♀Martine Gauthier

Martine Gauthier (born about 1619) lived at Port-Royal in Acadia with her husband, the farmer Denis Gaudet, and was the mother of five children who were counted with the couple in the census of 1671, among them two sons both named Pierre and two daughters both named Marie. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by six separate lines of descent, through four of her children.

Life

Martine was born about 1619, some six years before her husband. She probably married Denis Gaudet about 1643 or 1644, and their five children were born between about 1646 and 1657. The couple is said to have lived at first near the fort and then, from 1655, on land that Denis’s father handed over to him about thirty kilometers to the east, on the Rivière Dauphin (the Annapolis River), at the place later known as the Village des Gaudet.

In the census of 1671 Denis was a farmer of forty-six and Martine was fifty-two. Five children were counted as theirs, two of them already married: Anne, twenty-five, and Marie, twenty-one. After them came the two sons named Pierre and the younger Marie, fourteen. Both pairs of namesakes were alive at the same time, and the Acadian genealogies tell them apart as the elder and the younger. The family worked six arpents^W of land and kept nine cattle and thirteen sheep. The married Marie was most likely the Marie Gaudet, twenty, who was living that year with her husband Olivier Daigre and their three small sons.

Martine died before 1693. By the census of that year Denis was a widower of seventy, living with their son Pierre, thirty-nine, and Pierre’s wife Marie Blanchard. No record of her death survives; the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost.

Lines of descent

Six separate lines run down to Floyd through four of Martine’s children: two through her son Pierre Gaudet (born about 1654), one through Marie Gaudet (born about 1659), two through Marie Gaudet (about 1651–1734), and one through Anne Gaudet (born 1645). All six run through Ida Serrette (1903–1990), so they lie on Floyd’s mother’s side, and the nearest is eleven generations up. The lines join again in marriages where both spouses descend from Martine: the parents of Maximilien Daigle (born about 1816), of Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and of Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906).

Notes

The census of 1671

The household is given from the manuscript copy of the 1671 census of Port-Royal held by Library and Archives Canada, which writes her name Martine Gautier: “Denis Gaudet aagé de quarante six ans, sa femme Martine Gautier aagée de cinquante deux ans, Leurs enfans cinq, deux de marié”. Her birth about 1619 rests on that age alone. The land and the stock (six arpents “en valeur”, nine cattle, thirteen sheep) are given from Placide Gaudet’s printed transcription of the same census (1905), which also calls all five children “sans métiers excepté Laboureurs”. The manuscript gives the second Pierre’s age as twenty-seven, which cannot be right for a son listed after a brother of twenty; Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s dictionary of the Belliveau families prints it as seventeen, which fits a son born about 1654.

The census of 1693, which shows Denis as a widower with his son Pierre and Marie Blanchard, is given from the Library and Archives Canada manuscript copy of that census.

Marriage and the family’s land

The marriage date is compiled: Father Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes gives 1643, and Beliveau’s dictionary “vers 1644”. The move to the family land rests on Lanctôt alone, who writes that Denis “semble s’être établi d’abord près du fort de Port-Royal” and in 1655 took over the domain his father ceded to him on the Rivière Dauphin, at what would later be called the Village des Gaudet, near present-day Middletown, Nova Scotia.

Which child is which

The census names the children but not their marriages, so the identification of each with a later family rests on their ages and on the compiled genealogies. The census wording, “deux de marié … La premiere Anne … La seconde Marie”, marks Anne and the elder Marie as the two married children, and a Marie Gaudet of twenty appears in the same census as Olivier Daigre’s wife. The younger Marie, fourteen in 1671, fits the Marie Gaudet who was Martin Aucoin’s wife at Les Mines in the censuses of 1686 and 1693, and Pierre, thirty-nine in Denis’s household in 1693, fits Pierre the younger, the husband of Marie Blanchard. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens and Lanctôt both name Denis Gaudet and Martine Gauthier as the parents of all five. Both call the two Pierres “l’Aîné” and “le Jeune”, and Lanctôt calls the two Maries “l’Aînée” and “la Cadette”.

Parents and origin

Nothing is known of Martine’s parents or of where she was born.