♂Martin Dupuis

Martin Dupuis (died 8 August 1713) was an Acadian settler of Les Mines, in Acadia, who with his wife Marie Landry had at least twelve children; two of their daughters married two Blanchard brothers of Cobequid, and a son and a daughter married a brother and sister of one Babin family. He was born about 1664 at Port-Royal, and the censuses of 1671 and 1686 list him as a son of Michel Dupuis and Marie Gautrot. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Antoine Dupuis (died 1747).

Early life

Martin is placed in the family of Michel Dupuis and Marie Gautrot by the nominal censuses of Port-Royal, as transcribed on the acadian-home.org site; no baptism naming his parents has been found. The census of 1671 lists Michel Dupont (Dupuis), a farmer of 37, with his wife Marie Gautrot, 34, and the children Marie, 14, Martin, 6, Jeanne, 4, and Pierre, 3 months. The census of 1686 lists Michel Dupuis, 57, and Marie Gotro, 49, with Martin, 21, Pierre, 17, Jean, 10, and Marie, 7. The two ages for Martin, 6 and 21, agree on a birth in 1664 or 1665. The fourteen-year-old Marie of 1671 was his mother’s daughter by an earlier marriage, so she was Martin’s half-sister. His younger brother Pierre Dupuis (1671–1709) is also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne.

Marriage and family

Martin married Marie Landry. Declarations made by their descendants in exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, in the early months of 1767, and printed in English translation in the Attakapas Gazette, tie the couple to Port-Royal: his granddaughter Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, the widow of Pierre Theriot, called them “Martin Dupuis and Marie Landry of Port Royal”, and Honoré Daigre, whose first wife was another granddaughter, said that Martin “had married at Port Royal Marie Landry”. The wedding was probably about 1686, at Port-Royal, shortly after the census of that year.

The census of Les Mines in 1693 lists Martin, 27, with his wife Marie Landry, 22, four children and a servant, on five and a half arpents of land with eight cattle. The census of 1703 names Martin Dupuis and his wife, and the rolls of 1701 and 1707 list the household at Les Mines again. In 1701 it is on the Gaspareaux River, with his wife, three boys and four girls, six arpents and fifteen cattle; in 1707 the roll names his wife, with six arpents and ten cattle.

By the time the surviving register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, at Grand-Pré, begins in 1707, the family was living at Les Mines. That register records the baptisms of three of their children, Joseph in 1708, Henriette in 1710 and Charles on 10 September 1712, two months after his elder brother Antoine’s wedding, and the marriages of nine, Henriette’s among them in 1731. Another son, Jean, married Marguerite Richard at Port-Royal on 1 August 1713, where the register calls his parents “habitants of the parish of Mines”. The daughter Marguerite, then the widow of Claude Babin and living in the parish of Sauzon on Belle-Île, declared in 1767 that she had been born at Mines, in the parish of Saint-Charles, in 1702. Cormier’s compilation counts thirteen children.

At the first of the Grand-Pré marriages, his daughter Marie Joseph’s to Guillaume Hubert of Port-Royal on 14 January 1711, Martin was among the witnesses and made his mark rather than signing. His son Antoine married Marguerite Babin on 4 July 1712, and six years later, on 14 November 1718, his daughter Marguerite married Claude Babin, Margueritte’s brother; both were children of Charles Babin and Magdelaine Richard. His daughter Isabelle married Martin Blanchard on 1 October 1714, and on 4 July 1718 her sister Anne married his brother, Joseph Blanchard, both sons of Martin Blanchard and Marguerite Guillebaud of Cobequid^W. The other marriages joined the family to Granger, Robichaud, Aucoin and LeBlanc households between 1717 and 1731.

Death

The Grand-Pré register records that Martin Dupuis died on 8 August 1713, about seven in the morning, after receiving all the sacraments, and was buried the next day, 9 August, in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines. The entry, by the priest Bonaventure Masson, names no wife, age or parents, but it is the only burial of a Martin Dupuis in the register; the Port-Royal entry for his son Jean’s marriage, eight days earlier, does not call him deceased, and every one of his children’s marriages from October 1714 onward does.

Notes

The declarations of 1767 say that Martin and Marie Landry both died at Port-Royal, but the Grand-Pré register records his burial at Les Mines, and a Marie Landry, the widow of a Dupuy, was buried there in 1746. The declarations were made more than fifty years after his death.

His parents rest on the census households above, which name him as a child of Michel Dupuis and Marie Gautrot, and on Cormier’s compilation and the compiled dictionary, which make him their eldest son. A different account comes from the declarations of 1767, made some fifty years after his death: his daughter Marguerite’s declaration, and that of her son Laurent Babin, call him the son of “another Martin Dupuis who had come from France” and of Perrine Theriot. Honoré Daigre’s declaration says instead that Martin himself had come from France. These are second-hand statements by descendants, and they have not been followed; the censuses of 1671 and 1686 show a Martin of the right age in the household of Michel Dupuis at Port-Royal.

Birth and marriage dates

The ages in the Port-Royal censuses of 1671 (6) and 1686 (21) agree on a birth in 1664 or 1665, and the census of 1693 gives 27 at Les Mines. Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled Familles acadiennes, tome I, gives the birth as 1664 at Port-Royal and puts the marriage shortly after the 1686 census. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana dates the marriage to about 1686, at Port-Royal, and a compiled genealogical dictionary of Acadian families places the couple’s home on the Gaspareaux River, at Les Mines, where the census of 1701 finds them. No marriage act survives: the Port-Royal register has no years in the 1680s, so the marriage date is compiled, not recorded.

The Les Mines censuses

The four rolls are the manuscript nominal censuses of Acadia for Les Mines, for 1693, 1701, 1703 and 1707 (G1 vol. 466, partie I, for the later two). The transcriptions disagree on the children named in the 1707 roll, so the number of children at home is given only for 1693 and 1701.

The hour of death and the burial

The Saint-Charles-des-Mines parish register, in a copy of about 1895 held by Library and Archives Canada, records the death on 8 August 1713 at about seven in the morning, after the sacraments, and the burial on 9 August in the parish cemetery. The Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, Vol. 1a (1707–1748), give the same burial date. Cormier’s compilation gives his age at death as 48.