♂Jérôme Darois

Jérôme Darois (about 1670 – about 1750) was a settler from Paris who married a daughter of Port-Royal, raised a large family at Minas in Acadia and died at Petitcoudiac a few years before the deportation that carried his widow to Virginia. He was the husband of Marie Garault (born about 1677), who was the half-sister of Emmanuel Hebert (1656–1744), the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Life

He came from Paris, where he was probably born about 1670, and reached Acadia in the 1690s. At Port-Royal, probably about 1695, he married Marie Garault, a daughter of Port-Royal. The couple settled at Saint-Charles-des-Mines, on the Rivière des Habitants, and are said to have had ten children, five sons and five daughters.

In 1706, during Queen Anne’s War^W, Jérôme is said to have been captured by the British at Minas and held with his family as prisoners of war in Boston. After the war the family came home to the Rivière des Habitants, and later moved on to Petitcoudiac, near Beaubassin^W, where Jérôme died about 1750, at about eighty.

His widow’s exile

Marie outlived him, and in the deportation of the Acadians she was carried to Virginia, where she died. In 1767, when the Acadian exiles on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off Brittany, declared their ancestry at Sauzon, their son-in-law Claude Pitre named his wife’s father as “Jerome Darois from Paris, who had married at Port Royal Marie Gareau”, and said that he “died at the Riviere Petitcodiac in Beaubassin” and that she “died in Virginia”.

Notes

Sources

His birth in Paris about 1670, the marriage about 1695, the ten children, the home at Saint-Charles-des-Mines on the Rivière des Habitants, his death at Petitcoudiac about 1750 and his widow’s death in Virginia come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, whose list of the children runs from Isabelle, about 1697, to Simon, 1725. The capture in 1706, the captivity in Boston, the return home, the move to Petitcoudiac and his age at death come from Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which calls him “a late 1690s arrival” and places the ten children between 1698 and 1719, later than Arsenault’s marriage of about 1695. An index of the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines names Jérôme Darois and Marie Gareau as the parents of Elisabet Darois at her marriage to René Trahan on 8 November 1717.

The 1767 declarations

Claude Pitre’s declaration, printed in translation in the Attakapas Gazette (1982), gives his wife Magdelaine Darois as born at Mines, in the parish of Saint-Charles, in 1715; Arsenault gives 1719. A second declaration in the same series, by Sylvestre Trahan, who had married Ursule Darois in 1747, gives the same parents, the same death at the Petitcodiac River and the same death in Virginia. Both name Marie Gareau’s mother as Anne Gaudet; Arsenault and the family tree give Marie Gaudet.