♀Marguerite Bourgeois

Marguerite Bourgeois (born about 1658 – 8 August 1732) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal and Beaubassin^W, a daughter of the surgeon Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan, who was widowed young and in 1679 married, as her second husband, Emmanuel Mirande, a Portuguese settler from the island of Graciosa in the Azores. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Boudrot (born about 1677).

Early life and first marriage

When the census of Port-Royal was taken in 1671, Marguerite was thirteen, one of the ten children of Jacob Bourgeois, the only surgeon on the roll, and Jeanne Trahan. In the years that followed, her father is said to have opened up new land at Beaubassin, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, and settled several of his sons and sons-in-law there.

Marguerite married Jean Boudrot, probably about 1676, and their daughter was born about 1677. Jean was most likely a son of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin of Port-Royal, and is said to have been among the first settlers of Beaubassin. He died young, probably in 1678, and by the autumn of 1679 Marguerite was a widow of about twenty-one with a small daughter.

Emmanuel Mirande

On 30 November 1679, after the banns^W had been published, Marguerite, “veuve de Jean Boudrot”, married Emmanuel Mirande at Beaubassin before the Récollet^W missionary Claude Moireau. The register calls the groom “Portugais”, of the parish of Sainte-Croix on the island of Graciosa in the Azores, a son of Emmanuel Mirande and Catherine Spire; bride and groom were both living at Beaubassin. The seigneur of Beaubassin, Michel Leneuf de la Vallière^W, was present, and so were her brothers Germain and Guillaume Bourgeois and her brothers-in-law Claude Dugas and Michel Poirier.

Emmanuel is said to have prospered, and to have left his name on the land: the Butte à Mirande, on the Beaubassin ridge, was the family’s home.

In 1686 the census-taker at Beaubassin listed “Mirande 38 / Marguerite Bourgeois 28” and entered her daughter by Jean Boudrot apart from the rest, as the child “du premier Lict de Marguerite Bourgeois”, a girl of nine there called Marie. Then came the children of her marriage with Mirande: Joseph, 5, François, 4, Estiennette, 3, and Jeanne, 2. By 1693 Emmanuel, 45, and Marguerite, 33, had eight children at home: her daughter, now Anne, fifteen, and seven Mirande children, from Joseph, thirteen, down to Louis, two months old. By 1700 Anne had most likely left the house as the wife of Pierre Arseneau, at twenty-three.

Later life

In the census of Beaubassin taken in 1698, Emmanuel Mirande, aged fifty, was still listed with Marguerite, forty, and nine children at home, the eldest eighteen and the youngest a month old. Three of those children have baptisms in the Beaubassin register: François in 1682, Thérèse in 1683 and, probably, Madeleine in 1685. Emmanuel probably died between 1698 and 1707.

Marguerite was about forty-nine when she married a third time, at Port-Royal on 12 January 1707, to Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste^W. The register records her as a widow. A compiled genealogy describes him as a ship’s captain born at Bergerac and a privateer; another history places him among the raiders whose captures of English ships kept Acadia supplied in its last years under France. No child of that marriage is on record.

Marguerite died at Beaubassin on 8 August 1732 and was buried there the next day, in the cemetery of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption. The burial register calls the dead woman “Marie Bourgeois veufve de Jean Baptiste Mayssonnade”, aged about seventy; the identification rests on her being Maisonnat’s widow.

Notes

Her first husband and her daughter

The marriage record of 1679 names her as the widow of Jean Boudrot, and the census of Beaubassin of 1686 shows a daughter of her first marriage, “Marie 9”, who appears in 1693 as “Anne 15”, the same girl by age. That Jean was the son of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, the “Jehan 16” of their household in 1671, rests on Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 2, page 457; volume 3, page 859), which places the marriage about 1676 and Jean’s death in 1678. One of the witnesses of 1679, Michel Poirier, named as her brother-in-law, fits it: Arsenault gives Jean’s sister Marie Boudrot as the wife of a Michel Poirier of Beaubassin. Arsenault also has Jacques Bourgeois settling his sons-in-law, Jean Boudrot among them, at Beaubassin (volume 1, pages 71 and 74), and dates the first settlement there about 1672.

That this daughter is the Anne Boudrot who married Pierre Arseneau rests on her surname, her age and her settlement: the census of 1700 lists “Anne Boudrot 23” as Pierre Arseneau’s wife at Beaubassin. Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, as quoted online, makes the same identification, following her through the Beaubassin censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1700. Arsenault gives the couple two daughters, Marie (1677) and Anne (1678), marries his Anne to Joseph Hébert, and elsewhere (volume 3, page 827) makes the wife of Pierre Arseneau a daughter of Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg; the two censuses of Beaubassin show only one child of the first marriage.

Her age

Her age was thirteen in 1671 and twenty-eight in 1686, which both point to a birth about 1658, the year Arsenault gives; the census of 1693 makes her thirty-three.

Emmanuel Mirande

The marriage of 1679 is quoted from the register of Beaubassin, which writes her father’s name as Jacques and calls him “chirurgien”. The census of 1693 writes Emmanuel’s name as “Maniel”; in 1686 Jeanne, 2, is entered on the next page of the roll. Arsenault also calls him a native of Santa Cruz in the Azores (volume 3, page 828) and names him among the settlers whom the seigneur brought to Beaubassin (volume 1, pages 73–74). The Butte à Mirande and his prosperity come from John Mack Faragher’s history of the Acadians, A Great and Noble Scheme (page 72), which calls him an “emigrant from Portugal by way of Quebec”.

The Mirande children

The census of Beaubassin in 1698 lists “Manuel Mirande 50 / Mte Bourgeois 40” with nine children: Joseph, 18, down to Alexis, one month old. François’s baptism is dated 10 October 1682, two days after his birth on 8 October; the act is written as conditional and signed by the Recollet missionary Claude Moireau. Thérèse’s baptism is dated 29 November 1683, for a child born on the 25th of that month; the month is taken from a transcription, since the copy leaves it out. Madeleine was born on 12 July and baptized on 15 August, the act again written as conditional; the year of the baptism is hard to make out on the copy, and the 1685 date rests on a Généalogie Québec transcription and on her age of thirteen in the 1698 census.

The third marriage

The marriage of 12 January 1707 is recorded in the Port-Royal parish register, in a late nineteenth-century copy. The groom is “le Sieur Pierre Maisonnat de Port Royal”, son of a Maisonnat and of a Jeanne whose surname the copy gives uncertainly; the bride is “Marguerite Bourgeois Veuve”, daughter of Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan. The act is signed by the Recollet priest Justinien Durand. Arsenault’s history (volume 2, pages 671–672) places the marriage at Beaubassin rather than Port-Royal; the register is followed here. Arsenault gives the groom’s birth in 1653 in the parish of Saint-Jacques at Bergerac and calls him “capitaine de navire et fameux corsaire”. He gives Maisonnat five children by his first wife, Judith Soubirou, and credits none of them to Marguerite. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (page 1114) describes the groom in similar terms, as a ship’s captain and privateer born at Bergerac, and calls this marriage his third; that is White’s compiled description, not a record. Arsenault’s history (volume 1, page 103) names Maisonnat dit Baptiste among the privateers who kept Acadia supplied by falling on English ships.

Her death and burial

The Beaubassin parish register of 1732 (Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption), in the Drouin collection, gives her death on 8 August and her burial on 9 August, in the cemetery of the parish. The burial entry gives the name “Marie Bourgeois veufve de Jean Baptiste Mayssonnade” and says she was “agée d’environ soixante et dix ans”. The register therefore gives the name Marie and an age a few years low: born about 1658, she would have been nearer seventy-four. The identification rests on her being Pierre Maisonnat’s widow, which the marriage record of 1707 supports.