♀Marguerite Thibodeau

Marguerite Thibodeau (born 1705) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, the wife of the resistance leader Alexandre Broussard, who lived through the war and captivity that followed the deportation of 1755 and at about sixty crossed to Louisiana, where she died in the first months of the Acadian settlement on the Bayou Teche. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through her daughter Marguerite Broussard (born 1726).

Port-Royal and the Petitcodiac

Marguerite is said to have been born at Port-Royal on 22 December 1705 and baptized there the following May. On 7 February 1724, at Port-Royal, Alexandre Broussard, the son of the late Jean-François Broussard and Catherine Richard, married Marguerite Thibodeau, the daughter of Michel Thibodeau and Agnès Dugas. She was eighteen. Nineteen months later, on 11 September 1725, Alexandre’s brother Joseph^W married Marguerite’s younger sister Agnès at Port-Royal, so that the Broussard and Thibodeau families were joined twice over. The couple’s first two children were baptized at Port-Royal: Joseph Grégoire, born on 1 April 1725, and Marguerite, born on 15 March 1726.

About 1730 the couple moved north to Chepoudy, a settlement on Shepody Bay at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where Marguerite’s kinsmen lived, beyond the reach of the British governors at Annapolis Royal, as Port-Royal was now called. About 1740 they and Joseph’s family moved again, up the Petitcodiac River, and founded a village they named Beausoleil after the hamlet near Port-Royal where the brothers had been born. Their other children included Jean Baptiste, Sylvain and Madeleine, and in 1752 the household on the Petitcodiac is said to have held five sons and two daughters.

War and captivity

In the wars of the 1740s and 1750s Alexandre and Joseph took the French side and led Acadian partisans against the British. After the fall of Fort Beauséjour^W in 1755 Alexandre was held prisoner by the British, and by most accounts he was shipped to South Carolina that autumn. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana records that Marguerite then led the family into exile in present-day southeastern New Brunswick, where her sons fought in the resistance alongside their father and uncle once Alexandre had made his way back.

By 1759 the refugees were starving, and that November the brothers surrendered at Fort Cumberland, as the British had renamed Beauséjour. The family spent the next years as prisoners of war in Nova Scotia, and in August 1763 Marguerite was counted, unnamed, with her husband and four children on the list of Acadian prisoners at Halifax.

Louisiana

In November 1764 the family left Halifax with a large party of exiles led by Alexandre and Joseph, and sailed by way of Saint-Domingue^W to New Orleans, where early in 1765 Marguerite was counted at sixty. That spring they followed the party to the Bayou Teche, in the Attakapas District^W, where the brothers had agreed to keep the cattle of Jean-Antoine-Bernard Dauterive on shares. Within months an epidemic swept the new settlement. Marguerite died on 4 September 1765, and Alexandre about two weeks later. She was buried the next day “au dernier camp d’en bas”, at the last burial place on the lower section, near present-day Loreauville.

The family

Alexandre and Marguerite’s eldest son, Joseph Grégoire Broussard, married Ursule Trahan and died at Halifax in 1763, while the family were prisoners of the British; his widow and their two children came to Louisiana with the family in 1765. Madeleine Broussard reached Louisiana that year with her second husband, Olivier Thibodeau, and was expecting a child; Cormier’s history records that she died of complications of the birth soon after the family arrived on the Teche, and that she and her newborn daughter were the first Acadians buried west of the Atchafalaya Basin. Jean Baptiste Broussard was elected co-commandant of the Attakapas District in 1768 and served until 1770, was in later life a warden of the church, and died in Lafayette Parish in October 1825, in his nineties.

Notes

Sources for her life

The marriage of 7 February 1724 is entered in the Port-Royal parish register (Nova Scotia Archives, An Acadian Parish Remembered, RG 1 vol. 26 p. 335), which names the bride as Margueritte Thibaudault, daughter of Michel Thibaudault and Agnes Dugas, and the groom’s father as the late François Brossard. The same register holds the baptisms of Joseph Grégoire (born 1 April 1725, baptized 3 April) and Marguerite (born 15 March 1726, baptized 17 April), and the marriage of Joseph Brossard, 23, to Agnes Tibaudeau, 19, on 11 September 1725. The rest of her life rests on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, a compilation, which gives her birth, her age in 1765, the family’s years in exile and her burial, and on John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), pp. 201, 412 and 427–428, for the move to the Petitcodiac, the surrender of 1759 and the voyage of 1764–1765. A Broussard genealogy by John R. and Vita B. Reaux in the Attakapas Gazette (1971) gives the household of 1752 and the Halifax list, dated 12 August 1763.

Her birth

The family tree gives her birth as 1705, from Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians. Cormier gives the day, 22 December 1705, and her baptism at Port-Royal on 16 May 1706; his ages for her (eighteen at her marriage, sixty in 1765 and at her death) fit that date.

Death and burial

The family tree carries no death for her. Cormier gives two burial entries, as Donald J. Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records abstracts them from the early registers of the church of St. Martin at Attakapas: both record her death on 4 September 1765, her burial the next day and the entry made on 7 September, and neither names her parents or her age. One calls her the “wife of Alexandre BROUSSARD”; the other calls her his widow, although Alexandre outlived her by two weeks. Bona Arsenault gives her death as 7 September, the day the entry was made, and the Reaux genealogy gives 5 September, the day of her burial.

South Carolina

Historians disagree over which brother the British carried to South Carolina in 1755: Faragher names Alexandre, while Cormier follows the Acadian scholar Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc, who names Joseph. Cormier places Marguerite’s flight into exile after the departure of “his father and older brother” in the entry for her son Jean Baptiste.

The line to Floyd

No record names the parents of Anne Trahan (died about 1774), Marguerite Broussard’s probable daughter. She is placed in the family of Jean Trahan and Marguerite Broussard by an argument from the godparents and witnesses at her children’s baptisms and at the marriage of Jean’s son Germain, and Cormier’s age for her in 1765 would place her birth before that marriage of 1744.

The children

The family tree carries five of the couple’s children. Cormier names more: the sons Victor, Anselme, Simon and Pierre, the daughter Anne-Henriette, and perhaps a daughter Théotiste. He calls Madeleine “Alexandre’s older daughter”, but no Madeleine appears among the Port-Royal baptisms, and Donald J. Arceneaux’s study of the first Attakapas settlement gives Olivier Thibodeau’s wife the name Marguerite. The family tree gives Jean Baptiste’s birth as 1727; Cormier places it about 1731, at Chepoudy or on the Petitcodiac, and notes that the priest who recorded his burial gave his age as 98 when he was closer to 94.