♀Marie Trahan

Marie Trahan (born about 1672) was an Acadian woman of Pigiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, who at about twenty married the widower Jean Doiron and was counted in the census of 1693 at the same age as her eldest stepson. She probably outlived her husband by many years, and at 80 was living on Île Saint-Jean^W. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Paul Doiron (born about 1710).

Marriage and Pigiguit

Jean Doiron had been counted at Port-Royal in 1686 with his first wife, Marianne Carrol, and seven children. In the census of 1693 the household at Pigiguit was Jean Douaron, in his early forties, his wife Marie Trahan, about 20, and the children of his first marriage, from Abraham, about 20, down to twins of 4; they kept eight head of cattle, four sheep and six pigs, had five and a half arpents under the plow and owned one gun.

The census of Les Mines in 1701 counted the household again, with Marie entered as Jean Doiron’s wife.

Jean and Marie then raised a second family. Their children were born at Pigiguit, whose parish register has been lost, so they are known chiefly from the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré: their daughter Marie married Pierre Girouard, a widower from Port-Royal, there in 1709; a daughter Catherine was baptized there on 19 May 1709; and their son Alexandre married Anne Vincent there on 20 October 1727, his parents named as of the parish of Pigiguit. Two compiled genealogies, Bona Arsenault’s and Léopold Lanctôt’s, name among their sons Paul Doiron, called le Grand Paul, born about 1710; no record of his baptism survives. The census of 1714 still found the family at Pigiguit, and the household then counted four males and three females.

Widowhood and Île Saint-Jean

The census of 1714 is the last record known to name Jean; Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana has him dying at Pigiguit between April 1735 and June 1736.

When Joseph de La Roque took the census of Île Saint-Jean in 1752, he found her, aged 80, at the Anse du Nord-Ouest, living with her daughter Madeleine Doiron, aged 47, and Madeleine’s husband, François Nogues, a plowman from the parish of Piriac in the bishopric of Nantes. Nogues had come to the island two years before, and the household also held the couple’s six children. Madeleine was a native of Acadia. Their arrival places them in the Acadian Exodus^W, the flight of Acadian families from British-ruled Nova Scotia to the French islands about 1750. The records do not show when Marie died, or whether she lived to see the deportation of the island’s Acadians in 1758.

Notes

The censuses of 1693 and 1714 are known here from the transcriptions printed by Léopold Lanctôt (Familles acadiennes) and Bona Arsenault (L’Acadie des ancêtres). They differ by a year or so in the ages: 42 and 20 for the couple in 1693 in one, 44 and 21 in the other, with Abraham the same age as Marie in both. Her age of 80 in 1752 agrees with them. The copy of the 1714 census printed by Lanctôt calls her Jeanne Trahan. The 1701 census of Les Mines is cited from the manuscript nominal censuses of Acadia, and the 1714 entry from the manuscript census in G1, volume 466.

The 1752 census calls Marie “their mother”, meaning Madeleine and her husband François Nogues, and gives no father for either. Madeleine’s place as Jean Doiron’s daughter is not confirmed by a parish record here. Arsenault (volume 5, page 2133, compiled) places the same household at Saint-Pierre-du-Nord; the census names the Anse du Nord-Ouest, and this bio follows the census.

Arsenault, Lanctôt and Cormier make her a daughter of Guillaume Trahan and his second wife, Magdeleine Brun, of Port-Royal. A sworn declaration made at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 by a grandson of that couple lists among their children “Marie Trahant … mariée à Charles Doüaron venu de France”, which gives her husband a different first name. No record yet found names the parents of Jean Doiron’s wife.

Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens makes her husband a son of Jean Doiron and Marianne Carrol, born 1678; the censuses show that Jean was a boy in the household in 1693, when she was already his father’s wife. Cormier’s compiled history gives the couple a son Paul who married Marguerite Doucet about 1725, and does not say whose son le Grand Paul was. A Paul Douaron baptized at Grand-Pré on 19 April 1710 was the son of Noël Douaron and Marie Henry, not of this couple.

The Grand-Pré register dates her daughter Marie’s marriage to Pierre Girouard “le 14 de 9bre” 1709, that is, 14 November; the printed abstract of the register gives 14 September, misreading the month.