♀Magdelaine Dugas

Magdelaine Dugas (born about 1664) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, a daughter of the gunsmith Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet and the wife of Germain Bourgeois, one of three marriages that joined her family to the family of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois. She was the sister of Claude Dugas (born about 1652), the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Life

Magdelaine was seven at the census of 1671, one of the six unmarried children in her parents’ household, which also held two married daughters. Next to her in the list stood her younger sister Marie, six, and her brother Abraham, ten. Her sister Anne had already married Charles Bourgeois, a son of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan, and her brother Claude later married Charles’s sister Françoise. Magdelaine herself married Charles’s brother Germain.

No record of the marriage has been found. A transcription of the 1686 census of Beaubassin lists “Germain BOURGEOIS 34, Magdelaine DUGAS 22”, so the couple had left Port-Royal for Beaubassin, on the Chignecto isthmus, by then. No children of the couple are on record, and no record of her death has been found.

Notes

Her birth year comes from her age on the 1671 roll; the transcription of 1686 gives 22, two years younger than the 1671 age allows. The roll spells the family name Dugast; the children appear in later records as Dugas or Dugast. Her marriage rests on the Beaubassin transcription and on Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians; the 1686 census is known from the transcription alone. A transcription of the register of Port-Royal for 7 February 1708 names Germain Bourgeois and Magdelaine Dugast as the parents of an Anne Bourgeois, who married François Girouard; the match rests on the names alone.