♀Marie Dugas

Marie Dugas (born about 1688) was an Acadian woman of Pigiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, who married twice: first René Landry, at Grand-Pré on 16 November 1711, in a double wedding, at which his brother Jean-Baptiste Landry married Marguerite Gautrot, and then, as his widow, Alexandre Breau, whose sons by her were carried into exile in Maryland in 1755. That René Landry’s widow and Alexandre Breau’s wife were the same woman rests on a compiled genealogy of the Acadian families, which says so, and on the marriage of her son Joseph Landry in 1733, where Alexandre stood as a witness. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) through her sons Joseph Landry (about 1713 – before February 1777) and Joseph Braux (died before 1790), and his seventh great-grandmother through her son Jean-Baptiste Breau (born about 1727): three separate lines of descent.

Early life

Marie was the daughter of Abraham Dugast and Jeanne Guilbeau, and was probably born about 1688. Two years before, in the census of 1686, her parents were a young couple, still without children, counted in the seigneury of Pobomcoup at Cape Sable, on the southern tip of the peninsula. By 1714 her parents were living at Grand-Pré.

Marriage at Grand-Pré

René Landry and Marie Dugas were married at Grand-Pré on 16 November 1711, together with his brother Jean-Baptiste Landry and Marguerite Gautrot, whose family lived on the Gaspereau River. René was a son of Jean Landry and Cécile Melancon, whose home was at Pigiguit. Witnesses at both weddings included Abraham Dugast and Claude Gautrot, probably the brides’ fathers. None of the four could write, and each made a mark in the register.

The wedding came a year after the British capture of Port-Royal^W, and in 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht^W gave Acadia to Britain, so the couple’s married life passed under British rule.

Pigiguit and a second marriage

The young couple made their home at Pigiguit, among René’s family. Their one known child, Joseph, was born about 1713, and in the census of 1714 René Landry, his wife and one son were counted on the river of Pigiguit. After René’s death Marie probably married again, about 1716. Her second husband, Alexandre Breau, was probably a son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin, who had married at Port-Royal and later settled at Pigiguit.

Marie raised her second family at Pigiguit. Her son Alexis married Magdeleine Trahant there, and three more sons, Jean-Baptiste, Honoré and Joseph, are said to have been hers as well, born at Pigiguit between the mid-1720s and the mid-1730s. When Joseph Landry married his cousin Marie-Josèphe Richard at Grand-Pré on 3 November 1733, the register named his parents as René Landry, then dead, and Marie Dugas, of the parish of the Assomption at Pigiguit, and his stepfather Alexandre Breau was among the witnesses, making his mark.

When the British deported the Acadians of the Minas Basin in 1755, the four Breau sons were carried with their families to Maryland. It is not known whether Marie lived to see the deportation, and no record of her death is known. Her name was set down once more far from Acadia. On 11 February 1767 Pierre Trahant, Alexis’s father-in-law, then an exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer^W, an island off the coast of Brittany, made a declaration of his family. In it he recorded that his daughter Magdeleine had been born at Pigiguit in October 1725 and married there to Alexis Brault, “fils d’Alexandre Brault et de Marie Dugast” (son of Alexandre Brault and Marie Dugast), and that the English had transported the couple to Maryland.

The family

Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana follows the brothers from Maryland to Louisiana. Jean-Baptiste came in 1766 and settled at Cabanocé, later St. James, on the Mississippi above New Orleans, and afterwards moved upriver to Ascension. In February 1768 Alexis and Honoré led an extended family of about 150 Acadians from Port Tobacco to Louisiana, and Joseph and his family came with them.

By Cormier’s account, the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa^W, insisted that the party settle at the isolated post of Fort San Luis de Natchez, far from the other Acadians. Alexis and Honoré refused, and when Ulloa threatened to deport them they went into hiding with their families while Spanish soldiers took the rest upriver. Cormier writes that the two brothers certainly encouraged the revolt that overthrew Ulloa that autumn, the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768^W. In late 1769 his successor let the families settle where they wished, and Alexis and Honoré made their homes at Cabanocé. Both brothers appear in the Dafford mural at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne descends from Marie by three lines, one through each of three sons. The line through Joseph Landry, her son by René, comes down to Floyd’s father, Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929). The lines through Joseph Braux and Jean-Baptiste Breau, her sons by Alexandre, come down to his mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990), and meet on the way in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), both descend from Marie. The three lines meet again in Floyd himself. The two Breau lines rest on the compiled parentage of those sons.

Notes

Sources

Both Grand-Pré marriages, of 1711 and of 1733, are known from the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register (Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 1a). The 1711 entry names the parents of René and of Marie, calls René’s parents “habitans de Pigiguit”, notes the double wedding with Jean-Baptiste Landry and Marguerite Gautrot, and gives the witnesses and the marks of the four. The 1733 entry names Joseph’s parents as “Rene Landry, decd. and Marie Dugas, of the parish of la tres vierge de la Assomption de Pigiguit”, and lists “Alexandre {+} Bro” first among the witnesses. Her parents’ home at Grand-Pré in 1714 is from the entry for the marriage of her sister Jeanne to Jean Richart on 15 January 1714, which calls the bride’s parents “habitans de la Grand Prée”. The 1714 household is from that year’s census of the river of Pigiguit, which lists “Rene LANDRY and his wife, 1 son”. The birth year of about 1688 is from Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians, which lists Marie first among four children of Abraham Dugas and Jeanne Guilbault, with Joseph (1690), Jeanne (about 1691) and Marguerite (about 1692).

Alexandre and Marie are named as Alexis’s parents in the declaration Pierre Trahant made at Borderhouat, in the parish of Locmaria on Belle-Île-en-Mer, on 11 February 1767, printed by Casgrain and Rameau in 1890 in the third volume of the Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique. Steven A. Cormier’s compilation on the Acadians of Louisiana names four sons of Alexandre Breau and Marie Dugas, Alexis, Jean-Baptiste, Honoré and Joseph-Charles, born at Pigiguit between about 1724 and about 1734. For the sons’ households in Maryland he cites the lists of the Acadians at Port Tobacco and Oxford made in July 1763; the 1768 party, Ulloa’s order and the move to Cabanocé are as he gives them.

One woman, two husbands

Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (p. 273, as quoted in another family tree) gives Alexandre, son of Antoine Breau and Marguerite Babin, as “married around 1716 to Marie DUGAS, daughter of Abraham & Jeanne GUILBEAU (widow of René LANDRY)”. The second-marriage date of about 1716 rests on that work. The records fit it: René is last seen alive in the census of 1714; Joseph Landry’s mother lived in the parish of Pigiguit in 1733, where the Breau sons were born; and Alexandre Breau stood witness at Joseph’s wedding. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens instead gives Alexandre, written Alexandre Brot, a birth year of 1701 and a marriage to Marie Dugas about 1720. Born about 1688, Marie would have been in her mid-forties when Joseph-Charles was born about 1734; both birth years are estimates. The name was common at Minas: the Grand-Pré register of 1707–1748 records at least three other women called Marie Dugas, each the wife of another man.

Her sons by Alexandre

Arsenault names Alexis, born in 1725, and Jean-Baptiste, born about 1725, as sons of Alexandre and Marie, and gives Joseph, born about 1728, and a Pierre, born about 1740, as probably theirs. Cormier’s narrative calls Joseph-Charles the couple’s fourth son, but his table of the arrivals gives him as “son of probably Alexandre BREAUX & Marie DUGAS”; no record naming Joseph’s parents is known. That the Joseph Braux whose daughter Marie Claire married at St. James in 1790 was Cormier’s Joseph-Charles is itself probable; his own page sets out the evidence. Jean-Baptiste’s parentage is likewise unsettled, and his own page sets out the rival reading.

The census of 1686

The 1686 household is known from Arsenault’s transcript of that census in L’Acadie des ancêtres (1955), which lists “Abraham Dugas, 23 ans, marié a Jeanne Guilbault” among the people of the seigneury of Pobomcoup, which took in Cape Sable. The names and the age fit her parents, but the census gives no more to tie the couple to the later Grand-Pré family. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 528) gives an 1703 marriage to Madeleine Landry to Abraham Dugast, son of Martin Dugas, not to Marie’s father. The Grand-Pré entries of 1711 and 1714 name the brides’ mother as Jeanne Guillebaud and say nothing of a second wife.

Her name

The Grand-Pré register writes her Marie Dugas and her parents Abraham Dugas and Jeanne Guillebaud; the 1767 declaration writes her Marie Dugast. A Pointe Coupée entry for the marriage of her granddaughter Cécile Landry to Michel Rivais in 1769 names the bride’s mother as Marie Dugas, which was this Marie’s name; the entries for Cécile’s brothers and sisters give their mother as Marie Richard.

The line through Joseph Landry

The line runs from Joseph through his daughter Osite Landry (born about 1738), whose place in Joseph’s family rests on a compiled genealogy rather than a record that names her parents; Joseph Landry’s page sets out the reasons.