisters.

The Bangor parish register describes Chrysostome as an Acadian laboureur, a plowman, and the couple as afféagistes: holders of the land grants under which the crown settled the Acadians on the island. Their children baptized at Bangor included Marie Magdelaine in January 1768, Marie Marthe in 1770, Jean Chrysostome in September 1774 and Joseph Rose on 17 April 1777. Joseph Rose’s godfather was not an Acadian but a sergeant of the Régiment de Cambrésis.

Nantes

Chrysostome is said to have sold his concession at Kerlan, number 38, to Charles Thomas on 3 November 1777, as his brothers sold theirs. Some time after that the family left the island for Nantes. Their daughter Marguerite was born and baptized on 12 January 1780 at Saint-Martin de Chantenay, on the edge of the city, where the register calls both parents acadiens. Their last child, Reine Sophie, was born in the same parish on 19 March 1784, at the hamlet of Pilleux, and baptized the next day; her sister Marie Magdelaine, then sixteen, stood as her godmother, and the vicar again called the father a laboureur.

Louisiana

In 1785 the Spanish crown carried the Acadian exiles from France to Louisiana in seven ships. By the published passenger lists, the household sailed on L’Amitié: Chrysostome, “plowman”, aged 43, his wife, and seven children, the youngest Reine Sophie, not yet eighteen months old. The ship reached Louisiana in November, and the family settled at Valenzuela on Bayou Lafourche, where Spanish censuses, as transcribed, list him and Anne from 1788 to 1798.

In Louisiana he was a witness at the marriages of his daughters Julie, to Joseph Leblanc at Donaldsonville on 27 October 1787, and Marie Magdelaine, to François Boudeloche the next year. Marie Marthe married Joseph Daigle in 1800 and Marguerite married Joseph Maitrejean in 1802, both at Assumption. Anne was buried at Plattenville, in Assumption Parish, on 28 July 1811, aged 68. Their son Joseph Rose was buried there on 25 July 1815. Three months later, on 2 November 1815, Chrysostome was buried at Plattenville, recorded as aged 75, “of Acadia”, and the widower of Ana Grange.

Notes

The 1767 declaration states that he and his brother Joseph could not sign it, while Pierre-Simon signed. The 1777 baptism of his son Joseph Rose, however, carries a signature that appears to be his, in the same hand as one on a Bangor entry of 1774. The rector of Bangor often recorded several Acadians at once as unable to sign, in a single phrase, so that phrase says little about any one man. At Reine Sophie’s baptism at Chantenay in 1784 the vicar wrote, in the same way, that the godparents and the father, who was present, did not sign.

Family trees online give his death as 1 December 1778 at Nantes. The Nantes registers hold no burial of that date. The 1785 passenger list and his own 1815 burial in Louisiana show that the date is wrong.

The Spanish-era clerks in Louisiana wrote his name as Chrisostomo or Crisostomes, and once as Christoval; the French registers of Belle-Île have Chrisosthome.

The road to England

His family’s route by Virginia to England in 1756 is the account of Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana; the 1767 declaration’s record of his grandmother’s death in Virginia fits it. The Penryn burials are known from a published transcription of the St Gluvias register, which enters each exile as “neutral” and his mother, under her husband’s surname, as “Mary Trahan”. The declaration dates his father’s death to September 1756, which matches the burial of 3 September; the same list has a second Joseph Trahan, buried on 30 August, who is taken to be another man.

The roll of La Fauvette, also known from a published transcription, groups “Chrysostome Trahan · Anne Trahan · Paul Trahan · Jean Baptiste Granger” as one household, Anne under her married name. It gives no ages or relationships. Paul cannot be a child of a marriage made that January; he is taken to be the brother born at Pigiguit in September 1751.

The 1777 sale at Kerlan

Jean-Marie Fonteneau’s 1996 history of the Belle-Île Acadians, Les Acadiens: citoyens de l’Atlantique, gives the sale of his afféagement (concession) number 38 at Kerlan, Belle-Île, to Charles Thomas, dated 3 November 1777. This is a compiled source, not the deed itself. Fonteneau adds that Pierre-Simon and Joseph sold their concessions too, Pierre-Simon’s on the same day, and that the family left Belle-Île after 1778. He counts six of the family leaving for Louisiana on L’Amitié; the passenger list names nine, and the list is followed here. The Bangor baptism of Joseph Rose on 17 April 1777 is the record that places the family on the island that spring.

The 1785 voyage

A published transcription of the 1785 passenger lists, reproduced on a genealogy website, places the household on L’Amitié; the same website says the ship sailed from France on 20 August 1785 and reached Louisiana on 8 November, and that most of its families settled along Bayou Lafourche. These lists have not been compared with the original rolls. Some copies of the transcription place the household on La Ville d’Archange. In that transcription the ship’s name closes each household’s entry, and the name that closes this family’s entry is L’Amitié. La Ville d’Archange belongs to the household listed just above it. Fonteneau’s history also puts the family on L’Amitié.

The transcription lists the youngest child as “René, son, infant”. The only child of the couple baptized at Chantenay between 1781 and 1785 was Reine Sophie, whose baptism names both parents, and Cormier’s compilation names the infant as Renée-Sophie; the “René” of the list is taken to be her. Two compiled genealogies give Julie a twin brother, Léon, born in 1765; the 1767 declaration names Julie alone.

The Spanish censuses

Steven A. Cormier’s compilation The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis (online) transcribes the Spanish censuses of the Bayou Lafourche settlements. Its entries place Chrysostome at Valenzuela, on the right bank of Bayou Lafourche, in 1788 (age 48, wife Anne age 44), 1791 (age 50), 1795 (age 54), 1797 (age 55) and 1798 (age 57). These are compiled entries, not the census volumes themselves.