♂Joseph Bourgeois

Joseph Bourgeois (born about 1736) was an Acadian exile who married in the refugee camp at Restigouche, on the Baie des Chaleurs, in November 1759, four years after the deportation, and was later a settler of Spanish Louisiana on the Mississippi at St. James. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Celeste Bourgeois.

Origins

Joseph was the son of Paul Bourgeois and Marie Josèphe Brun, as a compiled genealogy of the Acadians gives. The couple’s marriage at Port-Royal in 1727 is on record, but his own parentage rests on his 1759 marriage act and that genealogy, and the first name of his father in the act is in question; the notes to Paul Bourgeois’s life set this out. The act gives the family’s place as Malpeque, a settlement on the north shore of Île Saint-Jean^W (now Prince Edward Island), then a French colony that took in many Acadians in the years before the deportation. No record of his baptism has been found, and the register gives no age; his age in a Louisiana census of 1766 puts his birth about 1736.

Marriage at Restigouche

On 5 November 1759 Joseph married Marie Giroir at the mission of Sainte-Anne de Ristigouche. The act, written by the Récollet^W missionary Father Étienne, names the bride as Marie Giroire, the daughter of Claude Giroir and Magdeleine Vincent, “de la Cadie”, and the witnesses as Jean Arseno, Jean Hébert and a third man. Marie was already a widow: the act describes her as the widow of Aimé Laurot, so she had been married once before, while still in her late teens or early twenties. Her first marriage has not been found, and the records do not say when or how her first husband died.

The mission stood at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs, where several hundred Acadians who had escaped the deportation of 1755, or had fled Île Saint-Jean after its fall in 1758, gathered in a refugee camp under French protection until the surrender of 1760^W and 1761. A published transcript of a ration list of the Restigouche refugees in 1760 includes a “Joseph Bourgeois fils” (“the son”), which may be him; the list does not say more.

Louisiana

The records do not show how the couple made their way from the Baie des Chaleurs to Louisiana. By 1766 they were on the Mississippi between St. James and Donaldsonville: a published transcript of the census of that year lists Joseph aged 30, his wife Marie Giroir aged 28, and a daughter Marie, whose age the printed transcript gives as 14, a figure that does not fit a marriage made in 1759. Published abstracts of the St. James and Ascension registers name further children of the couple, baptized or married between 1781 and 1803.

A compiled history of the Acadians in Louisiana by Steven Cormier places Joseph in the Cabanocé census of 1769, on lot 96 on the east bank, aged 33, with his wife Marie, 32, and an orphan girl in the household. The same history places him in the St.-Jacques census of 1777, on the east bank, aged 41, with Marie, 40, two daughters, Scholastique and Celeste, and two orphans in the household. For 1779 it gives a St.-Jacques census count of five free persons and four enslaved people in his household; the abstract names none of them and gives no ages or sexes for the four enslaved people.

When his daughter Celeste married Valentin Landry at St. James on 27 November 1792, the register, kept in Spanish, named her Celestina, the daughter of Josef Bourgeois and Maria Giroar, and Joseph was named again as the maternal grandfather at the baptism of her son Adelard in 1800.

He died at St. James before his burial there on 29 December 1812. The burial entry gives his age as about eighty, names him as a native of Acadia, and names no wife.

Notes

In the 1766 census Joseph is listed in the same run of entries as a Pierre, 20, and a Paul, 34, Bourgeois; a compiled genealogy makes that Paul a son of this couple. No Bourgeois baptism at Beaubassin has been found for 1735 to 1739, the years of his birth.

The burial entry’s age, about eighty, would put his birth near 1732. The census ages (30 in 1766, 33 in 1769 and 41 in 1777) put it about 1736, and this page keeps that estimate; the burial age runs high.