♂Martin Bourg

Martin Bourg (born about 1650) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal who, at about fifty, left the old colony to help found the frontier settlement of Cobequid at the head of the Minas Basin, together with his daughter and her husband. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1676).

Early life

Martin was a son of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry, one of the founding couples of Port-Royal. The census of 1671 lists him as twenty-one and unmarried in his parents’ household, one of eleven children, with four elder brothers and sisters already married and farming nearby. He is the only Martin in any Bourg household in that census, which is the main evidence for his parentage; no act naming his parents has been found.

Port-Royal

Martin married Marie Potet; a compiled online tree dates the marriage to about 1671. By 1678 the couple had a small holding with four cattle and a gun, and the census of 1686 shows them with four children, Marie, 10, Abraham, 7, Pierre, 5, and Jeanne, 2, on three arpents with four cattle, five sheep and six hogs. By 1693 the family had grown to seven children, and the farm to thirty arpents, eighteen cattle, twenty-four sheep and thirteen hogs.

Cobequid

Around 1700, when most men of his age stayed on their land, Martin moved his family to Cobequid, a new settlement on the far side of the Minas Basin. He heads the list of settlers “dans la baye de Cobequit” in the census of 1701, and his eldest daughter Marie and her husband Pierre Theriot appear a few households on. The two families stayed side by side through every Cobequid census to 1714; in 1707 Martin and his wife still had five sons and a daughter at home.

Notes

A compiled online tree gives his death in 1717. Among the witnesses at his grandson Joseph Theriot’s marriage at Grand-Pré in 1724 was a “Martain Borque”; if the online date is right, that was another man of the same name.