♂Laurent Granger

Laurent Granger (born about 1637) was an Englishman from Plymouth who settled at Port-Royal, in Acadia, where he made abjuration^W, formally renouncing the Protestant faith, in order to marry Marie Landry. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son René Granger (about 1675–1740).

From Plymouth to Port-Royal

Laurent Granger was born about 1637 at Plymouth, in Devon, England. He is said to have been a seaman who came to Acadia about 1659, in the years when Port-Royal was in English hands, between its capture in 1654 and its return to France under the Treaty of Breda^W.

At Port-Royal he married Marie Landry, a daughter of René Landry and Perrine Bourg, about 1666, after giving up his Protestant faith for the Catholic one. A century later, in exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, his great-grandchildren set down their family histories in 1767, and one after another they still named him as Laurent Granger “né à Plymouth en Angleterre” (born at Plymouth in England), married at Port-Royal “après avoir fait abjuration” (after making abjuration).

The young couple probably made their first home in 1667 near her parents, in a small cluster of Bourg and Landry houses on the north side of the rivière Dauphin, the river now called the Annapolis, across from the fort.

Life at Port-Royal

In 1671 Laurent, thirty-four, and Marie, twenty-four, had two children, Marguerite, three, and Pierre, nine months, and farmed four arpents^W of plowable land with five head of cattle and six ewes. The family grew over the next twenty years: the couple most likely had eight children, born between 1668 and 1688, among them René, born about 1675. In 1693 five of the children were still at home, and in 1700 Laurent, counted then as fifty-seven, was still at Port-Royal with Marie and their three youngest, Claude, Anne and Laurent.

Laurent Granger died at Port-Royal some time after 1700, and Marie Landry died there too.

Notes

His origin

The declarations made on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 by several of his great-grandchildren and their families agree that he was born at Plymouth in England and married Marie Landry at Port-Royal after making abjuration, and that both died there; one spells the town “Plimouth”. A printed English translation of one declaration gives Falmouth instead of Plymouth.

Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens calls him a “matelot” (seaman), born in 1637, from Plymouth, who arrived in Acadia about 1659; a transcription of the census of 1671 also calls him a seaman. Elsewhere in the same work Arsenault puts his arrival in 1657, on one of Thomas Temple’s ships. Frère J.-Hervé Béliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families repeats Arsenault’s account and gives the census of 1671, with the two children, the cattle, the ewes and the land. John Mack Faragher’s history of the Acadians, A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), writes that “Marie Landry married Lawrence Granger, a sailor from Plymouth, after both men renounced Protestantism”, places the couple’s first home on the rivière Dauphin in 1667, and cites a 1984 article by René Perron that offers evidence of a Huguenot background.

The marriage

No record of the marriage survives, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. Arsenault gives “about 1666”. One of the 1767 declarations dates the wedding after the Treaty of Breda “of July 31, 1661”; the treaty was signed on 31 July 1667, a date that fits the first child, Marguerite, born about 1668.

His age

His age on the rolls does not agree: thirty-four in 1671 gives a birth about 1637, but fifty in 1693 and fifty-seven in 1700 both point to about 1643. Another family tree gives him the dates 1643–1703. This page keeps 1637, from the census of 1671 and Arsenault.

The children

Arsenault names eight children, from Marguerite in 1668 to Laurent in 1688. The census of 1693 shows Jacques, René, Claude, Anne and Laurent in the household, and the marriage of the daughter Marie to Pierre La Noue at Port-Royal on 21 November 1702 names her parents as Laurent Granger and Marie Landry. The censuses put René’s birth about 1675; Arsenault gives 1676.