♂Jean-François Broussard

Jean-François Broussard (1654 – before February 1724) was a settler who farmed on the upper river above Port-Royal, in Acadia, and the father of Joseph and Alexandre Broussard, the brothers who later led the Acadian resistance to British rule. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through his son Alexandre Broussard (died 1765).

From France to the upper river

Jean-François is said to have come to Acadia from France about 1671, one of some fifty colonists who left La Rochelle that spring aboard the ship L’Oranger, sent out on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV. About 1680 he married Catherine Richard, the daughter of Michel Richard and Madeleine Blanchard, at Port-Royal. The couple made their farm on the haute rivière, the upper reaches of the river, at a hamlet called Beausoleil about twelve miles above the town, and had ten children there, born between 1682 and 1705.

In 1698 he is also said to have joined Pierre Thibodeau in founding a new settlement at Chepoudy, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, but he did not make his home there and kept his farm on the upper river.

Under British rule

In 1710 British and New England troops took Port-Royal after a siege^W, renamed it Annapolis Royal, and left Samuel Vetch^W in command. In January 1711 armed men of the upper river seized the garrison’s commissary, Peter Capon, at the house of the militia captain Pierre Leblanc; Leblanc ended the affair by paying a ransom, but Vetch struck back. By the account of the historian John Mack Faragher, Jean-François was one of about twenty leading men of the upper river who were arrested at the chapel of Saint-Laurent on a Sunday morning, together with their priest, and held in the fort’s dungeon for several weeks as hostages. Nothing tied any of them to the kidnapping, but Broussard, Faragher writes, was known as a dissident.

By one account he died suddenly at his farm in December 1716, in his early sixties. When Alexandre married Marguerite Thibodeau at Port-Royal on 7 February 1724, the register named the groom’s father as the late François Brossard.

The family

Two of the sons became leaders of the Acadians in the wars that ended French rule in the region. Alexandre and Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil married the sisters Marguerite and Agnès Thibodeau at Port-Royal in 1724 and 1725, settled on the Petitcodiac River and named their village there Beausoleil, after the hamlet where they were born. They commanded the Acadian militia at Fort Beauséjour in 1755, fought the British until 1759, and in 1765 led a large party of exiles to Louisiana, where both died in an epidemic on the Bayou Teche that autumn.

Notes

Origin and arrival

Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2nd edition, vol. 2, p. 471) gives his birth as 1654 and his arrival from France about 1671. Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives his birth about 1653, “perhaps in Anjou”, and says he “may have come to the colony in 1671 aboard the ship L’Oranger”. The voyage from La Rochelle with some fifty colonists sent by Colbert, and the place of Beausoleil about twelve miles up the river, come from an article in the Attakapas Gazette (1983).

Marriage and children

The marriage is dated about 1681 by Arsenault, about 1680 by a Broussard genealogy by Vita B. and John R. Reaux in the Attakapas Gazette (1970), and about 1678 by Cormier, who places all the children’s births at Beausoleil. Arsenault, the Reaux genealogy and the family tree name ten children; Cormier counts eleven, six of them sons. The family tree gives the son François’s birth as 1692, the Reaux genealogy about 1695. The Port-Royal register names Catherine Richard as the mother of Alexandre at his marriage in 1724 and of Joseph, aged 23, at his marriage to Agnès Thibodeau on 11 September 1725.

Chepoudy

Arsenault (Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, vol. 1, p. 80) has him follow Pierre Thibodeau to Chepoudy in 1698 and return to Port-Royal a few years later. Cormier writes that he “collaborated with Pierre Thibodeau in the colonization of Chepoudy, but he did not go to settle there himself”, and places this not long after his marriage.

The hostages of 1711

Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005) names him “Francis Broussard” among the men taken on Vetch’s orders and adds that he “would raise two sons who would later be prominent leaders of the resistance to British rule”. Cormier’s history also records that he was one of several residents of the upper river jailed by Vetch in early 1711.

Death

The family tree carries no death date. The Reaux genealogy gives 31 December 1716 at Port-Royal, Arsenault gives 1716 at Port-Royal, and Cormier has him die “suddenly at his farm on haute rivière in December 1716, in his early 60s”. The marriage of his son Alexandre on 7 February 1724 (Port-Royal register, Nova Scotia Archives, RG 1 vol. 26 p. 335) calls him the late François Brossard.

The line to Floyd

The line runs through Alexandre’s daughter Marguerite Broussard (born 1726) and her probable daughter Anne Trahan (died about 1774), whose parents no record names.