♂Michel Boudrot

Michel Boudrot was an Acadian of Grand-Pré, the husband of Cécile LeBlanc, three of whose children married three children of a single household at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia: the family of Antoine Dupuis and Marie Josèphe Dugas. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Boudrot (1725–1764), by two separate lines of descent.

He was born about 1685 at Les Mines, the son of Claude Boudrot and Anne-Marie Thibodeau. The 1693 census of Les Mines lists him, aged 8, in the household of his parents. The 1714 census of Les Mines lists him again, with his wife, one son and three daughters. A later compiled genealogy, Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, gives a different birth: 1686, at Rivière-aux-Vieux-Habitants.

Marriages

The Grand-Pré register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines, which runs from 1707 to 1748, records Michel Boudrot as the husband of Cécile LeBlanc, daughter of Jacques LeBlanc. Their children baptized there included Pierre, born 16 December 1720, and Marguerite, born 12 October 1725, and a son Michel was named as a witness and brother at his sister Françoise’s wedding in 1732. Cécile was buried at Grand-Pré on 26 May 1731, aged about 45.

Michel Boudrot married again within a year of her burial. The Annapolis Royal register records, on 16 April 1732, the marriage of Michel Boudrot, “veuf de Cecille leblanc” (widower of Cécile LeBlanc), and Anne Prejean, widow of François Pitre. The entry notes a dispensation of three banns and records the marks of Michel Boudrot and Anne Prejean, with Pierre, Jean and Charles Prejean among the witnesses.

The Dupuis marriages

A sworn declaration was made on 27 February 1767 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, by Marie-Josèphe Dupuis, widow of Pierre Theriot, before four Acadian witnesses living on the island. She stated that she had been born at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, to Antoine Dupuis and Marie Josèphe Dugas, and listed their children, born at the same place. Three of them had married children of Michel Boudrot, whose wife the declaration calls Anne-Marie LeBlanc: her brother Antoine, “married there to Marguerite Boudrot, daughter of Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie LeBlanc”; her sister Marguerite, married to Pierre Boudrot, “son of Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie LeBlanc”; and her sister Anne-Marie, one of twins, married to Michel Boudrot, son of the same couple. The declaration was printed in the original French in a collection of documents on Acadia edited by Abbé H.-R. Casgrain, and in English translation in 1983. Because brothers and sisters of one family married brothers and sisters of the other, the children of the three marriages were double first cousins.

Exile

The expulsion of the Acadians scattered the three couples. The declaration records Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot, and Pierre Boudrot and Marguerite Dupuis, as “deported to New York”, and says that the younger Michel Boudrot and Anne-Marie Dupuis “went to the Mississippi with their families”, the French text reading “passés avec leur famille au Mississipi”, that is, to Louisiana. The declaration does not say where Michel Boudrot himself was in 1755. A compiled dictionary of Acadian families, by Stephen White, which follows P. Delaney, places him among the Acadians carried to Bristol, England, on the Virginia Packet in May 1756, and he probably died in exile between September 1755 and September 1756.

Lines of descent

Michel Boudrot is an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne by two separate lines, both on his mother’s side. The nearer is seven generations up, through his daughter Marguerite Boudrot (1725–1764). The farther is nine generations up, through his daughter Anne Boudrot. The two lines meet again in Floyd’s mother, Ida Serrette, whose parents Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle both descend from Michel.

Notes

The 1767 declaration calls the mother of the three Boudrot children Anne-Marie LeBlanc, but the registers give her as Cécile, and Michel’s second wife of 1732 was Anne Prejean. No record of a marriage of Michel to an Anne-Marie LeBlanc is known. The most likely explanation, an interpretation and not a record, is that the deponent, speaking from memory more than thirty years later, ran together the first name of the second wife and the surname of the first.

A genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau family compiled by Brother J.-Hervé Béliveau gives a different Michel Boudrot: one born at Port-Royal in 1706, son of François Boudrot and Madeleine Belliveau, married in 1725 to Anne-Marie LeBlanc, whom it calls “no doubt” the daughter of Pierre LeBlanc and Marie Terriot while noting that her name is absent from the list of that couple’s children. The Annapolis Royal register has his baptism but no such marriage, and a man born in 1706 cannot have fathered a child baptized in 1720, so he appears to be another man. The 1693 census of Les Mines places him in the household of Claude Boudrot and Anne-Marie Thibodeau, and the households of Claude at Les Mines in the censuses of 1693 and 1700 include a son Michel of the right age; the compiled genealogies of Arsenault and Lanctôt make him their son.

Birth and childhood

The estimated birth year, about 1685, rests on the 1693 census, which gives his age as 8. The compiled genealogy of Léopold Lanctôt, Familles acadiennes, volume I, page 76, gives 1686 at Rivière-aux-Vieux-Habitants instead; it is a later compilation, and the census is the nearer source for his age.

Death

The death range and the Bristol passage come from Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, a compiled work, which follows P. Delaney. No other source for the death is cited.