♂Michel Boudrot

Michel Boudrot (born about 1600) was a farmer of Port-Royal in Acadia who had come from France with his wife, Michelle Aucoin, and who in 1671, at seventy-one, still had eight of their eleven children at home, the youngest of them five years old. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by twelve separate lines of descent, through seven of his children.

Port-Royal

Michel Boudrot probably came out to Acadia in the 1630s, when Isaac de Razilly^W and then Charles de Menou d’Aulnay^W were bringing French settlers to the colony. By September 1639 he was apparently one of the first two syndics^W of Port-Royal: when d’Aulnay’s newborn daughter Marie was baptized that month, she was dedicated to the Virgin by the two “premiers sindics du port Royal”, and he was one of them. The syndics were most likely chosen by the settlers from among themselves, to speak for them to the leaders of the colony.

Michel probably married Michelle Aucoin about 1640 or 1641. Between about 1642 and about 1666 they had eleven children, four daughters and seven sons. When the census of 1671 was taken at Port-Royal, the roll entered the household by Michel’s trade: “Laboureur Michel Boudrot aagé de soixante et onze ans, sa femme Michelle aucoin aagée de cinquante et trois ans” (the farmer Michel Boudrot, aged seventy-one, his wife Michelle Aucoin, aged fifty-three). Three of their daughters were married: Françoise, 29, Jeanne, 25, and Marguerite, 20. The other eight children were still at home, from Charles, 22, down to François, 5. The family kept twenty cattle and twelve sheep and had eight arpents^W of land under the plow. The household the census-taker entered just before theirs was Jeanne’s, with her husband, Bonaventure Thériot, and their four-year-old daughter.

The king’s judge

In 1685, at about eighty-five, Michel Boudrot is said to have been named by royal letters patent the king’s lieutenant-general for Acadia, the colony’s judge in civil and criminal cases. The office gave him jurisdiction in the first instance over every civil and criminal matter and over questions of police, trade and navigation; the title was a judicial one, not a military rank. The census of 1686, as transcribed, lists him second at Port-Royal, straight after the seigneur, as lieutenant-general of the jurisdiction, aged eighty-five. Michelle was with him, and of their children only Michel, 26, and François, 20, were still at home, on a farm grown to twenty arpents, with sixteen cattle and seventeen sheep.

In a certificate dated at Port-Royal on 15 October 1687, as published, he and the other “anciens habitants”, the old settlers of the country, testified to the forts, mills and ships that d’Aulnay had built in Acadia, certifying it all to be true “car nous l’avons vu”, because they had seen it. He signed as “Messire Boudrot, lieutenant général”, while several of the others made their marks. He is said to have been replaced in the office in August 1688, at about eighty-eight, by Mathieu de Goutin, on account of “son grand âge”, his great age. When Michelle was buried in 1706, the priest still remembered him as “en son vivant juge du lieu”, in his lifetime the judge of the place.

Death

Michel Boudrot died at Port-Royal, probably between 1688 and 1693: the census of 1693, as transcribed, lists Michelle as his widow. No record of his burial survives, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost.

In 1767, Acadian exiles on Belle-Île-en-Mer^W, off the coast of Brittany, set down their family histories in declarations made before witnesses, and several of them, descended from the couple’s son Charles, took their line back to Michel and Michelle: “Charles Boudrot was the son of Michel Boudrot, who had come from France with his wife, Michelle Aucoin, and settled at Port Royal, where they both died.”

Lines of descent

Michel Boudrot reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by twelve separate lines, all through Ida Serrette (1903–1990) on Floyd’s mother’s side. The lines run through seven of his children: Claude, Jeanne, Charles, Marguerite, Marie, Françoise and Jean. The nearest is nine generations up, through Claude. The lines meet again in Ida’s parents, Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle; in Pierre Anatole’s parents, Firmin Serrette and Euphemie Dupuis; and in Melia Thibodeaux, whose parents Leonard Thibodeau and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier both descend from him. Some links down the lines through Jeanne, among them the one through Judith Landry (born 1728), are probable rather than proved, resting on identification by age and register or on compiled genealogies.

Notes

Origin and arrival

No record of Michel Boudrot’s birth, parents or marriage survives. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadian families gives his birth as 1601 and has him reach Acadia about 1642; it suggests, with a question mark, that he came from Cougnes, near La Rochelle, reasoning that he married Michelle Aucoin in France about 1640, before he sailed, and that the Aucoin family came from Cougnes. Léopold Lanctôt’s compiled Familles acadiennes gives his birth as 1600, suggests that he came out with Razilly in 1632, and has him marry Michelle at Port-Royal in 1641, after she had arrived with her mother. The historian Naomi Griffiths has him in Acadia in the 1630s. The declarations of 1767 say only that he came from France with his wife. His census ages, seventy-one in 1671 and eighty-five in 1686, place his birth about 1600.

The offices

The baptism of 1639 is known from an extract printed by Lanctôt (Familles acadiennes, volume 1, page 68) and is cited by Griffiths in From Migrant to Acadian (pages 181–182), who explains the syndic’s role and writes that by 1686 Boudrot had been appointed magistrate at Port-Royal. The letters patent of 1685, the certificate of 15 October 1687 and his replacement in 1688 are given by Lanctôt (pages 69–72), who also writes that Michel succeeded Abraham Dugast in the office. Transcriptions of the census of 1686 by Lanctôt, by Arsenault in L’Acadie des ancêtres and online all give him the title of lieutenant-general and the age of eighty-five. Arsenault’s genealogy calls him a councilor and lieutenant-general of Acadia.

The census of 1671

The 1671 household is quoted from the census roll of Port-Royal; the count of livestock and land runs over onto the next page of the roll, which reads “huict arpans”, eight arpents. Frère J.-Hervé Béliveau’s genealogical dictionary, quoting the same census, gives 28 arpents.

Another Michel Boudrot

Michel Boudrot of Port-Royal is not the Michel Boudrot of Grand-Pré who married Cécile LeBlanc, a man of the following century.

The lines through Jeanne

Some links further down the three lines through Jeanne Boudrot rest on identification by age and register, or on compiled genealogies, rather than on a record naming the parents; Jeanne Boudrot’s page sets them out.