♀Marie Gautrot

Marie Gautrot (born about 1637) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, a daughter of the early settler Francois Gautrot, twice married and the mother of Marie Potet, Martin Dupuis and Pierre Dupuis. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines of descent, through three of her children, two of them by her second husband and one by her first.

Life

A modern genealogical dictionary of Acadian families names her mother only as “Marie”, Francois Gautrot’s first wife. Her first husband is likewise known only by his surname, Potet; the dictionary suggests that he was “perhaps” Jean Potet dit La Fortune, a Swiss from Lucerne who had engaged in 1643 to come to Acadia, but it offers that as a possibility, not a finding. By 1671 she had married again. The Port-Royal census of that year lists the household of Michel Dupuis, written Dupont, a farmer of 37, with “wife Marie Gautrot, 34” and the children Marie, 14, Martin, 6, Jeanne, 4, and Pierre, 3 months. The roll itself writes a surname after the elder Marie’s name that reads Potier or Poter, the last letters uncertain, and plainly not Dupuis; a published transcription of the roll leaves it out. She was her daughter by Potet, later the wife of Martin Bourg. The infant Pierre is placed in her family by this census household and the next; no baptism names his parents.

The same census lists two married daughters of Francois Gautrot, both named Marie, aged 35 and 24. Marie, the wife of Dupuis, was the elder; the younger was the wife of Claude Thériot.

Later years

Martin, the eldest of the Dupuis children, was born about 1664, and Jeanne about 1667; Jeanne, four in 1671, is named only in that census. Pierre, the infant of 1671, was born about 1671, and Jean about 1675. The youngest, Marie, was born about 1679.

The couple stayed at Port-Royal, and the colony’s nominal censuses follow them for thirty years. In 1686 Michel Dupuis was 57 and Marie 49, with the sons Martin, Pierre and Jean and a daughter Marie, 7. In 1693 they had ten arpents under cultivation, fourteen cattle and eighteen sheep. In 1698 and again in 1700 they are listed with the two youngest children, Jean and Marie, still at home. The ages the census-takers gave her, from 34 in 1671 to 61 in 1700, all place her birth between 1637 and 1639. The couple does not appear in the censuses of 1701 and after. Both were dead by 12 January 1706, when their daughter Marie Dupuis married Jean-François Flan at Port-Royal. No burial entry for either survives in the Port-Royal register.

Her descent through Pierre later mattered to the Church. When her great-grandson Justinien Dupuis married Anne Girouard at Port-Royal in 1751, the register recorded a dispensation for kinship in the third to the fourth degree, without saying how the two were related. The family as reconstructed from the register and the censuses gives exactly that degree: Anne’s grandmother Marguerite Gautrot was another daughter of Francois Gautrot, who stood four generations above Justinien, through Marie and her son Pierre, and three above Anne.

Lines of descent

Marie’s four lines all come down on Floyd’s mother’s side. The nearest, nine generations above Floyd, runs through her son Martin Dupuis (died 1713). Three run eleven generations up: two through her daughter Marie Potet, by her first husband, and one through her son Pierre Dupuis (born about 1671, died before 9 September 1709), by her second. The lines meet again in Céleste Dupuis (born 1801), whose parents Pierre Dupuis and Rosalie Theriot both descend from Marie, and in Ida Serrette, Floyd’s mother, whose parents Amelia Pennison Daigle and Pierre Anatole Serrett both descend from her.

Notes

An online family tree names her mother as Marie Perrin; no record names her so, and that is not followed here. One compiled genealogy of Acadian families makes her a daughter of Edmée Lejeune, Francois Gautrot’s second wife; Edmée’s age in the 1671 census makes her about twelve at Marie’s birth, so that cannot be right. The register of that 1706 marriage calls the bride ‘fille de feu Michel Dupuis et Marie Gautrot habitans de Port Royal en leur vivant’. The published transcription marks only Michel as deceased; the register’s wording is taken here to mean that both parents were dead.