♀Marie Josèphe Bourg

Marie Josèphe Bourg (died before 8 February 1761) was an Acadian woman whose parents and birthplace are unknown, remembered only as the mother named at her daughter’s wedding in Louisiana in 1774. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Poirier.

Life

Marie Josèphe married Abraham Poirier and is said to have come from Chignecto, the district around Beaubassin^W. She was presumably his first wife and the mother of his daughter Marie, born about 1756. Abraham is thought to have remarried, to Agnès Belliveau, and to have had a son by her about 1764, so Marie Josèphe was most likely dead by then; Abraham probably died by 1765, and the boy is reckoned to have been brought to Louisiana as an orphan that year.

Stephen White dates the couple’s marriage to about 1751, with no place named. The January 1752 refugee roll of Baie-Verte lists “Abraham POIRIER and his wife”, two people in all. As White transcribes a 1755 Tintamarre roll, the household then counted a man, a woman and one girl. The Sainte-Anne-de-Ristigouche register records Abraham Poirier’s marriage to Agnès Belliveau on 8 February 1761. She had died before that marriage.

In September 1769 the census of St. James listed Marie, aged 16, as an orphan in Michel Poirier’s household. Her marriage there to Joseph Dupuis on 7 February 1774 named her parents as “Abraham & Maria Josephe Bourg”, the only record known to name Marie Josèphe.

Notes

Sources

Apart from her daughter’s marriage, everything known of her comes from Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana: that she was Abraham’s first wife, “of Chignecto”, and the mother of a Marie born about 1756, and that Abraham remarried, to Agnès Belliveau. “Of Chignecto” rests on that one compiled source, which contradicts itself on how Marie reached Louisiana (from Maryland in 1766, or from Halifax in 1765), and is best taken as a description, not an established fact. Her death is inferred: Cormier has Pierre, the son of the second marriage, born about 1764 and brought to Louisiana as an orphan in 1765. No register gives her parents, her birthplace or any other event of her life.

Other women of the name

At least two other Acadian women named Marie-Josèphe Bourg have been examined and set aside. One, of Grand-Pré, the widow of Pierre-Joseph Godin dit Châtillon and of Joseph Landry, settled near St. James and died at Ascension in September 1792, aged 81; born about 1711 and never married to a Poirier, she is not this woman. Another identification, which makes her a woman of Cobequid born about 1729, was rejected on grounds independent of her place of origin: it has her die in Louisiana in 1759, years before any Acadian reached the colony.

Rolls and the 1761 date

The January 1752 entry is Stephen White’s transcription of the Rolle général des familles réfugiées (G1 vol. 466), roll 1752r-22, which gives “Abraham POIRIER and his wife”, two souls. White’s 2019 study gives a 1755 Tintamarre count (Recensement de Beaubassin 1755, Jolicoeur, roll 1755-307) as one man, one woman, no boys and one girl, three in all; the link of that count to this household is White’s own identification. White’s union of about 1751 appears as “v1751” (vers 1751), with no place given. The date before 8 February 1761 comes from the Restigouche marriage of her husband, in the Drouin Collection; that act does not describe the groom as a widower, so the date is the limit the marriage sets, not a record of her death.