♂Justinien Dupuis

Justinien Dupuis (born 24 March 1725) was an Acadian of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) who married a kinswoman, Anne Girouard, in 1751 under a church dispensation for their blood relationship, and whose only known son survived the deportation of the Acadians to found a Louisiana family. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Dupuis, baptized at Port-Royal in January 1752.

Early life

Justinien was born on 24 March 1725 at Port-Royal, the son of Pierre Dupuis and Jeanne Richard, and was baptized there on 20 May 1725; the parish register of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) spells the family name Dupuy. His parents had married there on 6 January 1720: his father was the son of the late Pierre Dupuis and Magdelaine Landry, and his mother the daughter of the late Alexandre Richard and Elizabeth Petitpas. His godparents were Germain and Angélique Richard, children of Alexandre Richard and so his mother’s own brother and sister. The settlement had been under British rule since 1710, renamed Annapolis Royal, but its Acadian farming families kept their French Catholic parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, whose register records the family’s baptisms and marriages.

Marriage

On 3 February 1751, after three banns^W, Justinien married Anne Girouard, the daughter of Guillaume Girouard and Marie Bernard, at Port-Royal. The register records a dispensation from the impediment of kinship^W “du trois au quatre”, the third to the fourth degree. Church law of the time barred marriage between blood relatives out to the fourth degree unless a bishop or his delegate granted a dispensation; a third-to-fourth relationship meant the couple shared an ancestor three generations above one of them and four generations above the other. No record states how Justinien and Anne were related, but the family as reconstructed from the parish register and the Acadian censuses matches the register’s degree exactly: both descended from Francois Gautrot, an early settler of Port-Royal. Justinien’s line ran through his father Pierre, his grandfather Pierre Dupuis (born about 1671) and his great-grandmother Marie Gautrot, four generations; Anne’s through her father Guillaume Girouard and her grandmother Marguerite Gautrot, three. Two of those links rest on census households rather than on records naming parents: the censuses of 1671 and 1686 list the elder Pierre as a child in the household of Michel Dupuis and Marie Gautrot, and those of 1686 to 1701 list Guillaume in the household of Jacques Girouard and Marguerite Gautrot. The witnesses were Pierre Dupuis, Charles Dupuis, a Guillaume Giroir, and Basile Girouard; the entry does not say whether that Guillaume was the bride’s father or her brother of the same name. The same day his sister Theotiste married Anne’s brother Pierre Giroir, so that two Dupuis children married two Giroir children at one sitting.

In January 1752 the General List of Inhabitants of French Acadia placed him at Memramcook, with no wife or children listed beside his name. Their son Joseph was baptized at Port-Royal on 9 January 1752, with Pierre and Isabelle Dupuis as godparents. He is the only child of the couple found in the register, and he carried his grandfather’s name forward: his own son was named Pierre.

Exile

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana describes Joseph as an only son who followed his parents into the deportation of 1755, and that by then Justinien and Anne had already died in the exile. No register gives a place or date for either death; the compilation states only that they did not live to see their son reach Louisiana. The same compilation says that by 1764–65, when Joseph was in his early teens, it was his aunt Anne Gaudet, the widow of his uncle Michel Dupuis, who brought him and two girl cousins to the colony.

Joseph settled among the Acadian exiles at Cabahannocer (the present St. James Parish), where he married Marie Poirier, daughter of fellow Acadians Abraham Poirier and Marie-Josèphe Bourg, on 7 February 1774; the St. James marriage register names the groom’s parents as “Justinien & Anne Giruar, Acadians”. Their children were baptized at St. James into the 1790s; Cormier’s compilation has the family cross some time after 1800 to the Attakapas prairies, where Joseph died in December 1803, while a FamilySearch profile gives his death as 5 December 1803 at St. James.

Notes

Cormier’s compilation places Joseph’s birth about 1751; the Port-Royal register gives his baptism as 9 January 1752. The compilation also cites a second account of the family, from Bona Arsenault’s Généalogie des Acadiens, which makes Justinien a brother of Michel Dupuis and a son-in-law of Guillaume Girouard and Marie Bernard. The 1751 marriage register confirms the second point: it names Anne’s parents as Guillaume Girouard and Marie Bernard. Arsenault’s account further states that Justinien’s own family — not merely his son — was at St. James, Louisiana, in 1774, which would mean Justinien himself survived the exile and reached Louisiana, against Cormier’s narrative that he died in it. Cormier’s text does not reconcile the two, and no Louisiana register naming Justinien himself has been found. No record of his death has been found.