♂Joseph Trahant

Joseph Trahant (1708 – September 1756) was an Acadian of Pigiguit^W who died a prisoner of the Deportation, at Falmouth, England. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Chrysostome Trahan (born 1740).

Acadia and marriage

Joseph was born at Pigiguit, in the parish of l’Assomption, Acadia, a son of Guillaume Trahan and Jacqueline Benoit. The sworn declaration that his sons made before French authorities at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 gives his birth as 1708; the register entry of his marriage gives his age as about thirty, which would put his birth around 1701. On 5 November 1731, at the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, he married Marie Blanchard, a daughter of Rene Blanchard and Anne Landry. The couple settled at Pigiguit, where their children were born, among them Joseph, Pierre-Simon (born 25 March 1735), Jean Chrysostome (1740), Aimée (1745) and Paul (September 1751).

Deportation and death

The family was expelled from Nova Scotia in the deportation that began in 1755. According to the 1767 declaration, Joseph’s father died that September at Pigiguit, and his mother died in Virginia the same year. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana has their son Jean Chrysostome exiled to Virginia in 1755 and deported from there to England in 1756, and the declaration places the deaths of both Joseph and Marie at Falmouth in 1756, Joseph in September. They were buried two days apart in the churchyard of St Gluvias at Penryn, on the edge of Falmouth, where the parish register enters “Mary Trahan” on 1 September and “Joseph Trahan” on 3 September 1756, each as “a neutral”, the English name for the Acadian prisoners. Three of the couple’s surviving sons married into the same extended Granger family of Rivière-aux-Canards while still held at Falmouth, according to the same declaration: Joseph married Anne Granger there on 22 August 1757, and Pierre-Simon married her sister Marie-Josèphe on 18 November 1758, the two being daughters of François Granger and Anne Landry; Jean Chrysostome married Anne, a daughter of a separate Granger couple, Jean-Baptiste Granger and Magdeleine Landry, on 10 January 1763 — three weddings among fellow exiles awaiting resettlement. Jean Chrysostome, through whom this line continues, was later repatriated to France and, according to Cormier, after more than two decades of exile reached Louisiana in 1785.

Notes

The 1767 Belle-Île declaration gives the marriage year as 1732; the parish marriage register itself dates it to 5 November 1731, and the register date is followed here. The same register entry gives Joseph’s age as about thirty, which would put his birth near 1701, a few years earlier than the declaration’s 1708. The Penryn burials are known from a published transcription of the St Gluvias register, not from the register itself. The same list has a second Joseph Trahan buried on 30 August 1756; he is taken to be another man, since the declaration dates this Joseph’s death to September. Cormier’s account of the family’s route to England (Virginia first) and of Jean Chrysostome’s voyage to Louisiana rests on his compilation alone. Family trees carry Joseph’s father, Guillaume Trahan, back a further generation to a Guillaume Trahan who came from France; no record confirms that link, and it is not followed here.