♀Marguerite Babin

Marguerite Babin (born about 1670) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal who moved with her husband, Antoine Breau, to the settlements of Les Mines^W on the Minas Basin, where they raised a family of at least eight children and made their home at Pisiguit^W. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Alexandre Breau.

Port-Royal

Marguerite was a daughter of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier. When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal she was one year old, the youngest of their five children, and in 1686, at sixteen, she was the second of the eight children still living in her parents’ household.

Antoine Breau, the eldest son of Vincent Breau and Marie Bourg, was then 22 and living at home with his widowed mother. Antoine and Marguerite probably married about 1687, and their eldest daughter, Suzanne, was born about 1688.

Les Mines

By 1693 the young family had left Port-Royal for the Minas Basin. In the census of Les Mines that year Antoine was 26 and Marguerite 22, with three children, Suzanne, 5, Pierre, 3, and Madeleine, 1. They worked six arpents^W of land, kept fifteen cattle, ten sheep and seven hogs, and owned a gun. On the roll their household came just before that of Guillaume Lejuge and his wife Marie Mercier, apparently Marguerite’s widowed mother, who had married again; the next household was that of Marguerite’s brother Vincent Babin.

In 1701 the two households were again counted only one household apart, on the Rivière de l’Ascension, where Antoine and Marguerite had three boys and four girls, six arpents, sixteen cattle and twelve sheep. By 1707 there were eight children at home, three sons and five daughters, and the farm carried sixteen cattle, fifteen sheep and twelve hogs on four arpents.

Pisiguit

By 1710 Antoine and Marguerite were living at Pisiguit. That year their son Antoine married Marguerite Dugas at Grand-Pré, in September or November, and the register calls his parents inhabitants of Pigiguit. The census of 1714 lists Antoine and his wife at Pisiguit with four sons and three daughters still at home.

Two more of their sons married at Grand-Pré, Pierre to Marguerite Gautrot on 25 June 1726 and Charles to Claire Trahan on 22 November 1729, each named in the register as a son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin. Among the witnesses at both weddings was Alexandre Breau, said to be another of their sons, through whom the line descends to Floyd. When Antoine and Marguerite died is not known.

The family

Their son Charles and his wife, Claire Trahan, settled at Pisiguit. By Steven A. Cormier’s account of the Acadians of Louisiana, the British deported them to Maryland in 1755, and a report of July 1763 found Charles and Claire among the exiles at Port Tobacco. Claire came to Louisiana in 1768 as a widow and died at Fort San Luis de Natchez that June, a few weeks after she arrived.

Notes

Records

The census entries are known from a modern transcription of the rolls of Acadia; for 1693 the ages and the order of the households are those of the original roll of Les Mines. Marguerite’s recorded ages, 1 in 1671, 16 in 1686 and 22 in 1693, give a birth about 1670. Bona Arsenault’s extract of the 1693 roll, in L’Acadie des ancêtres, gives the couple as 27 and 23. Régis Brun’s essay on the Acadians before 1755 lists Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin among the households of Les Mines in 1693 whose village is not given. The rolls of 1701, 1703, 1707 and 1714 name only the head of each household and count the rest.

Marriage

Arsenault and Cormier both date the marriage about 1687, and Cormier places it at Port-Royal, whose surviving parish registers begin only in 1702. In 1686 both Antoine and Marguerite were still single in their family homes, and in 1693 their eldest child was five, so the marriage falls between 1686 and about 1688. Cormier has the couple moving to Pisiguit in the early 1700s; the roll of 1693 already places them at Les Mines.

Her mother’s second marriage

Antoine Babin was counted in 1686 but in no later census. No record names Marie Mercier, the wife of Guillaume Lejuge in 1693 and 1701, as his widow; the identification rests on the rolls, where in 1693 her household stands between Marguerite’s and that of her son Vincent Babin, and in 1701 the Lejuge and Breau households are listed only one household apart. Against it, a declaration made in 1767 by the widow of Marguerite’s nephew Claude Babin, among the Acadian exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer in France, says that Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier both died at Port-Royal and mentions no second marriage.

The register entries

The weddings of 1710, 1726 and 1729 are known from the printed abstracts of the Grand-Pré register published by the Diocese of Baton Rouge. The abstract of 1710 gives the date as 5 September or November, the month being unclear; Arsenault gives 5 November. The abstracts write her name Margueritte Babin and her husband’s family name Breaux in 1710, Breau in 1726 and Braut in 1729.

Her son Alexandre

No surviving act names Alexandre Breau’s parents. Arsenault gives Alexandre, born about 1701, as a son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin, and Cormier’s lineage for Alexandre’s sons runs back through Antoine to Vincent Breau. Arsenault names eight children of the marriage, born between 1688 and about 1703: Suzanne, Pierre, Madeleine, Antoine, Marguerite, Charles, Alexandre and Anne. Cormier credits the couple with eleven.

Charles and Claire

Cormier’s account of Charles and Claire Trahan after 1729 rests on the report of the Acadians at Port Tobacco, Maryland, of July 1763, which counts Claire with her husband, a son and two daughters, and on the report of the Acadians settled at Fort San Luis de Natchez in 1768, which calls her a widow. He gives her burial there on 7 June 1768.