♂Michel de Forest

Michel de Forest was a farmer at Port-Royal, in Acadia, who lost his first wife while their six children were small and by 1686, at forty-seven, had married Jacqueline Benoit, a girl of thirteen who was younger than three of his own children. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Forest (born about 1687).

Port-Royal

He is said to have been born a Protestant at Leiden, in Holland, to have lived in the Dutch colony of New Netherland^W, and to have come to Port-Royal while Acadia was in English hands, between 1654 and 1670, becoming a Catholic there. His ages on the census rolls, thirty-three in 1671 and forty-seven in 1686, place his birth about 1638. His land was most likely a large grant on the river some ten miles east of the fort, near present-day Tupperville, Nova Scotia.

About 1666, it is thought, he married Marie Hébert, a daughter of Étienne Hébert and Marie Gaudet, who was then about fifteen. When France took the colony back and its settlers were counted in 1671, Michel was a farmer with two arpents^W under the plow, twelve head of cattle and two sheep, and Marie, at twenty, had already borne three sons: Michel, four, Pierre, two, and René, one. Three more children followed, two daughters and a son, the last about 1677.

Widower and second marriage

Marie died young. When the census was taken again, in 1678, Michel was a widower with four boys and two girls at home, the eldest twelve, and three cows, two calves and a gun.

By the census of 1686 he had married again. Jacqueline Benoit was thirteen, while the six children of his first marriage ranged from Michel, nineteen, to Jean-Baptiste, nine. She was probably a daughter of Martin Benoist, whose household on the same roll includes a Jacquette, also thirteen. Michel and Jacqueline’s daughter Marguerite was born about 1687.

Death

Michel died within a few years of the marriage, by one account in 1690. By 1693 Jacqueline, aged twenty, was the wife of Guillaume Trahan, and Marguerite, six, was living with them. The two eldest sons of his first marriage, Michel and Pierre, were by then married and heads of their own households at Port-Royal.

Notes

Sources

The census of 1671, printed in Placide Gaudet’s Acadian Genealogy and Notes (1906), lists Michel de Forest as a laboureur (farmer) of thirty-three, with his wife Marie Hébert, twenty, their three sons, two arpents in tillage, twelve cattle and two sheep. Clarence J. d’Entremont’s translation of the census of 1678 (French Canadian and Acadian Genealogical Review, 1979), which he places more likely early in 1679, calls him a widower. The roll of 1686 lists him at forty-seven with Jacqueline Benoist, thirteen, and the children of his first marriage: Michel 19, Pierre 18, René 16, “Gabriel” (Gabrielle) 13, Marie 11 and Jean-Baptiste 9. The same roll counts a Jacquette, thirteen, in the household of Martin Benoist and Marie Chaussegros, the only Benoist household on it. In the roll of 1693, Marguerite, six, is in the household of Guillaume Trahan, twenty-six, and his wife Jacqueline, twenty, with “(deForest)” penciled beside her name on the copy held by Library and Archives Canada. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (1994) puts Marie Hébert’s death about 1680, but the 1678 census already calls Michel a widower.

The marriage dates come from compiled genealogies: Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives about 1666 for the first marriage and about 1686 for the second, and Lanctôt gives 1666 and 1686. Arsenault calls Jacqueline “veuve de Michel de Forest” when she married Guillaume Trahan about 1690, and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana also gives her as his widow. Lanctôt puts Michel’s death in 1690, at the age of fifty-three. A declaration sworn on Belle-Île-en-Mer on 20 February 1767 by Claude-Joseph Billeray, the husband of Michel’s granddaughter Brigitte, and printed in translation in the Attakapas Gazette (1982), names Michel de Forest and Marie Hébert as the parents of her father, Michel.

His origin

Two compiled genealogies make him a Protestant of a family from Avesnes, in French Flanders, born at Leiden, but they give him different parents and dates. Arsenault names his father as Henri de Forest and has him born in 1638, after his father’s death, cross the Atlantic at sixteen in 1654 and settle in Acadia about 1659. Lanctôt calls him Gereyt de Forest, a son of Crispin de Forest and Marguerite Bornstra, born at Leiden on 18 June 1637, and has him go to Fort Orange, on the upper Hudson, in 1657 and come to Port-Royal about 1664, taking the name Michel when he was received as a Catholic. Both say he became a Catholic and married an Acadian. The two accounts cannot both be right, and his parents are left unnamed here. The census ages fit either birth year.

His land

Arsenault describes the grant as about a mile along the river by two miles deep, some ten miles east of the fort, at what is now Tupperville; Lanctôt gives thirty arpents of frontage on the river by sixty deep, sixteen kilometers east of Port-Royal.

The line of descent

Marguerite married Étienne Comeau. The step from her to her daughter Hélène Comeau, the wife of Alexis Benoit, rests on Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes as cited in an online family tree, not on a register.