♀Marie Boudrot

Marie Boudrot (born about 1653) was an Acadian settler, a daughter of the Port-Royal settlers Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, who with her husband, Michel Poirier, left Port-Royal for the young settlement of Beaubassin^W at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where they raised a large family. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Michel Poirier (born about 1674).

Port-Royal

Marie Boudrot was born about 1653, probably at Port-Royal, one of the eleven children of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, who had come to Acadia from France. When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal, she was “Marie 18”, one of the eight unmarried children still at home with her parents, between her brothers Charles, 22, and Jehan, 16.

Michel Poirier and Marie Boudrot are thought to have married at Port-Royal about 1673, and their eldest son, Michel, was born there about 1674. Michel was the son of Jean Poirier, who is said to have died while Michel was a small child, and of Jeanne Chebrat, who had married again, to Antoine Gougeon.

Beaubassin

By one account, in the late 1670s or early 1680s the couple left Port-Royal for Beaubassin, where Marie’s brother Jean Boudrot had also settled. They were most likely there by 30 November 1679, when Jean’s widow, Marguerite Bourgeois, married Emmanuel Mirande at Beaubassin, and a Michel Poirier, named as her brother-in-law, stood among the witnesses.

When the census was taken at Beaubassin in 1686, Michel was thirty-seven and Marie thirty-six, with nine children in the house; in 1693 they were forty-two and forty-one. The census-takers listed the household at Beaubassin again in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1703. The couple are said to have had eleven children, nine sons and two daughters, among them Michel, the eldest, and Pierre, born about 1680. No record gives the date or place of death of either Michel or Marie.

Notes

Her age

The census of 1671 gives her eighteen, which places her birth about 1653, the year Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives. The transcriptions of the censuses of 1686 and 1693 give thirty-six and forty-one, which point to about 1650 to 1652. Arsenault names her as the wife of Michel Poirier of Beaubassin, son of Jehan Poirier and Jeanne Chabrat.

Marriage and the move to Beaubassin

No record of the marriage survives, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana and Stephen A. White’s published transcription of the Beaubassin census rolls (2019) both date it about 1673, and Cormier places the eldest son’s birth at Port-Royal. Cormier dates the family’s move to Chignecto to the late 1670s or early 1680s, and Arsenault counts Michel Poirier among the settlers of Beaubassin about 1682. The marriage of 30 November 1679, which survives in a copy of the Beaubassin register, names a Michel Poirier as the bride’s brother-in-law among the witnesses; Marie’s husband, as the husband of Jean Boudrot’s sister, fits that description, and it is the earliest record that may place the couple at Beaubassin.

The censuses

The ages and the nine children of 1686, and the ages of 1693, are given from a transcription of those rolls. White’s transcription lists the household on the Beaubassin rolls of 1686, 1693, 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1703, naming Michel as a son of Jean Poirier and Marie as a daughter of Michel Boudrot. Cormier gives the couple eleven children, nine sons and two daughters. Arsenault names the sons Michel, Pierre, Jean-Baptiste, Jacques, Joseph, Louis and François as children of Michel Poirier and Marie Boudrot.

Another Marie Boudrot

A genealogy published in the Attakapas Gazette marries a Marie Boudrot, named as a daughter of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, to Jean Charles Benoit in 1694. The census rolls of 1686 and 1693, and again those of 1698 to 1703, list this Marie as the wife of Michel Poirier, so the Benoit bride was another woman of the name.