♀Marguerite Dugas

Marguerite Dugas was an Acadian of Port-Royal, the first wife of Pierre Arsenault and the mother of his two eldest sons, Pierre and Abraham. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Arseneau (born about 1676).

Life

No record that names her as Pierre Arsenault’s wife has been found; what is known of her comes from two compiled works, Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians and Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, compared with the censuses. Bona Arsenault and Léopold Lanctôt both make Marguerite Dugas a daughter of Abraham Dugast, the gunsmith of Port-Royal, and so a sister of Claude Dugas; the census of Port-Royal in 1671 does list a daughter “Margueritte”, aged 14, in Abraham Dugast’s household. She was therefore born about 1657 at Port-Royal, and Arsenault gives 1657 as her birth year. On that evidence the tree places her as a daughter of Abraham Dugast and Marie Judith Doucet, the wife the census names, though the placing rests on those compilations and on the age alone.

The tree dates her marriage to Pierre Arsenault between 1671 and 1676, the census of 1671 still listing her as unmarried. Arsenault has Pierre Arsenault marrying Marguerite Dugas at Port-Royal in 1676, and gives them two sons, Pierre and Abraham, born about 1676 and 1678. Her husband, by Arsenault’s account, had come from France in 1671. By the census of 1686 Pierre Arsenault had a second wife, Marie Guérin, aged 24, too young to have been the mother of his sons Pierre, 10, and Abraham, 8. Marguerite had died by then, as Arsenault and Lanctôt both conclude, leaving the two boys. No record of her death or burial has been found.

In 1686 her widower was one of three men of Port-Royal who held land at Beaubassin^W; Lanctôt takes the other two, Claude Dugas and Guillaume Bourgeois, for her brother and her brother’s brother-in-law, and thinks the three most likely worked the land together. Her sons grew up at Beaubassin in their father’s second household, where the census of 1693 found them aged 16 and 14; by 1698 Pierre had married Anne Boudrot and had a household of his own.

Notes

The 1671 roll names Abraham Dugast’s wife Marie Judith Doucet; Arsenault calls her Marguerite Doucet. Arsenault gives the marriage as about 1675 in one place and 1676 at Port-Royal in another. His earlier book, L’Acadie des ancêtres (1955), abstracting the 1686 census, gives the sons’ ages as 9 and 7 rather than 10 and 8. The censuses of 1686, 1693 and 1698 are cited here from a published transcription; the original pages have not been seen.

Her death before 1686

The 1686 census names Pierre Arsenault’s wife as Marie Guérin and does not mention Marguerite. Arsenault’s history says of Pierre’s first wife that she died after giving him two sons, Pierre and Abraham (vol. 1, p. 72). The tree’s date, before 1686, rests on that statement and on the second wife’s place in the census; no death or burial record has been found.