♀Marguerite Gautrot

Marguerite Gautrot (born about 1655 – died 2 August 1727) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, the wife of Jacques Girouard and the mother of at least fourteen children named in the colony’s censuses between 1671 and 1698. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through her sons Pierre Giroard (born about 1672) and Guillaume Giroir (born about 1686). Her father, Francois Gautrot, descends to Floyd Amatus Delahorne through three of his daughters: through Marguerite, on his mother’s side; through her elder sister Marie Gautrot (born about 1647), wife of Claude Thériot, on his father’s side; and through their half-sister Marie Gautrot (born about 1637). Both of Floyd’s parents therefore descend from the same founding settler of Port-Royal, each through a different daughter.

Early life

Marguerite was a daughter of Francois Gautrot, a farmer of Port-Royal and one of the colony’s first French settlers. The census of Port-Royal taken in 1671 lists Francois, aged 58, and his wife Edmee Lejeune, 47, with their children, among them “Marguerite 16”, counted with her married brothers and sisters. The census does not say which of Francois’s two wives was her mother: he had an earlier wife, known only as Marie, before his marriage to Edmee Lejeune about 1644. Marguerite’s age places her birth about 1654 or 1655, well after that marriage and after Edmee’s daughter Marie, born about 1647, so Edmee Lejeune is the likelier mother by the ages, though no record names her. In 1693 a widow of 71, entered as Aimee Lejeune and identified in the transcription as Francois Gautrot’s widow, was counted next to Marguerite’s household.

Marriage and family

Marguerite most likely married Jacques Girouard, a son of Francois Girouard and Jeanne Aucoin of Port-Royal, about 1670. The census of 1671 counts the couple in their own household - “Jacob Girouard, farmer, 23, his wife Marguerite Gautrot 17” - with an infant son, Alexandre, seven cattle, three sheep and no land. The census of 1686 lists “Jacques Giroüard”, 38, and “Marguerite Gotro”, 32, with nine children, among them Pierre, aged 14; Bona Arsenault’s^W compilation of 1955, transcribing the same count, calls her “fille de Francois Gauterot”.

The family stayed at Port-Royal and grew with each count. In 1693 the household held eleven children, twenty-five cattle, thirty sheep and fifteen hogs on twenty-two arpents^W; in 1698, when Jacques was 50 and Marguerite 45, it held twelve children still at home, the youngest, Anne-Marie, six months old, with forty-eight arpents of land and eighteen fruit trees. Across the four censuses the couple’s children number fourteen, born over nearly thirty years. In 1709 their son Pierre married for the second time in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, at Grand-Pré, to a daughter of a Pisiguit^W family, five weeks before his brother Denis married in the same church; an act of 1726 describes Pierre as living at Pisiguit, on the Minas Basin.

Widowhood and death

Jacques Girouard died on 27 October 1703 and was buried at Port-Royal the next day, the register calling him “Jacob Girouard”. Marguerite outlived him by almost twenty-four years. The census of 1707 lists her, as the transcription reads it, as “The widow GIROUARD”, with six sons aged fourteen or older and two daughters under twelve, beside her sons Jacques and Alexandre Girouard. Between 1704 and 1713 five more of their children married at Port-Royal – Jacques, François, Claude, Magdelaine and Charles Girouard – and each marriage act names their parents as the late Jacques Girouard and Marguerite Gautrot, whose surname the priest wrote Gauterot or Gotro.

She died on 2 August 1727, aged about 73 by the ages given in the censuses, and was buried at Port-Royal on 3 August. The burial act, written “Marguerite Gotrot”, calls her “widow of Jacques Giroard, her last husband”, and names François Giroard and Claude Giroard as “her children”, who were witnesses. The phrase “her last husband” implies an earlier husband; the records seen do not name him.

Lines of descent

Both lines reach Floyd through his mother, Ida Serrette, at the same generation: one through her son Pierre Giroard and his son Claude Giroir, the other through her son Guillaume Giroir and his daughter Anne Girouard. Guillaume’s place in the family rests on census households rather than on a register naming his parents. The lines meet again when Leonard Thibodeau married Madeleine Ordalie Cormier in St. Martin Parish on 16 December 1845, both descendants of Marguerite Gautrot.

Notes

The Port-Royal census of 1701, which lists “Jacq[ues] Girouard 52” and “Marguerite Gautrot 45”, is followed by the census of 1707, the last census record of Marguerite; her death and burial in 1727 are known only from the burial act. The census-takers and priests spelled her surname in several ways, among them Gautrot, Gauterot, Gotro, Goutrot and Gotrot. The names of her parents, Francois Gautrot and Edmee Lejeune, rest on the censuses and on Cormier’s compilation of Acadian families, not on a register act; her mother’s identity rests on the ages in the censuses, not on a register; if she was instead a daughter of Francois Gautrot’s first wife, she and Marie Gautrot would be half-sisters rather than full sisters, and Francois would remain the ancestor shared by both lines.

The marriage date

The date of about 1670 comes from Steven A. Cormier’s compilation, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, which gives the marriage at Port-Royal in about 1670. The 1671 census already shows the couple married, with an infant son, which fits that date.

The 1707 census

The 1707 entry is the transcriber’s reading of the roll: “The widow GIROUARD”, six boys aged 14 or older, two girls under 12, and 10 arpents of land, listed beside her sons Jacques and Alexandre Girouard.