♀Madeleine Michel

Madeleine Michel (born 5 August 1712) was an Acadian of Port-Royal who went through the deportation with her husband, Joseph Guilbeau, followed him to Louisiana in 1765 and was widowed there within months of arriving. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Charles Guilbeau (1736–1809).

Early life and marriage

Madeleine was born at Port-Royal at two in the morning on 5 August 1712 and baptized the same day, the daughter of Jacques Michel and Catherine Comeau. Her godparents were Jean Baptiste Landry and Magdelaine Petitot, and the priest was Justinien Durand, a Récollet^W friar.

On 2 January 1733, at Port-Royal, Joseph Guilbeau, son of Charles Guilbeau and Anne Bourg, married Madeleine Michel, daughter of Jacques Michel and Catherine Comeau. Their children, from Marie in 1733 to Basile in 1752, were baptized at Port-Royal, among them Charles, born on 27 November 1736.

Exile

In December 1755, during the deportation of the Acadians, the family is said to have been put aboard the transport Pembroke, bound for North Carolina. At sea the passengers, her husband among them, seized the ship, sailed it to Baie Sainte-Marie and in January 1756 into the lower Saint John River. Cormier calls it the only known case of Acadian exiles taking a British vessel from its crew. The family wintered at Sainte-Anne-du-Pays-Bas, up the Saint John, and by the late 1750s had reached the refugee camp at Restigouche, at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs, where Joseph served as a lieutenant of the Acadian militia. Two of the daughters married there, Anne in February 1760 and Marie in January 1761. By August 1763 Joseph, his wife and six of their children were prisoners of the British at Halifax.

Louisiana and widowhood

From Halifax the family sailed with the party of Acadians led by Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil, by way of Saint-Domingue^W, and reached Louisiana in February 1765: Joseph, aged 55, and Madeleine, 53, with their three youngest children, and with them a married son and several married daughters and their families. After a short stay at New Orleans they followed the Broussards west to the Bayou Teche.

That summer and autumn an epidemic swept the new settlements and killed dozens of Acadians. Joseph was one of its first victims and died near the present St. Martinville on 1 September 1765. Many of the Teche Acadians fled the sickness to Cabanocé on the Mississippi, but his widow and children stayed on the Teche. Madeleine seems to have made her home with her two youngest sons, François and Jean; she was still counted as a widow in the Attakapas in 1777. When and where she died is not known.

Notes

Sources for her life

Her birth, baptism and parents are in the Port-Royal register, which records that she was “née aujourd’huy à deux heures après minuit”, born today at two hours after midnight. Her marriage on 2 January 1733, which names both sets of parents, the baptisms of her children at Port-Royal, and the marriages of her daughters Anne (5 February 1760) and Marie (25 January 1761) at Restigouche are also in the parish registers. The exile, the Halifax prisoner list of 1763, the arrival in Louisiana and her age of 53 are as Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives them. So are the censuses that follow her widowhood: in 1769 her sons François and Jean lived with their widowed mother, in 1774 a widow Guilbeau was counted with a child, and in 1777 she was entered as Magdeleine, widow Guilbeau, with Jean. A genealogy of the family published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1992 calls her Madeleine (Marguerite) Michel and gives her birth as 1712. Jean, born about 1756, is known from Cormier and that article.

Her parents

Cormier calls her father Jacques Michel dit Saint-Michel. The early censuses of Port-Royal list Jacques Michel with his wife Catherine Comeau in 1693, 1698 and 1701, and Madeleine’s baptism names Catherine Comeau as her mother.

The other Joseph Guilbeau

Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians has her husband remarry, in 1769, to a Catherine Comeau. Cormier shows that this was his nephew Joseph Guilbeau, born in 1730, who married Catherine Comeau, widow Lafaye, at Cabanocé in October 1767; Madeleine was alive and a widow in 1777.