♂Joseph Guilbeau

Joseph Guilbeau (1710 – 1 September 1765) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who lived through the deportation of his people and, at fifty-five, brought his wife and most of his children to Louisiana in 1765, only to die on the Bayou Teche within months of arriving. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Charles Guilbeau (1736–1809).

Port-Royal

Joseph was probably born at Port-Royal early in 1710, the youngest son of Charles Guilbeau and Anne Bourg. In the autumn of that year a British and New England force captured the town in the Siege of Port Royal^W, and he grew up in a colony that had passed to Britain, its capital renamed Annapolis Royal.

On 2 January 1733, at Port-Royal, Joseph Guilbeau, son of Charles Guilbeau and Anne Bourg, married Madeleine Michel, daughter of Jacques Michel and Catherine Comeau. Their children, from Marie in 1733 to Basile in 1752, were baptized at Port-Royal, among them Charles, born on 27 November 1736.

Exile

In December 1755, during the deportation of the Acadians, the family is said to have been put aboard the transport Pembroke, bound for North Carolina. At sea the passengers, Joseph among them, seized the ship, sailed it to Baie Sainte-Marie and in January 1756 into the lower Saint John River. Cormier calls it the only known case of Acadian exiles taking a British vessel from its crew. The family wintered at Sainte-Anne-du-Pays-Bas, up the Saint John, and by the late 1750s had reached the refugee camp at Restigouche, at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs.

At Restigouche Joseph served as a lieutenant of the Acadian militia, which is probably how he came to be called Joseph Guilbeau dit L’Officier, “the officer”. When the camp’s Acadians were counted on 24 October 1760 he was entered as a lieutenant, with a family of seven. Two of the daughters married there, Anne in February 1760 and Marie in January 1761. By August 1763 Joseph, his wife and six of their children were prisoners of the British at Halifax.

Louisiana

From Halifax the family sailed with the party of Acadians led by Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil, by way of Saint-Domingue^W, and reached Louisiana in February 1765: Joseph, aged 55, and Madeleine, 53, with their three youngest children, and with them a married son and several married daughters and their families. On 4 April 1765, at New Orleans, Joseph was one of eight “chefs des Acadiens” who signed a contract with Antoine Bernard Dauterive, a former infantry captain who owned large tracts in the Attakapas. Dauterive was to furnish each family with five cows and their calves and a bull for six years, the increase to be divided equally between him and the Acadians. That spring Joseph also tried to exchange the family’s card money^W for Louisiana currency, and then followed the Broussards west to the Bayou Teche.

That summer and autumn an epidemic swept the new settlements and killed dozens of Acadians, Beausoleil and his brother Alexandre among them. Joseph was one of its first victims and died near the present St. Martinville on 1 September 1765. Many of the Teche Acadians fled the sickness to Cabanocé on the Mississippi, but his widow and children stayed on the Teche.

Notes

Sources for his life

His year of birth comes from Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians, which places him, born in 1710, among the children of Charles Guilbeau and Anne Bourg; Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives the day as 7 February 1710 and his baptism as 27 March 1710 at Port-Royal, and calls him the youngest son. His marriage on 2 January 1733, which names both sets of parents, the baptisms of his children at Port-Royal, and the marriages of his daughters Anne (5 February 1760) and Marie (25 January 1761) at Restigouche are in the parish registers. The voyage of the Pembroke, the winter on the Saint John, his militia rank, the Restigouche list of 1760, the Halifax prisoner list of 1763, the arrival in Louisiana, the ages of 55 and 53, and the card money are as Cormier gives them; Cormier also calls the Pembroke affair the only instance in which Acadian exiles seized a British vessel. That his name L’Officier came from his militia rank is Cormier’s suggestion, not a statement of any record. The contract with Dauterive survives in the archives of the Cabildo at New Orleans and is described by Lyle Givens Williams, as quoted in a genealogy of the family published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1992, which also places his death in the epidemic that killed Beausoleil.

Date of death

The 1992 Attakapas Gazette genealogy gives his death as 1 September 1765, near St. Martinville, citing the first volume of the St. Martinville church registers. Cormier, citing the same entry through a published abstract, gives his death as 31 August 1765 and his burial as the next day, so 1 September may be the date of burial. The abstract calls him Joseph dit l’Officier but names neither his parents nor his wife.

The other Joseph Guilbeau

Arsenault has Joseph remarry, in 1769, to a Catherine Comeau born in 1728. Cormier shows that this was a different man: Joseph’s nephew Joseph Guilbeau, born at Port-Royal in December 1730, son of Charles Guilbeau and Marie-Anne Comeau, who married Catherine Comeau, widow Lafaye, at Cabanocé on 2 October 1767. Madeleine Michel outlived her husband and was still counted as a widow in the Attakapas in 1777.