♂Joseph Theriot

Joseph Theriot (died before April 1766) was an Acadian of the Minas Basin and Cobequid^W who did not live to see Louisiana: by the time the first census of the Acadian settlers on the Mississippi was taken in April 1766, his widow was there with four of their sons. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Thomas Theriot (about 1745 – before 1812).

Early life and marriage

Joseph was the son of Pierre Theriot and Marie Bourg. His birth falls before the surviving registers of the Minas parish begin; a compiled online family tree places it in 1699 and his parents’ marriage the year before at Port-Royal.

On 14 October 1725, in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré, he married Francoise Melancon, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Pierre Melancon and Marie Blanchard. Six witnesses stood at the wedding, among them the bride’s relations Jean and Pierre Melanson and Rene Blanchard; neither Joseph nor Francoise could write, and both signed with a mark.

Cobequid

By 1731 the couple were “habitans de Cobeguit”, settlers at Cobequid, at the head of the Minas Basin. Their son Estienne was born there on 9 June 1731 and baptized five weeks later. Their son Thomas was born about 1745. A compiled online tree credits the couple with eleven children, born between 1726 and 1753; only some of them have been confirmed against the registers.

Île Saint-Jean

About 1750 the family left Cobequid for Île Saint-Jean^W, the French-held island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that is now Prince Edward Island. Their son Paul was born there on 6 October 1751 and baptized the same day, the family living “dans la rivière de Ouest”. In the spring of 1752 the king’s surveyor, the Sieur de la Roque, found them on the Rivière de l’Ouest: Joseph, a ploughman of fifty-three, two years on the island, with Françoise, forty-four, and seven children at home, two oxen, two cows, a heifer, a calf and three pigs, on land granted to them by word of mouth. Their married daughter Françoise-Josèphe and her husband, Charles Henry, had settled on the same lot, and Joseph meant to move on to Bedeque and leave the land to his son-in-law.

Exile and Louisiana

Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians of Louisiana traces the family’s course through the exile. It says that they escaped the British roundup of the island in 1758 and found refuge on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore, and that they became prisoners of war in Nova Scotia in the early 1760s. In 1765, it says, Françoise Melanson, “widow of Joseph Thériot of Cobeguit”, reached New Orleans from Halifax by way of Cap-Français with four sons. By 9 April 1766, when the first census of the Acadian settlers at St. James, on the Mississippi (the Acadian Coast^W), was taken, Joseph was dead: his wife is listed there as “Francoise Melancon, widow Theriot, age 57”, with four of their sons. Cormier has her arriving a widow, so Joseph died before the family reached Louisiana; no record found gives the place or date. A compiled online tree gives his death at St. James on 9 April 1766, which is the date of the census itself.

Notes

The printed abstract of the Grand-Pré register gives the marriage as 4 October 1724, but a copy of the register, the Drouin index and Stephen White’s dictionary of Acadian families all read 14 October 1725, and the abstract’s only other entry from the same register page is dated 8 October 1725. The same parish records a second couple of the same name, Joseph Terriot and Marguerite Melanson, with children baptized in the 1720s; they were a different family. Cormier’s compilation gives Françoise’s age as 56 in 1765, where the St. James census of 1766 gives 57; the two agree with her baptism of 1709.