♀Marie Chaussegros

Marie Chaussegros (born about 1656) was a woman from France who married the settler Martin Benoist at Port-Royal in Acadia and raised their family there and at Pigiguit^W, on the Minas Basin. She had ten children, two of them sons named Pierre, both alive at the same time. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by three separate lines of descent, through two of her children, Clément Benoist and Jacqueline Benoit (died 1755).

From France to Port-Royal

Marie was born about 1656 in France. She was probably one of the handful of women who came out from Rochefort to Port-Royal in 1671, and about 1672 she married Martin Benoist there; she was about sixteen, and he some thirteen years older. Long afterwards, giving their ancestry in exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer, descendants in three branches of the family called the couple “tous deux de France”, both of them from France.

The family at Port-Royal

Their first child, Jacqueline, was born about 1673. When the census was taken in 1686, Martin, aged 42, and Marie, 30, headed the only Benoist household at Port-Royal, with six children: Jacquette, 13, Pierre, 11, Clément, 9, Marie, 8, Jean, 5, and a second Pierre, 3. The same roll listed Jacqueline a second time, in the house of Michel de Forest, a widower of forty-seven with six children, whom she had just married. By 1693 she was the wife of Guillaume Trahan and had left home, while Claude, Catherine and Jeanne had been born; Françoise followed about 1693, the last of the ten. The family was still at Port-Royal in 1701.

Pigiguit

Some years later Martin and Marie moved with their younger children to Pigiguit, and by January 1711, when their son Claude married Jeanne Hébert, the register called them “habitans de Pigiguit”. On 23 May 1712 their daughter Catherine married François Prince at a triple wedding at which their granddaughter Anne Trahan, Jacqueline’s daughter, married Antoine Prince. On 12 September 1712, when Jeanne married Pierre Lejeune, Martin, nearly seventy, made his mark as a witness. Neither death is recorded. Two of the declarations say that both died at Port-Royal, though the last records place them at Pigiguit.

Lines of descent

All three lines run up through Floyd Amatus Delahorne’s mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990). The first runs through their son Clément Benoist (born about 1677), probably the Clément listed in the Port-Royal census of 1686, and makes them Floyd’s sixth great-grandparents. The other two both run through their daughter Jacqueline Benoit (died 1755) and make them Floyd’s seventh great-grandparents; the two lines depend on her identity, since the 1701 roll lists a Jacqueline aged 13 at home in Martin and Marie’s household while the 1693 roll gives a Jacqueline, aged 20, as Guillaume Trahan’s wife. The lines meet again in Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926), whose parents Firmin Serrette (born 1818) and Euphemie Dupuis (born 1817) both descend from this couple, and in Elizabeth Benois (about 1757–1816), whose parents Hélène Comeau and Alexis Benoit both descend from them.

Notes

Sources

Marie’s French origin rests on the sworn declarations the Acadian exiles made on Belle-Île-en-Mer: that of her grandson Pierre Trahant at Locmaria on 11 February 1767, that of her great-grandsons, the Trahant brothers of Kerguinolay, at Bangor on 26 February 1767, and that of the brothers Alexis and Jean Doüaron, in which Jean’s wife, Anne Thibodault, is a daughter of Marie’s daughter Françoise. All three call Martin and Marie “tous deux de France”. Pierre Trahant’s declaration, and another made at Bangor on 24 February 1767 by his son Pierre, add that they died at Port-Royal; the Kerguinolay brothers give no place of death, and the Doüaron declaration says only “en Acadie”. The family’s ages come from the Port-Royal census rolls of 1686, 1693, 1700 and 1701, which drift as such rolls do: Marie is 30 in 1686, 39 in 1693, 46 in 1700 and 48 in 1701; Martin is 42, 50, 50 and 58. The 1711 and 1712 marriages are those of the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, as abstracted by the Diocese of Baton Rouge. No baptism is known for either of them, and no burial.

Her arrival

Bona Arsenault’s genealogy says she would have been one of the five women who arrived from Rochefort at Port-Royal in 1671. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes puts both Marie and Martin among the sixty colonists the ship L’Oranger brought to Port-Royal in the spring of 1671, a recruit that included four marriageable young women, and dates the marriage to 1671, perhaps in France before they sailed. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana dates it to the year after Martin’s arrival, and Arsenault to about 1672; this page keeps about 1672. No marriage record survives.

Her parentage

Some online family trees make Marie a daughter of Gaspard d’Estienne de Chaussegros and Isabeau de Rostang, born at Port-Royal in 1656. The dates they give those two (1580–1660 and 1585–1698) would make her mother seventy-one at her birth, and her descendants’ declarations say she came from France, so that parentage is not followed here. Her parents are not known.

The two Pierres

The 1686 roll lists Pierre, 11, and Pierre, 3, and the 1693 roll Pierre, 18, and Pierre, 9. Cormier calls the elder Pierre l’aîné and the younger Pierre le jeune; Arsenault notes that the second was the second boy of that name in the family.

The move to Pigiguit

The date of the move is not recorded. By Lanctôt’s account the 1703 census already places the family at Pigiguit; Cormier and Arsenault put the move about 1708. By Lanctôt’s account the 1701 roll still places the family at Port-Royal.

Her name

The rolls and registers spell her surname in many ways: Chaussegros and Chosegros in 1686, Chossegros in 1700, Chendros in 1701, and Chosegros, Chossegros and Chossinrot in the marriage registers of her children; the Trahant brothers’ declaration writes Chausse-Gros.

Lines of descent

The first line rests on the Port-Royal census of 1686, which lists Clément, aged 9, in the household of Martin and Marie; that listing is the evidence for the link. The two lines through Jacqueline rest on three census rolls: the 1686 roll lists her, aged 13, in Martin’s household; the 1693 roll gives a Jacqueline, aged 20, as the wife of Guillaume Trahan; and the 1701 roll lists a Jacqueline, aged 13, at home in the household. The rolls do not settle whether the wife of 1693 and the daughter of 1701 are one woman; the lines through Jacqueline depend on that.