♀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 around 1700. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1676).

Life

Her mother was Marie Gautrot; her father, a man named Potet, is known only by his surname. By 1671 her mother had remarried, and the Port-Royal census of that year lists Marie, aged fourteen, as simply “Marie” in the household of her stepfather, Michel Dupuis, which is why she does not appear under her own surname until her marriage. A modern genealogical dictionary of Acadian families identifies her there. The same census lists two married daughters of François 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 was twenty-nine in the Port-Royal census of 1686, the wife of Martin Bourg, with four children: Marie, 10, Abraham, 7, Pierre, 5, and Jeanne, 2. By 1693 there were seven, and 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.

Around 1700 she and Martin left Port-Royal for Cobequid, on the far side of the Minas Basin, where their eldest daughter Marie and her husband Pierre Theriot settled beside them.

Notes

A compiled online tree dates her marriage to about 1671 and her death to 1717; neither has been checked against a 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 stepfather’s household.