♂Jean Trahan

Jean Trahan (18 March 1719 – 10 April 1799) was an Acadian of Grand-Pré who lost his wife in the years of war and captivity after the deportation of 1755 and in 1765 brought his three children to Louisiana, among the first Acadians to settle on the Bayou Teche. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through his daughter Anne Trahan (died about 1774).

Acadia

Jean was born at Grand-Pré, in the Minas country, on 18 March 1719, the son of René Trahan and Isabelle Davoy, and is said to have been baptized there on 15 April. At twenty-five he married Marguerite Broussard, a daughter of Alexandre Broussard and Marguerite Thibodeau, most likely at Beaubassin^W, on 26 December 1744. The couple seem to have made their home at Petitcoudiac, in present-day New Brunswick, where their children Madeleine, Germain and Marguerite were born between about 1750 and 1755.

When the British began deporting the Acadians in 1755, the family is said to have escaped the roundup, but by the early 1760s they were prisoners of war in Nova Scotia. Marguerite died before August 1763, when British officials counted the Acadian prisoners at Halifax and listed Jean as a widower with three children.

Louisiana

Early in 1765 Jean and his children, Madeleine, then fifteen, Germain, thirteen, and Marguerite, ten, left Halifax with the party of Acadians led by Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil, his late wife’s uncle. They sailed by way of Saint-Domingue^W, reached New Orleans in February, and after a short stay in the city followed the Broussards to the Bayou Teche, in the Attakapas District^W, where the party helped found a new Acadian settlement. Anne Trahan, who came in the same party as the wife of Charles Guilbeau, was probably a daughter of the couple too.

Jean never remarried. In 1766 he was counted in the district of the Pointe, apparently with his son, a daughter and two other men in the house. By 1769 the family kept five cows with their calves, two oxen, two horses, a foal and ten pigs, and on 9 December that year Jean made his mark on the oath of allegiance to the Spanish king. Two years later he had 18 cattle and nine horses on 12 arpents^W of land he held without title.

By 1774 the household had emptied, and he was counted with no wife or children in the house. By 1777 his son Germain, then twenty-five, was living with him again, and the two men had 40 cattle, 13 horses and 30 hogs. Jean outlived his only son, who died at St.-Gabriel, on the Mississippi, in September 1784. He was still head of a household in the census of 1785, and he died in the Attakapas country, in what is now St. Martin Parish, on 10 April 1799. The priest who recorded his burial gave his age as 95; he was eighty.

Notes

How his life is known

Jean’s life rests on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which abstracts the Halifax prisoner list of August 1763, the Attakapas censuses from 1766 to 1785, the oath of allegiance of 1769 and his burial. Cormier takes the dates of his birth and baptism from the Grand-Pré register as published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, volume 1a, and calls the 1719 date “verified by a baptismal record at Grand-Pré”. That volume also holds the marriage of René Trahan and Elizabeth Darois at Saint-Charles-des-Mines on 8 November 1717; Cormier names Jean’s mother Élisabeth Darois dit Jérôme, and the family tree carries her as Isabelle Davoy. The marriage of 1744, Marguerite’s parentage and the children’s births, which Cormier places “probably” at Petitcoudiac, also come from his history. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians names Jean and Marguerite Broussard as the parents of Madeleine, Marguerite and Germain, and gives Germain’s birth as 1758, against Cormier’s about 1752.

His age

The ages given for Jean in his last years drift upward: the census of 1777 gave him 60, when he was 58, and the burial gave him 95. Cormier counts him as 46 on arrival in 1765 in one place and 47 in another.

Anne’s parentage

No record names Anne Trahan’s parents. She is placed in this family by an argument put forward in 2001 and since taken up by online family trees: Jean’s son Germain stood godfather to Anne’s daughter Emilie in 1774, a Marguerite Trahan was godmother to her son Jean Charles in 1772, and Charles Guilbeau witnessed Germain’s marriage in 1781, as Donald J. Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records abstracts those entries. Cormier counts Anne in the 1765 party apart from Jean’s children, as the wife of Charles Guilbeau, and Bona Arsenault lists only Madeleine, Germain and Marguerite as children of the couple. Cormier gives Anne’s age as 26 in 1765, which would place her birth about 1739, before Jean and Marguerite married; the census of 1771 makes her 23, born about 1748, which fits the marriage.