♀Marie Giroir

Marie Giroir (born about 1738) was an Acadian refugee who married Joseph Bourgeois in the refugee camp at Restigouche in 1759, already a widow at about twenty-one, and later settled with him on the Mississippi in Spanish Louisiana. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Celeste Bourgeois.

Family and early life

Marie was the daughter of Claude Giroir and Magdeleine Vincent. Her parents had married at Annapolis Royal on 3 June 1726, when the register describes Claude, aged 27, as living in the parish of Pisiguit, the Acadian settlement on the Minas Basin; through him she was a granddaughter of Pierre Giroard and Marie Comeau, and descended from Girouards who had been at Port-Royal since its founding generation. A census taken in Louisiana in 1766 gives her age as 28, which places her birth about 1738, most likely at Pisiguit. No record of her baptism has been found; the Pisiguit registers of those years have not survived.

Île Royale

By about 1749 the family had come to Île Royale^W, the French colony on Cape Breton Island. A census taken there by the Sieur de la Roque in April 1752 finds Claude Giroir, a plowman born in Acadia, and his wife Madeleine Vincent, born at Port-Royal, on Isle Madame, “three years in the colony”, with five sons and three daughters. Seven children are named: Joseph, Marguerite, Marie Joseph, Silvain, Bazille, Antoine and Procède; one son goes unnamed. The census gives Marie Joseph as sixteen, and she is taken to be the Marie of this page, though the census does not call her Marie Giroir.

That age does not agree with the Louisiana census, which gave her 28 in 1766. Sixteen in 1752 puts her birth about 1736; twenty-eight in 1766 puts it about 1738. The records give no way to choose between the two, so this page keeps “about 1738” and leaves the difference open. Neither census says where she was born. In 1752 she was still in her parents’ household and no husband is named, so her marriage to Aime Laurot, and his death, fall between that census and November 1759.

Restigouche

In the years after the deportation of 1755, Acadians who had escaped the British gathered at a refugee camp on the Restigouche River, at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs, where a Récollet^W missionary kept the register of Sainte-Anne de Ristigouche. On 5 November 1759 Father Étienne married there Joseph Bourgeois, son of Paul Bourgeois and Marie Josèphe Brun of Malpeque, on Île Saint-Jean, and Marie Giroire, daughter of Claude Giroir and Magdeleine Vincent, both “de la Cadie”. The act calls her the widow of Aime Laurot. She was then about twenty-one by the 1766 census, or about twenty-three by the 1752 one. Nothing else is known of him or of that first marriage, which fell between the 1752 census and November 1759; no record of the wedding or of his death has been found. The couple’s daughter, Marie Madeleine Bourgeois, was baptized at the same mission on 28 September 1760, ten months after the wedding, with Michel Bourgeois and Madeleine Bourgeois as godparents.

Louisiana

The records do not trace the couple’s route from the Baie des Chaleurs south. By 1766 they were among the first Acadians settled on the Mississippi between St. James and Donaldsonville, the stretch known as the Acadian Coast^W, where a published transcript of that year’s census lists Joseph, 30, Marie, 28, and a daughter Marie, whose age the printed transcript gives as 14, a figure that does not fit a marriage made in 1759. The St. James registers name her twice more: as Maria Giroar, mother of the bride, when her daughter Celestina married Valentin Landry on 27 November 1792, and as Maria Giroir, maternal grandmother, at the baptism of her grandson Adelard in 1800. Abstracts of the river-parish registers point to further children of the couple, one baptized at St. James as late as 1781.

A published abstract of southwest Louisiana church records, Hebert’s Southwest Louisiana Records, gives her death at Carencro on 26 August 1815, at the home of Joseph Braud, at the age of 78, and records her as the widow of Joseph Bourgeois. A Find a Grave listing gives her burial at St. Martinville.

Notes

One published transcription of the 1759 marriage gives her father’s name as Charles; the register itself names Claude.

A compiled genealogy by Arsenault gives the 1760 daughter the surname Bourg. The page of the 1760 entry is cut off in the gutter at the mother’s name; her name in that entry comes from a transcription.

The age of 78 at her death in 1815 would put her birth about 1737. The census ages (28 in 1766) keep this page at about 1738.