♀Marie Poirier

Marie Poirier (born about 1754) was an Acadian exile, listed as an orphan in the 1769 census, who settled among fellow Acadians at Cabahannocer, in present St. James Parish. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Dupuis.

Exile and arrival

Marie was a daughter of Abraham Poirier and Marie Josèphe Bourg; the St. James marriage register of 1774 names them as her parents, without giving dates or a place. The Cabanocé settlement’s 1769 census lists her as an orphan, aged 16, in the household of Michel Poirier; the census gives no relationship. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, she arrived as a child, in 1765 or 1766 (see Notes), and her father Abraham had a second wife, Agnès Belliveau, and a son Pierre, Marie’s half-brother, who also came as an orphan. Neither parent is recorded as having reached the colony, and no record of the date or place of either death is known.

Marriage and family

Marie married Joseph Dupuis, son of fellow Acadians Justinien Dupuis and Anne Girouard, at St. James on 7 February 1774. Their children included Pierre, baptized 8 December 1778, and a daughter Rosalie baptized in 1781, among others Cormier’s compilation credits to the marriage. The family’s children were still being baptized at St. James in the 1790s, and three of them married there in 1799 and 1800; Cormier’s compilation has the family cross the Atchafalaya Basin some time after that to the Attakapas prairies, where Joseph died in December 1803, while a FamilySearch profile gives his death as 5 December 1803 at St. James.

Notes

Marie’s parentage rests on the St. James marriage register; her birth year and her arrival as a child rest instead on Cormier’s compiled narrative, which is not consistent about the arrival. One passage has her come in September 1766, aged 10, with the first contingent of exiles from Maryland; his genealogical entry gives 1765, with a query, aged 9, and suggests she came from Halifax by way of Saint-Domingue, perhaps as guardian to her infant half-brother. Cormier also notes that she is missing from the Cabanocé census of 1766. For her age he prefers the 1777 census (21, so about 1756) to the 1769 census (16, so about 1753), which he marks as too high; the birth year of about 1754 falls between the two. Cormier’s compilation also tentatively identifies her, hedged as “may have been,” with a “Mrs. Poirier” who died in Ascension Parish about 1855 at the reported age of 99; no register confirms this, and no record of her death has been found.