♀Magdeleine Vincent

Magdeleine Vincent (1 January 1709 – 26 February 1768) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal who married Claude Giroir of Pisiguit in 1726, on the same day and in the same church as her elder sister Marie Joseph. Her name is set down again a generation later in the register of the Acadian refugee camp at Restigouche, when her widowed daughter remarried there in 1759. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Giroir (born about 1738).

Early life

Magdeleine was the daughter of Clément Vincent and Magdeleine Levron, habitants of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal. The transcription of the parish register records that she was born on 1 January 1709, “between seven and eight in the evening”, and was baptized the same day by a layman named Clemenceau. Such an emergency baptism was given when a newborn might not live to reach a priest. On 6 January the Récollet^W missionary Justinien Durand supplied the ceremonies of baptism. Her godparents were Jacques Leuron and Magdelaine Vincent, wife of François Moyse dit La Treille. The register records ten brothers and sisters, from Pierre in 1704 to François in 1726, among them Marie Joseph, born in 1707, and Anne, born in 1711. Three of the ten died as infants.

Marriage

On 3 June 1726, in the church at Port-Royal, which the British had held since 1710 and called Annapolis Royal, the missionary René Charles de Breslay^W married the two elder sisters, one act after the other. Marie Joseph, nineteen, married Paul Michel, son of François Michel of Pisiguit^W, and Magdeleine, eighteen, married Claude Giroard, twenty-seven, “living in the parish of Pegighit” (Pisiguit, the Acadian settlement on the Minas Basin), son of Pierre Giroard and the late Marie Comeau. The priest granted a dispensation for a degree of kinship between Magdeleine and Claude, and their father Clément witnessed both marriages. Her sister Anne married Alexandre Doiron of Pisiguit the following year.

The couple had at least seven children, born between about 1729 and 1747 by the ages a census later gave for them: Joseph, Margueritte, Marie, Silvain, Bazille, Antoine and Procède.

Isle Madame

By the spring of 1752 the family was living on Isle Madame, off the southern coast of Cape Breton Island in Île-Royale^W, the French colony that took in many Acadians from the peninsula after 1749. The census taken there that April by the Sieur de la Roque lists “Claude Giroir, ploughman, native of la Cadie, aged 55 years, married to Madeleine Vincent, native of Port Royal, aged 44 years”, and records that “they have been in the colony three years”, that is, since about 1749. It counts five sons and three daughters but names only seven children, aged 23 down to 5: Joseph, Margueritte, Marie Joseph, Silvain, Bazille, Antoine and Procède.

The census also notes that the family had been granted rations for those three years and owned three oxen, two cows, a calf, a pig and five fowls. They had been settled on land chosen for them by Monsieur de Villejoint, but the soil would not repay cultivation: they cleared ground and made a garden, and the cabbage and turnip seed did not come up well even with a great deal of manure.

Restigouche

After the deportation of 1755, Acadians who had escaped the British gathered at a refugee camp on the Restigouche River, at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs. On 5 November 1759 the Récollet missionary F. Étienne married there Joseph Bourgeois, son of Paul Bourgeois and Marie Josèphe Brun of Malpeque, on Île Saint-Jean, and Marie Giroire, the widow of Aimé Laurot. The act names the bride as the daughter of Claude Giroir and Magdeleine Vincent, “de la Cadie”. It does not say whether Magdeleine was still living. Marie and Joseph later settled on the Mississippi in Spanish Louisiana.

Death

Magdeleine Vincent died at Saint-Charles-de-Bellechasse, in the Province of Quebec^W, on 26 February 1768 and was buried in the parish cemetery the next day; her husband Claude Giroir died there three weeks later, on 18 March, and was buried on 20 March. Her burial act gives her age as sixty and names her as Claude’s wife. The records do not show when or by what route the couple came to Bellechasse from Acadia.

Notes

Claude Giroir’s burial act names no wife and gives his age as eighty, which would put his birth about 1688; his age of twenty-seven at the 1726 marriage puts it about 1699, and the 1752 census, which gives him as fifty-five, puts it about 1697. Two earlier records thus agree with each other against the burial act, which would make him about seventy-one in 1768; the records do not explain the difference. In the same census Magdeleine is forty-four, which is close to her baptism in 1709. He is taken to be Magdeleine Vincent’s husband because she was buried as the wife of Claude Giroir in the same parish three weeks earlier, and her act gives her age as sixty against fifty-nine by her baptism.