♀Marie Josèphe Dugas

Marie Josèphe Dugas (died 1747) was an Acadian born at Cobequid^W, the wife of Antoine Dupuis of the Minas settlements of Acadia and the mother of twelve children named in a daughter’s sworn declaration of 1767; that declaration records that three of her children married three children of one man, Michel Boudrot. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Antoine Dupuis (1723–1765).

Early life and marriage

Marie Josèphe was born at Cobequid about 1703, the daughter of Joseph Dugas and Claire Bourg, according to a declaration that her daughter Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, the widow of Pierre Theriot, made before witnesses on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, on 27 February 1767, while in exile there; it was printed in English translation in the Attakapas Gazette in 1983. Her birth falls before the surviving Grand-Pré register begins in 1707, but that register records Joseph Dugas and Claire Bourg as a Cobequid couple, with a son Alexis baptized at Cobequid in 1708. The declaration says that she married Antoine Dupuis, son of Martin Dupuis and Marie Landry, at Cobequid, in the parish of Saints-Pierre-et-Paul, in 1719, and that their children were born at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana calls her Antoine’s second wife; the Grand-Pré register records an Antoine Dupuis, son of Martin Dupuis and Marie Landry, marrying Marguerite Babin on 4 July 1712, most likely his first marriage.

Family

The Grand-Pré register records the baptisms of five of the couple’s children between 1722 and 1739: Magdelaine, Antoine, Simon Pierre, Margueritte and Blanche, whose godmother in 1739 was her sister Magdeleine. In October 1727, as “Marie Dugas, wife of Antoine Dupuis”, Marie Josèphe was herself godmother to Anne Aucoin. The declaration names twelve children, including two pairs of twins. Antoine the younger married Marguerite Boudrot, his sister Marguerite married her brother Pierre Boudrot, and another sister, Anne-Marie, married a third child of the same couple, Michel Boudrot. The declaration states that Antoine died at Rivière-aux-Canards in March 1747, and Marie Josèphe at the same place in the same year, eight years before the deportation of the Acadians.

The children in exile

The declaration records several of the children deported in 1755 to New York, and a daughter, Françoise-Ozide, dying at Falmouth, in England, in November 1756. Cormier’s compilation follows two sons, Antoine and Simon-Pierre, with a younger son, Joseph, and a daughter, to Le Mirebalais in French Saint-Domingue^W in the early 1760s, where all but Joseph died in 1764 and 1765; the Mirebalais register records the burial of Antoine the younger, “acadien”, on 6 August 1765. According to the compilation, Joseph then brought four of his brother Antoine’s children to Louisiana, where Spanish officials counted them at New Orleans in July 1767.

On 27 March 1769 the Pointe Coupée register recorded two Acadian weddings on the same day. Her son Joseph married Anne Marie Hébert, and Marie Madeleine Dupuis, the daughter of Antoine the younger and Marguerite Boudrot, married Jean Baptiste Hébert, with Joseph as the first of her witnesses. The register does not call Joseph her uncle, but the declaration of 1767 and Cormier’s compilation both make him her father’s brother. Both entries call the parents “both decd.”: by then Marie Josèphe and her husband had both died, as had the younger Antoine and Marguerite Boudrot.

Notes

The register abstract of Joseph’s 1769 marriage names his mother as Marie Anne Dugas, not Marie Josèphe; the register page itself has not been seen. The birth years in the 1767 declaration run several years later than the Grand-Pré baptisms (Magdelaine 1729 against a baptism of 1722, Blanche 1743 against 1739). The printed translation spells her mother’s surname “Bouig”; the Grand-Pré register gives the Cobequid couple as Joseph Dugas and Claire Bourg. The baptisms are in the Grand-Pré register, while the declaration places the births at Rivière-aux-Canards.

How the line is known

The link between Antoine Dupuis and Marie Josèphe Dugas and their son Antoine, the husband of Marguerite Boudrot, is proved by a sworn record. The 1767 declaration of their daughter Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1983 (page 109), names Antoine the younger as their son and as the husband of Marguerite Boudrot, whom it calls the daughter of Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie LeBlanc. The Grand-Pré register names her mother as Cécile LeBlanc, and Michel Boudrot’s second wife was Anne Prejean, so the declaration’s form of the mother’s name does not agree with the registers. The declaration agrees with the Grand-Pré baptism of 21 November 1723, the only baptism of an Antoine Dupuis in the surviving Grand-Pré registers of 1707 to 1748, which names his parents as Antoine Dupuis and Marie Joseph Dugas, and with the double wedding of 1769. The declaration was made from memory twenty years after the parents’ deaths, and its years run late: it gives Antoine’s birth as 1732, where the baptism is of 1723.