♂Michel Dupuis

Michel Dupuis (born about 1634) was an Acadian farmer at Port-Royal who married the widow Marie Gautrot and is followed through the colony’s nominal censuses from 1671 to 1700. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his sons Martin Dupuis (died 1713) and Pierre Dupuis (born about 1671, died 1709). His stepdaughter Marie Potet, his wife’s child by her first marriage, is also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne, so Marie Gautrot’s two marriages meet again generations later: Céleste Dupuis (born 1801) descends from Michel’s son Pierre on her father’s side and from Marie Potet on her mother’s.

Life

Nothing is known of his parents or where he came from. The census-takers wrote his name in several ways: Dupont in 1671, du Peux in 1678, Dupeux or Dupuis in 1693 and 1700. The census of 1671 lists him as a farmer of 37 at Port-Royal, with “wife Marie Gautrot, 34” and the children Marie, 14, Martin, 6, Jeanne, 4, and Pierre, 3 months, on six arpents of cultivated land with five cattle and a sheep. The fourteen-year-old Marie was his wife’s daughter by her first husband, Potet, and later the wife of Martin Bourg. Martin’s age puts the marriage of Michel and Marie Gautrot before about 1665; no record of it has been found. Pierre is placed in the family by these census households; no baptism names his parents.

The roll of 1678 lists “Michel du Peux” and Marie Gautrot with three boys and a girl, two acres of land and six cattle. In 1686 he was 57 and Marie 49, with the sons Martin, 21, Pierre, 17, and Jean, 10, and a daughter Marie, 7; Jeanne, the four-year-old of 1671, is not in the household. The farm had grown by 1693, when the couple held ten arpents under cultivation, fourteen cattle, eighteen sheep, eight hogs and a gun, with Jean and Marie still at home. In 1698 they had eight arpents, twelve cattle, twenty sheep and eight hogs, and in 1700 the same two children were still living with them. By then the elder sons had households of their own at Port-Royal.

Martin, the eldest of the Dupuis children, was born about 1665, and Jeanne about 1667; Jeanne, four in 1671, is named only in that census. Pierre, the infant of 1671, was born about 1671, and Jean about 1675. The youngest, Marie, was born about 1679.

Michel Dupuis does not appear in the censuses of 1701 and after. Both were dead by 12 January 1706, when their daughter Marie Dupuis married Jean-François Flan at Port-Royal. No burial entry for either survives in the Port-Royal register.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Michel’s sons. The nearer runs through Martin Dupuis, nine generations up from Floyd Amatus Delahorne; the other runs through Pierre Dupuis, eleven generations up. Both reach Floyd on his mother’s side, by way of Ida Serrette. The lines meet again in Ida Serrette (1903–1990), whose parents Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) and Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) both descend from Michel.

Notes

The ages the censuses give him do not agree: 37 in 1671, 57 in 1686, 56 in 1693, 69 in 1698 and 63 in 1700. Taken together they place his birth anywhere between about 1629 and 1637; the year used here, about 1634, follows the census of 1671, the earliest of them.

The register of that 1706 marriage calls the bride ‘fille de feu Michel Dupuis et Marie Gautrot habitans de Port Royal en leur vivant’. The published transcription marks only Michel as deceased; the register’s wording is taken here to mean that both parents were dead.