♂Joseph Dupuis

Joseph Dupuis (baptized 9 January 1752 – December 1803) was an Acadian exile, baptized at Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) three years before the deportation, who settled among fellow Acadians on the Mississippi at Cabahannocer^W, in present St. James Parish. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Dupuis.

Early life and exile

Joseph was baptized on 9 January 1752 in the parish of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal), the son of Justinien Dupuis and Anne Girouard; his godparents were Pierre Dupuis and Isabelle Dupuis. The same parish register records his parents’ marriage there on 3 February 1751, eleven months before his baptism, and names all four of his grandparents: Pierre Dupuis and Jeanne Richard on his father’s side, and Guillaume Giroir and Marie Bernard on his mother’s. The St. James marriage register of 1774 names the same parents, and a son was named Pierre.

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Joseph was his parents’ only son; he followed them into the deportation of 1755, and by the time he reached his early teens both had died in the exile. He was brought to Louisiana in 1764 or 1765 by his aunt Anne Gaudet, the widow of his uncle Michel Dupuis, together with two girl cousins. A different account Cormier cites from the same compilation, drawn from Bona Arsenault^W’s Généalogie des Acadiens, instead has Justinien’s whole family reaching St. James by 1774, which would mean Joseph’s parents survived the exile after all. The two accounts have not been reconciled.

Marriage and family

Joseph married Marie Poirier, daughter of fellow Acadians Abraham Poirier and Marie Josèphe Bourg, at St. James on 7 February 1774. Their children included Pierre, baptized 8 December 1778, and a daughter Rosalie baptized in 1781; Cormier’s compilation credits the couple with several more children, some of whose daughters married into the Thériot family. The family’s children were still being baptized at St. James in the 1790s, and three of them married there in 1799 and 1800; Cormier’s compilation has the family cross the Atchafalaya Basin some time after that to the Attakapas prairies, one of the moves that gave upper Bayou Teche a settlement of Dupuis families of its own, and has Joseph die there in December 1803, while a FamilySearch profile gives his death as 5 December 1803 at St. James.

Notes

Earlier accounts, following Cormier, placed Joseph’s birth about 1751, probably at Annapolis Royal; the Port-Royal baptism of January 1752 settles the place and narrows the date. His parents’ deaths in exile and his crossing to Louisiana with his aunt still rest on Cormier’s compiled narrative, not a register checked directly, and the tension over whether his parents died in the exile or reached Louisiana themselves is unresolved. Arsenault’s naming of Anne Girouard’s parents as Guillaume Girouard and Marie Bernard, part of that second account, is borne out by the Port-Royal register. A burial record Cormier cites gives Joseph’s age at death as 50, a year or two short of what the baptism implies. Cormier’s narrative places his death at Attakapas, while a FamilySearch profile linked to his son’s own record gives St. James as the place of death instead.