♀Marguerite Bariault

Marguerite Bariault (died before July 1811) was an Acadian woman, the wife of Alexis Brault, who shared his exile in Massachusetts and in 1767 went with him and their children to the Province of Quebec^W, where the family settled south of Montréal. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Firmin Breaux (1749–1808). In May and June 1767, her four daughters, aged from four to twelve, were baptised at L’Assomption.

Acadia and the exile

Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians places Alexis Brault and Marguerite Bariault, whom it writes Bariot, at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph near Grand-Pré, and gives their marriage about 1745, with their sons Joseph, Jean-Baptiste and Firmin born in the years that followed. A compilation by Steven A. Cormier on the Acadian families of Louisiana has the family deported to Massachusetts in the autumn of 1755 and, citing published lists of the exiles, finds Alexis with his wife and six children at Weymouth and Hingham, south of Boston, in 1760–61, and in Massachusetts again in August 1763.

On 22 August 1760 the Suffolk County division of the French neutrals enters “Elixes Brow” with his wife Margaret and the children written Joseph, Firmin, Battis and Charles. Her husband signed the exiles’ petitions at Boston in 1765 and 1766, and on the list of those asking to go to Canada in June 1766 the household numbered nine.

To Quebec

According to André-Carl Vachon’s reconstruction of the passenger lists, the family left Boston on the sloop Swallow about 13 April 1767 and reached Québec on 6 May: Alexis, aged 45, Marguerite, 42, their sons Joseph, Jean-Baptiste and Charles, and four daughters, Marie, Élisabeth, Marguerite and Françoise-Rose. Within weeks they were at L’Assomption, north-east of Montréal, and there, between 17 May and 9 June, the four daughters were baptized. Françoise-Rose, born, as the register put it, in “the province of Boston”, had already been baptized, and the priest supplied the ceremonies; Marie was baptized conditionally.

Between 1767 and 1774, Vachon writes, the family moved from L’Assomption to join the Acadian settlers at L’Acadie, who went to church at La Prairie and Saint-Philippe. The registers of those two parishes name Alexis and Marguerite as parents in seven acts between 1774 and 1779, beginning with the marriages of Joseph at Saint-Philippe on 25 July 1774 and of Jean-Baptiste at La Prairie on 21 November 1774.

Marguerite died before her husband: when Alexis was buried at L’Acadie on 18 July 1811, the register called him her widower. The date and place of her own death are not known.

The son in Louisiana

Pierre Firmin Breaux did not go to Quebec with his parents. Arsenault and Cormier both name him as a son of Alexis and Marguerite. Cormier writes that he was counted with them in Massachusetts but did not go north with them, and came instead to Louisiana in February 1765 with his uncle Sylvain Breau and the Broussard party from Halifax. He is not in Vachon’s list of the household in 1767, and a history of Breaux Bridge finds him in 1766 a bachelor of 19 on the Côte Gelée, in the Attakapas country. The family’s exile thus ended at two ends of the continent: the parents near Montréal, and the son on Bayou Teche, where, by the same history, the village of Breaux Bridge later grew up on his land.

Notes

A list of the French who wished to go to Old France, sent with a letter of 24 August 1763 and printed by Placide Gaudet, gives “Alexis Broux [Breau] & Margrite” (a compiled source, so the residence of 24 August 1763 carries that qualifier). Her surname is written Bariau, Bario and Beriaut in the Quebec registers, Bariot by Arsenault and Barrieau by Cormier and Vachon. In the Drouin abstracts of the four L’Assomption baptisms of 1767 the name is written Bellau or Beliau; the ages of the four girls match Vachon’s list of the family to the year. A dictionary of the Belliveau families lists among the Acadians received at Saint-Jacques-de-l’Achigan in 1767 “Alexis Brault, of Grand-pré, 45 years old, Marguerite Belliveau, 4 children”; this is very probably the same household. The 1767 baptisms and the Quebec marriage and burial acts are known here from the Drouin collection’s abstracts.

Vachon’s age of 42 in 1767 points to a birth about 1725. Her parents are not known.