♀Marguerite Boudrot

Marguerite Boudrot (about 1682 – buried 20 June 1751) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and the Minas Basin, the wife of Jean Babin and the mother of his children. In her last years she left the Minas Basin for Île Saint-Jean^W, then still a French colony, and she was buried there at seventy. She was most likely the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Babin (died before 1777).

Port-Royal

Marguerite was born at Port-Royal about 1682, a daughter of Charles Boudrot and his first wife, Renée Bourg. At the census of 1686, when she was four, her father was listed as a widower with seven children aged three to eleven; her mother seems to have died after the birth of twin sons about 1683. By 1693 Charles had married again, to Marie Corporon, and was living at Les Mines^W, on the Minas Basin.

The Minas Basin

She is reckoned to have married Jean Babin about 1706. He was probably the youngest son of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier of Port-Royal. A census of Les Mines in 1707 counts Jean Babin and his wife with one boy under fourteen. Two of their children were baptized in the church of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré: Marguerite, born on 21 August 1708 and baptized three days later, and Germain, born on 29 April 1711 and baptized on 24 May. Marguerite’s godfather was Jean Babin, the son of Vincent Babin, who signed the register; Germain’s godparents were Germain Landry and Marie Boudrot.

By 1714 the family was living on the Pisiguit River. That year’s census, as Bona Arsenault extracted it, lists Vincent Babin and Jean Babin side by side among the settlers of the river, and a transcription of the same census gives Jean and his wife two sons and two daughters. The family is said to have belonged to the parish of Sainte-Famille at Pisiguit^W, whose registers do not survive, and the rest of the children are known only from compiled genealogies. With Marguerite and Germain, those genealogies name at least five more: Paul, Anne, Jean-Baptiste, Joseph and Marie-Josèphe.

Île Saint-Jean

Jean died before 1751, at a place that is not recorded. Around 1750 many Acadians of the Minas Basin left for the French-held islands to the north, in what is known as the Acadian Exodus^W, and by the summer of 1751 Marguerite, a widow, was on Île Saint-Jean. She was buried in the cemetery of Port-La-Joye^W on 20 June 1751, aged seventy. The priest, a Récollet friar who served as chaplain and parish priest, entered her as the wife of the late Jean Baptiste Babin and named her parents, Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg, and the parish of Saint-Charles in Acadia, the parish of Grand-Pré.

The family

Before the deportation of 1755, two of the daughters, Marguerite and Marie-Josèphe, had moved with their husbands, Benjamin and François Landry, to Île Saint-Jean, where both families were living in 1752. The sons’ families were caught in the deportation itself: Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana records that the wives of Paul, Joseph and Jean-Baptiste Babin were exiled to Maryland in 1755. By July 1763 the wives of Joseph and Jean-Baptiste were counted as widows at Oxford, Maryland, and in 1766 and 1767 all three women reached Louisiana as widows.

Notes

Records

Her birth about 1682 rests on her age of four in the census of 1686, known from a modern transcription of the roll; her age at burial, “septante ans” (seventy), points to the same years. The roll of Les Mines in 1693 lists no Marguerite in her father’s household but has a Françoise, 11, of her age; online family trees call her Marguerite Françoise. The burial entry, signed “Fr Patrice La Gré, Récollet aumônier et curé”, calls her “épouse de deffunt Jean Baptiste Babin” (wife of the late Jean Baptiste Babin) and ends “de la paroisse de Saint Charles à l’Acadie” (of the parish of Saint-Charles in Acadia). Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens also records her burial at Port-La-Joye.

Marriage

No record of the marriage survives. Arsenault dates it about 1706 and makes her husband the son of Antoine Babin and Marie Mercier, born in 1684; online family trees citing Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes give about 1705, at Port-Royal. The baptisms of 1708 and 1711, which name the parents as Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot, are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a); the census entries of 1707 and 1714 come from modern transcriptions and from Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres (1955). Arsenault places the family in the parish of Sainte-Famille at Pisiguit; her burial entry names Saint-Charles.

The children

Marguerite and Germain are named in their baptisms. Paul, Anne, Jean-Baptiste, Joseph and Marie-Josèphe are named as children of Jean Babin and Marguerite Boudrot in Steven A. Cormier’s The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, in his entries for their wives and husbands. Arsenault lists only Marguerite (1708), Germain (1711) and Marie (about 1720), and his Marie is Cormier’s Marie-Josèphe, the wife of François Landry, though the two compilers give François different parents. The daughters’ husbands and their presence on Île Saint-Jean in 1752 are from Arsenault.

A namesake

An older Marguerite Boudrot, the widow of François Bourg, was the wife of a Jean Babineau at Port-Royal in the 1690s; their daughters married there in 1711 and 1713. She is a different woman, a generation older.