♀Magdeleine Brun

Magdeleine Brun (baptized 25 January 1645) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, baptized in western France, who at about twenty married Guillaume Trahan, one of the colony’s first settlers and a widower at least thirty-five years older than herself, and after his death married a second husband also many years her senior. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three separate lines of descent, through her son Guillaume Trahan, her daughter Marie Trahan (born about 1672) and her son Jean-Charles Trahan (born about 1668).

Birth and family

Magdeleine was the eldest of the five children of Vincent Brun and Renée Brode counted in the census of 1671. She was baptized at La Chaussée, in the Loudunais in western France, on 25 January 1645, entered in the register as “Magdeleine Brin fille de Vincent Brin et de Vincende Braude”, with Vincent Braud as her godfather; her sister Andree was baptized in the same parish in August 1646. When the family crossed to Acadia is not recorded.

Guillaume Trahan

Magdeleine married Guillaume Trahan at Port-Royal before 1667. He was by then a widower, who had come to Acadia in 1636 aboard the Saint-Jehan, an edge-tool smith from Bourgueil traveling with his first wife and two children. The census of 1671 counted Magdeleine twice, at twenty-five both times: among the married children in her parents’ entry, and in her husband’s household, where the census-taker wrote Guillaume down as a smith “aage de soixante ans ou environ” with three sons, the eldest four. Three daughters followed: Marie about 1672, Jeanne about 1674 and Magdelaine about 1677. The census of 1678 lists the couple at Port-Royal with three boys and three girls, on four acres with six cattle.

Second marriage

Guillaume died before 1686, and by then Magdeleine had married again at Port-Royal. Her second husband was Pierre Bezier dit La Rivière, whom the census of 1686 lists as Pierre Joan, sixty, with Magdeleine, forty-seven, the six children “du premier lict de sa femme”, and a daughter two months old. The same census counted the family a second time under Magdeleine’s own name, at forty-five, with her Trahan sons and three daughters, and named the baby’s father as “la Riviere”. In 1693 the couple were still at Port-Royal, Pierre aged seventy and Magdeleine forty-eight, with their daughter Susanne, seven. By then Marie had married Jean Doiron and gone to Pigiguit, while Magdelaine, fifteen, and her husband Jacques Léger, thirty, were living with her mother and stepfather.

The census of 1698 lists Magdeleine, fifty-six, at Port-Royal with her husband, then sixty, and their daughter Susanne, twelve. The date of her death is not established. Port-Royal’s parish registers before 1702 have been lost, but declarations made by Acadian exiles on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 record that she and Guillaume both died at Port-Royal.

Lines of descent

Magdeleine reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne by three lines. The nearest, nine generations up, runs through her son Guillaume Trahan; another, ten generations up, runs through her daughter Marie Trahan (born about 1672); and a third, eleven generations up, runs through her son Jean-Charles Trahan (born about 1668). The lines meet again in Ida Serrette (1903–1990), Floyd’s mother, whose parents Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) both descend from Magdeleine. Within that line they meet once more in Amelia Pennison Daigle, whose parents Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) both descend from Magdeleine.

Notes

Her age of twenty-five in 1671 would put her birth about 1646; the baptism shows she was born by January 1645. Her later ages run forty-seven and forty-five in the two entries of 1686, forty-eight in 1693 and fifty-six in 1698. The register of La Chaussée calls her mother Vincende Braude; at Andree’s baptism the same register calls her Renée Braud, and the census of 1671 Renée Brode.

The household entries of 1671, 1686, 1693 and 1698 are taken from the original census rolls. The entry of 1678 comes from Duchesneau’s roll of Port-Royal, known from an online transcription. An online transcription of the 1693 roll gives Pierre’s age as sixty-seven and Susanne’s as eight; the roll itself gives seventy and seven.

Her second husband’s name varies. The census of 1686 calls him Pierre Joan in one entry and la Rivière in the other, and the transcription of 1693 gives Pierre Arbezier. The register of Port-Royal names Pierre Bezier and Magdelaine Brun as the parents of a bride married on 25 January 1704, and records the death on 11 March 1706 of Pierre Bezier dit La Rivière, said to be ninety. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives him as Pierre Bézier dit Touin dit Larivière, born about 1623, who married Madeleine Brun, the widow of Guillaume Trahan, about 1684.

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana places her marriage to Guillaume about 1666, when she was twenty-one, gives the couple seven children, and places Guillaume’s death about 1684.