♂Joseph Brun

Joseph Brun (born 20 March 1719) was an Acadian of Port-Royal whose daughter Agnes was baptised in February 1743, five months before he and her mother were married in church. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Agnes Brun (died 1809).

Life

Joseph was born at Port-Royal on 20 March 1719, a son of Claude Brun and Cécile Dugas, and was baptized by Claude Teriot, with Joseph La Noue and Marie Joseph Brun as his godparents. He grew up in a large household: his parents had at least twelve children baptized between 1710 and 1736, and two of his brothers, Simon and the elder Michel, died young.

On 2 February 1743 a daughter of Joseph Brun and Marguerite Pellerin, christened Agnes Eulalie, was baptized in Joseph’s house by Jean Brun. On 16 April the priest, Desenclaves, supplied the rest of the baptismal ceremonies and wrote her down as “fille legitime de joseph brun et de marguerite pelerin”; her godparents were Marguerite’s parents, Bernard Pellerin and Marguerite Gaudet. On 29 July 1743, after the banns^W had been read on three Sundays in a row, Joseph Brun and Marguerite Pellerin were married at Port-Royal, the bride’s father Bernard Pellerin, Pierre Suret, Pierre Landry and Etienne Robicheau standing as witnesses. The register calls Agnes legitimate although her parents’ wedding came five months after her baptism; the records do not explain why.

The couple probably had at least four more children: Jean in 1745, Nathalie in 1746, Anne about 1749 and Joseph in 1758. On 27 July 1757 two of the daughters, Nathalie aged eleven and Anne aged eight, were buried on the same day at Notre-Dame de Québec. Joseph Brun had died before 12 January 1767, the day his son Jean married at Québec, where the marriage act calls him deceased; the younger Joseph is said to have married at Cap-Saint-Ignace in 1784. Agnes is most likely the Agnes Brun who, as the widow of Paul Doucet, married Olivier Thibodeau in the Attakapas country of Spanish Louisiana about 1769 and died there on 24 October 1809.

Lines of descent

Joseph reaches Floyd by two separate lines, both on Floyd’s mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990) and both through Agnes. They part with her sons Cyrille Thibodeaux (1773–1829) and Nicolas Thibodeaux (1771–1817), and meet again in Floyd’s grandmother, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux, each descend from Agnes.

Notes

Agnes of 1743 and Agnes of Attakapas

The 1743 baptism names Joseph and Marguerite as Agnes’s parents, and her godparents were Marguerite’s own parents. That she is the Agnes Brun who died in Louisiana in 1809 is an identification, not a record. Cormier’s synthesis of the Thibodeaux family calls the Louisiana Agnes “daughter of perhaps Joseph BRUN and Marguerite PELLERIN of Annapolis Royal”. In 1773 she and Olivier Thibodeau stood godparents to Frederic, a son of Grégoire Pellerin and Cécile Prejean; the Port-Royal register has a Grégoire, son of Bernard Pellerin and Marguerite Gaudet, baptized in 1724 and married to Cécile Prejean in 1752, which would make the child Agnes’s first cousin. An Attakapas Gazette compiler in 1971 gave Joseph Brun and Marguerite Pellerin as the parents of a different woman, Anne Brun, wife of Jean-Baptiste Broussard; she had a son born about 1752 and so cannot be the child baptized in 1743. Against the identification, the Louisiana Agnes was said to be about 70 at her death in 1809, which points to a birth about 1739, four years too early.

The other children

Jean (1745) and Joseph (1758), with their marriages at Québec on 12 January 1767 to Marie-Josèphe Brisard and at Cap-Saint-Ignace on 8 November 1784 to Félicité Saucier, come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 478), a compiled genealogy. Jean’s own marriage act at Notre-Dame de Québec, which writes the name Brunete, names his parents as the late Joseph and Marguerite Pelerin. Arsenault gives Anne’s birth as 1752, but the Port-Royal baptism of an Anne Brun on 14 April 1752 names her parents as Joseph Brun and Magdelaine Pelerin; Anne’s burial at Québec on 27 July 1757, aged eight, puts her birth about 1749.

Names and a namesake

The marriage act spells the bride Marguerite Pelerin and her mother Marguerite Godet. Arsenault’s genealogy also has a Joseph Brun, son of Abraham Brun and Anne Pellerin, who married Françoise Comeau, widow of Pierre Doucet, in 1752; his parents show he is a different man.