♀Marguerite Boudrot

Marguerite Boudrot (born about 1651) was an Acadian farmer’s wife of Port-Royal, a daughter of the settlers Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, who raised a large family with her first husband, François Bourg, and after his death married Jean Babineau, a man some ten years younger, with whom she had two more daughters in her forties. She was the sixth great-grand-aunt of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014); sister of Claude Boudrot (born about 1663), Floyd Amatus’s sixth great-grandfather.

Port-Royal

Marguerite Boudrot was born about 1651, probably at Port-Royal, one of the eleven children of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, who had come to Acadia from France. She married François Bourg, a son of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry, while still in her teens, probably about 1665.

When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal, the couple had a farm of their own, entered as “Laboureur françois Bour aagé de 28 ans, sa femme Margueritte Boudrot aagée de 23 ans” (the farmer François Bourg, aged twenty-eight, his wife Marguerite Boudrot, aged twenty-three). They had two children, Michel, five and a half, and Marie, three, and kept fifteen cattle and five sheep on five and a half arpents^W of plowed land. On her parents’ line of the same roll she was counted again, at twenty, among their three married daughters.

By 1678 the household counted five children, two boys and three girls, the youngest a baby of one. Two more followed: Pierre about 1681 and Anne about 1684.

Widowhood and a second marriage

François is said to have died about 1684, leaving Marguerite with a young family. She married again, probably about 1691, to Jean Babineau. In 1693 the census-taker found them farming twenty-five arpents at Port-Royal, with twenty cattle, fifteen sheep, twenty hogs and a gun; with them were their daughter Marie, a year old, and Marguerite’s son Pierre Bourg, ten. A second daughter, Marguerite, was born about 1694.

By 1698 Anne, fifteen, was living with them too, beside Pierre, seventeen, and her two small half-sisters. Marguerite was still at Jean Babineau’s side in the censuses of 1700 and 1701. She was living in 1703, when she stood godmother at Port-Royal to a baby girl born on 23 September, named in the register as Marguerite Boudrot dit Babineau. When and where she died is not known.

Notes

Her age and name

The census of 1671 gives her age twice: twenty on her parents’ line and twenty-three in her own household, pointing to a birth between about 1648 and 1651. Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives 1648. Transcriptions of the later censuses give forty-four in 1693, fifty in 1698, fifty-one in 1700 and fifty in 1701, nearer to 1648. The transcription of 1693 calls her Marie Boudrot; it is the same household, with her son Pierre Bourg, that the roll of 1698 gives as Jean Babineau and Marguerite Boudrot.

Her marriages and children

Arsenault places her first marriage about 1665 and François’s death about 1684, and gives her five children by him: Michel (1665), Marie (1668), Alexandre (1671), Pierre (1681) and Anne (1683). Frère J.-Hervé Béliveau’s genealogical dictionary agrees on the marriage and the death. The census of 1678, as transcribed, lists two sons of thirteen and eight and three daughters of ten, five and one, so the couple had more children than Arsenault names; Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the LeBlanc family gives them a daughter Madeleine, who married Pierre LeBlanc at Port-Royal about 1697.

Arsenault has her marry Jean Babineau, born in 1660, about 1691, and gives the couple two daughters, Marie (1691) and Marguerite (1694). The census entries of 1693, 1698, 1700 and 1701 are quoted from published transcriptions; Jean’s ages there drift, thirty-three in 1693, forty-seven in 1698, forty-two in 1700 and forty in 1701.

The baptism of 1703

The godchild was Anne, a daughter of Charles Melanson and Anne Bourg, and so Marguerite’s own granddaughter. The Port-Royal register, as indexed, names the godparents as Jean Beliveau and Marguerite Boudrot dit Babineau.

Her daughter Anne

Anne Bourg, her daughter by François, was born about 1684. An Anne, nine, was listed with Alexandre Bourg, twenty-two, in 1693, and “Anne 15” was in the Babineau household in 1698. The 1703 baptism register names Charles Melanson as the father and Anne Bourg as the mother of a daughter, and a compiled genealogy gives her marriage to him. Arsenault’s genealogy had placed her as the wife of Charles Guilbeau instead, but that was a different Anne Bourg: Bernard Bourg’s daughter Anne was thirteen in 1693 and seventeen in 1698, and the wife of Charles Guilbeau was twenty-one in the census of 1701, when this Anne was not listed with her mother. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana makes the Guilbeau wife Bernard Bourg’s daughter.