♀Marie-Anne Canol

Marie-Anne Canol (about 1651 – before 1693) was one of the early settlers of Acadia; the census of 1686 found her at Port-Royal with her husband, Jean Doiron, and their six sons and a daughter. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Jeanne Doiron (born 1678).

Marriage and family

She probably married Jean Doiron about 1671, when she was about twenty, and the couple lived first at Pentagouët, the French fort^W on the Penobscot river in present-day Maine, where he was serving in the garrison, before moving to Port-Royal. Who she was before her marriage is uncertain: some genealogists make her one of a handful of young women sent out from France to Acadia in 1671, while others hold that she was “Mary Ann Carrol”, from one of the Boston families who had settled at Pentagouët under English rule and stayed on when the French took the fort back.

The census of 1686 found Jean Douaron, 37, and his wife Marianne, about 35, at Port-Royal with their children, from Abraham, 14, down to Noël, 2, along with seven head of cattle, a sheep and a gun. Soon afterwards the family left the old settlement for the mouth of the Pigiguit river^W, on the south shore of the Minas Basin. Two more children followed: Marie, about 1687, and Louis, whose marriage at Grand-Pré in 1712 names his mother as Marie Anne de Canolle.

Death

She died before the census of 1693, most likely a year or two before it. By then Jean had married again, to Marie Trahan, a young woman of about twenty, and the children of the first marriage were living with the couple at Pigiguit. Her daughter Jeanne had already married Jean Hébert and had a son, Charles, a few months old.

Notes

Her name and origin

The census of 1686 survives in more than one copy. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes prints “Marianne Carrol, sa femme, 36 ans” and holds that the copy most faithful to the original writes her surname Carrol, while an abridged version turned it into the French-looking Canol; Bona Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres transcribes “Marianne Canol, 35 ans”. The register of her son Louis’s marriage at Grand-Pré on 21 November 1712 calls her “Marie Anne de Canolle”.

Lanctôt sets out the two schools. Those who write the name Canol, Cannol or Canolle make her, unless she was already Jean’s wife before he left France, one of the five young women sent to Acadia in 1671; Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens counts her among the five women in a party of some sixty people who came from Rochefort to Port-Royal that year. Those who call her “Mary Ann Carrol” place her in one of the Boston families settled at Pentagouët during the English occupation, who stayed after the fort was handed back to the French governor, the chevalier de Grandfontaine. Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana has her reaching Acadia already married, with Jean, perhaps aboard L’Oranger in 1671. The census and the register do not settle the question.

Dates

Her birth about 1651 rests on her age in the census of 1686 and on Lanctôt’s statement that she was 20 when she married in 1671; Arsenault gives the marriage as about 1671. Lanctôt writes that she had died a year or two before the census of 1693, and his second volume dates Jean’s marriage to Marie Trahan to 1692; Arsenault’s transcription of the 1693 census calls Jean “veuf de Marie-Anne Canol”. Arsenault gives Louis’s birth as about 1691.