♀Madeleine Doucet

Madeleine Doucet was an Acadian woman of Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, the wife first of René Bernard and, after his death, of Pierre Doiron. A mason’s daughter from Port-Royal, she appears in the young settlement’s censuses from 1693 to 1714. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Bernard.

Early life

Madeleine was a daughter of Pierre Doucet, a mason, and Henriette Pelletret. She was presumably the unnamed daughter, three months old, in their household at the census of 1671, and in 1686 she was still at home, written Magdelaine, aged sixteen, with eight brothers and sisters. Her later ages, twenty-three in 1693, twenty-eight in 1698 and thirty in 1700, put her birth about 1670.

At Beaubassin

She married René Bernard, probably about 1689, and they made their home at Beaubassin, then a young settlement. In 1693 they had two sons, René, three, and Joseph, six months, with eight cattle, nine sheep, four hogs and a gun. By 1698 the farm carried twelve cattle on thirteen arpents^W and kept a servant; Joseph was gone from the roll, and the children were René, eight, Marie, five, and Jean-Baptiste, two. René still headed the household in 1700, and by 1707 there were five children at home, fifteen cattle, twelve sheep and nine hogs.

Second marriage

René was living in 1707 but dead by July 1713, when the record of their son René’s marriage at Beaubassin called him deceased. Madeleine married Pierre Doiron, perhaps about 1709. In 1714 she was his wife at Beaubassin, and the household had seven children: four of them, Jean-Baptiste, Anne, Marguerite and Michel, probably her children by René, and the other three, Joseph, Paul and Pierre, not assigned to either marriage. She is said to have had two sons by Doiron.

She was dead by 25 February 1740, when Pierre Doiron, her widower, married the widow Véronique Brassaux at Beaubassin; the marriage record calls Madeleine his deceased spouse. No record of her death itself is known.

Family

The couple is reckoned to have had seven or eight children, and their four sons are believed to have all stayed at Chignecto. The register of Beaubassin names her as the mother when René married in 1713 and when Anne and Jean-Baptiste married in 1719. Their son Michel married in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré on 20 June 1729, as the son of “Rene Bernard and Madelaine Doucet of the parish of Beaubassin”. Their daughter Marie, through whom the line runs, was most likely the Marie Bernard who married Guillaume Giroir about 1713 and raised her own family at Port-Royal.

Notes

Parents and birth

The compiled genealogies of Bona Arsenault, Léopold Lanctôt and Steven A. Cormier make her a daughter of Pierre Doucet and Henriette Pelletret; Lanctôt has her born at Port-Royal in 1671, which fits the unnamed daughter that year. The original census of 1686 has “Magdelaine 16” in their household, as Lanctôt prints it; the published transcription drops her and three of her brothers and sisters.

The censuses

The censuses of 1701 and 1703 count the children without naming them. Lanctôt prints the 1693 and 1698 entries alike, but with her age in 1693 as twenty-two. The 1714 census of Beaubassin (Library and Archives Canada, C-2572, copy page 248, household 14) writes Doiron as Douaron, lists “Magdelaine Doucet son espouse”, and then “Leurs enfans”: Jean Baptiste, Anne, Marguerite, Joseph, Michel, Paul and Pierre, without a surname. Arsenault gives the first five to Bernard children. Taken here are the four who married under René Bernard’s name at Beaubassin in 1719 and at Grand-Pré in 1729 (Jean-Baptiste, Anne, Marguerite and Michel); Joseph, Paul and Pierre are not assigned to either marriage.

Marriages and death

The marriage about 1689 and the seven or eight children are the compilers’ reckoning; Cormier counts four sons and two by Doiron. The compilers call her René’s widow at her second marriage, which Lanctôt dates to 1700 in one place and 1703 in another; the census of 1707, still listing René and Madeleine together, rules out both, and Cormier’s about 1709 fits. Lanctôt and Cormier have Doiron remarrying at Beaubassin, Lanctôt on 25 February 1740. The Beaubassin marriage index for that day (Drouin Institute, LAFRANCE act 6162095) has Pierre Doiron marrying Véronique Brassaux, a widow, and names Madeleine Doucet as the groom’s spouse, deceased, so she was dead by that date.

The Beaubassin marriages are known from the register’s index, which names the mother “Marguerite Doucet” at Marguerite’s marriage in 1719. Michel’s entry does not say whether either parent was living. Arsenault identifies Marie with Giroir’s wife, “fille de René et de Madeleine Doucet, de Beaubassin”; no record seen names that woman’s parents.