♂Martin Bourg

Martin Bourg (born about 1650) was an Acadian farmer of Port-Royal who, at about fifty, moved to the frontier settlement of Cobequid^W at the head of the Minas Basin, where his daughter and her husband also lived. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughter Marie Bourg (born about 1676) and, most likely, his son Charles Bourg (born about 1698).

Early life

Martin was a son of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry 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 is known.

Port-Royal

Martin married Marie Potet, about 1675 according to a modern genealogical dictionary of Acadian families; a compiled online tree says about 1671, when she was fourteen and still in her mother’s household. 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^W with four cattle, five sheep and six hogs. By 1693 the family had grown to seven children, with Ambroise, François and Anne Marie added, and the farm to thirty arpents, eighteen cattle, twenty-four sheep and thirteen hogs.

The family kept growing. The census of 1698 lists Martin, 48, and Marie, 42, with eight children at home, among them two new names, Madeleine, 4, and Charles, a baby of six months. In all, the Port-Royal rolls name nine children of the marriage: Marie, Abraham, Pierre, Jeanne, Ambroise, François, Anne Marie, Madeleine and Charles.

Cobequid

Martin was still at Port-Royal when the census of 1700 was taken. Brun’s history of the Acadians, a secondary work, records that on 16 July 1701 Martin, by then styled a habitant of Cobequid, sold his Port-Royal farm at Pleinmarais to Nicolas Babineau dit Deslauriers for 1,200 livres, in a deed it attributes to the Port-Royal records of Loppinot. The move to Cobequid therefore came in 1700 or 1701. 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 were in the same settlement in every Cobequid roll to 1714; in 1707 Martin and his wife still had five sons and a daughter at home. The census of 1714 counted the household as Martin, his wife and three sons, without naming the boys.

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

The census-takers’ ages for Martin drift, from 36 in 1686 to 34 in 1693, 48 in 1698 and 41 in 1700; the birth about 1650 rests on the age of twenty-one in 1671. A published transcription of the 1698 census gives a daughter Marie as 10; the roll itself reads 7, which fits Anne Marie. The census of 1700 lists six of the children and omits Madeleine and Charles, and the records do not explain why. 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 rests on Brun’s account alone. A declaration made on Belle-Île in 1767 records that he had died at Cobequid before that year. Brun gives Martin’s death as about 1725, a compiled online tree and Stephen White’s dictionary of Acadian families as about 1717; neither year rests on a surviving record. Among the witnesses at his grandson Joseph Theriot’s marriage at Grand-Pré in 1724 was a “Martain Borque”; on Brun’s date that could have been Martin himself, and on the online date it was another man of the same name.

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.