♀Marguerite Michel

Marguerite Michel (born about 1706 – died before 8 January 1765) was an Acadian woman who moved with her husband, Paul Doiron, and their children from Acadia to Île Saint-Jean^W about 1750, where the census of 1752 counted the couple with nine children. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Rose Doiron (about 1749–1808).

In Acadia

A compiled genealogy, Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 4), gives her parents as François Michel and Marguerite Meunier; her place in this family rests on the same compiled genealogy, since no record of her baptism or marriage is known. Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel had married by about 1735, to judge from the age of their eldest child on the 1752 census, a daughter of 17; no record of the marriage is known.

The earliest known record of the couple is the baptism of their daughter Anne Apollonie, born on 16 September 1737 and baptized on 6 April 1738, whom the register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré names as the daughter of Paul Doueron and Marguerite Michel; her godparents were Jacques Girouard and Marie Doueron. That register was later carried to Louisiana by Acadian exiles and is printed among the Catholic church records of the Diocese of Baton Rouge. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana describes the couple as of Pigiguit^W and places the births of their older children there, most of them only as probable.

Île Saint-Jean

The census of Île Saint-Jean taken in 1752 by the King’s surveyor, Joseph de La Roque, counted the family on the north side of the Rivière du Nord-Est. In the English translation printed in the Report concerning Canadian Archives for the year 1905, she appears as “Marguerite Michel, native of l’Acadie, aged 46 years,” the wife of “Paul Douaron dit le Grand Paul,” a plowman of 42 who had been on the island two years; she was four years older than her husband. They had three sons and six daughters, aged from 17 years down to 8 months, among them Anne Appoline, 15, and Roze, 2. The household kept four bulls, three cows, two heifers, two sows, two pigs and twenty-five fowls. Their land had been given to them by word of mouth by Monsieur de Bonnaventure, whom the same census calls the King’s commandant on the island, and they had made a clearing on it where they hoped to sow eight bushels of wheat the next spring.

Their arrival about 1750 places them in the Acadian Exodus^W, the flight of Acadian families from British-ruled Nova Scotia to the French islands: a letter of 20 August 1750 from the intendant at Quebec, printed in the same report, passes on Bonnaventure’s word that Acadians were taking refuge on the island in great haste, bringing even their livestock.

Exile and death

Cormier’s compiled history has the family still at the Rivière du Nord-Est when the British deported the island’s Acadians to France in late 1758^W, and follows five of the nine children through exile in France; all five sailed to Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont in 1785. Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel were both dead by 8 January 1765, when the register of their daughter Rose’s marriage at Notre-Dame, Le Havre, called her “fille mineure de feu Paul et de feue Marguerite Michel”, the minor daughter of the late Paul and the late Marguerite Michel. No record of either death is known, and the records do not show whether either of them reached France.

Notes

Rose’s marriage register names her parents but gives them no place beyond Acadia. The household on the 1752 census is identified as theirs because both parents’ names match and because its Roze, aged 2, fits the ages given for Rose in France in 1772 and 1775; she is the only Roze aged 2 in a Douaron household on the census. The same census counted another couple of almost the same names at Pointe Prime, Paul Douaron, 43, and Margueritte Benoist, 42. A compiled account of a Paul Doiron and his wife Marguerite lost aboard the transport Duke William in 1758 concerns the Pointe Prime couple, Paul Doiron and Marguerite Benoit, not Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel.