♀Marie Potet

Marie Potet (born about 1657) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of Martin Bourg and the mother of a large family that moved with her to the new settlement of Cobequid^W around 1700. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through her daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1676) and, most likely, her son Charles Bourg (born about 1698).

Life

Her mother was Marie Gautrot; her father is not known, and no record names him. A modern genealogical dictionary of Acadian families lists her mother’s first husband only as “Potet”, with no given name. By 1671 her mother had remarried, and the Port-Royal census of that year lists Marie, aged fourteen, among the children of the household of her stepfather, Michel Dupuis. The roll itself writes a surname after her name that reads Potier or Poter, the last letters uncertain, and plainly not Dupuis; a published transcription of the roll leaves it out, which is why she can seem to appear only as “Marie” until her marriage. The same census lists two married daughters of Francois Gautrot, both named Marie, aged 35 and 24; the elder was Marie Potet’s mother, and the younger was the wife of Claude Thériot.

She married Martin Bourg, about 1675 according to the genealogical dictionary. She was twenty-nine in the Port-Royal census of 1686, with four children: Marie, 10, Abraham, 7, Pierre, 5, and Jeanne, 2. By 1693 there were seven, with Ambroise, François and Anne Marie added. In 1698, aged forty-two, she had eight children at home, including Madeleine, 4, and a baby, Charles; in all, the Port-Royal rolls name nine children of the marriage. By 1707, at Cobequid, the household still held five sons and a daughter. The census clerks never agreed on her name: she is “Marie POTET” in 1686, “Marie POTRET” in 1693 and “Marie PETER” in 1707, the kind of drift that makes Acadian surnames hard to follow from one list to the next.

Cobequid

Martin was still at Port-Royal in the census of 1700, but by 16 July 1701 he was styled a habitant of Cobequid, on the far side of the Minas Basin, when he sold the family’s Port-Royal farm to Nicolas Babineau. The sale is recorded in Brun’s history of the Acadians, a secondary work. Their eldest daughter Marie and her husband Pierre Theriot were in the same settlement. The roll of 1714 still lists Martin Bourg and his wife at Cobequid.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) descends from this couple by two separate lines of descent, both through their children. The first runs through their daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1676). The second runs, most likely, through their son Charles Bourg (born about 1698).

Both lines run ten generations from Floyd to the couple, on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990) and her mother, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906). The two lines meet again in Amelia, whose father, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847), descends from the couple by the Charles line, and whose mother, most likely, Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), descends by the Marie line.

Notes

A compiled online tree dates her marriage to about 1671 and her death to 1717; neither rests on a surviving record. The genealogical dictionary gives the marriage as about 1675, which fits her first child’s birth about then better than 1671, when she was fourteen and still in her mother’s household. The census-takers’ ages for her drift as well: 29 in 1686, 34 in 1693, 42 in 1698 and 41 in 1700. The census of 1700 omits Madeleine and Charles, and the records do not explain why; a published transcription of the 1698 census gives a daughter Marie as 10, where the roll itself reads 7, which fits Anne Marie. The roll of 1707 counts three boys under fourteen, though only Charles is known to have been that young, so one or two sons born after 1698 were probably never named. The sale of the farm is known only from Brun’s history, which gives Martin’s death as about 1725.

The Charles line

The second line depends on one link: that Charles Bourg (died before 1765), whose son Joseph Bourg was born about 1742, was the son of Charles Bourg (born about 1698). Joseph’s marriage at Le Havre in 1765 names his late father only as Charles; the identification with the son of Martin Bourg and Marie Potet comes from a collaborative online family tree.

Melia Thibodeaux

The 1880 census of the 5th Ward of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana (enumeration district 37, page 31) lists Jean Baptiste Daigle, 31, with his wife Melia, 26, and their daughter Amelia. It is the record that links Amelia to her mother.