♂Michel Poirier

Michel Poirier (born about 1650) was an Acadian settler of Port-Royal who with his wife, Marie Boudrot, left Port-Royal for the young settlement of Beaubassin^W at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where they raised a large family. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Michel Poirier (born about 1674).

Port-Royal

Michel Poirier was born about 1650, probably at Port-Royal, the son of Jean Poirier and Jeanne Chebrat. His father is said to have died while he was still a small child, about 1654, and his mother married again, to Antoine Gougeon, a farmer of Port-Royal. When the census of 1671 was taken there, he was entered on the same page as his mother’s household as “Michel Poirié garçon, fils de deffunct Jehan Poirié, aagé de 20 ans”: an unmarried young man of twenty, the son of the late Jehan Poirier.

Michel Poirier and Marie Boudrot, a daughter of Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, are thought to have married at Port-Royal about 1673, and their eldest son, Michel, was born there about 1674. Marie had been eighteen and still living at home with her parents when the census of 1671 was taken.

Beaubassin

By one account, in the late 1670s or early 1680s the couple left Port-Royal for Beaubassin, where Marie’s brother Jean Boudrot had also settled. They were most likely there by 30 November 1679, when Jean’s widow, Marguerite Bourgeois, married Emmanuel Mirande at Beaubassin, and a Michel Poirier, named as her brother-in-law, stood among the witnesses.

When the census was taken at Beaubassin in 1686, Michel was thirty-seven and Marie thirty-six, with nine children in the house; in 1693 they were forty-two and forty-one. The census-takers listed the household at Beaubassin again in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1703. The couple are said to have had eleven children, nine sons and two daughters, among them Michel, the eldest, and Pierre, born about 1680. No record gives the date or place of death of either Michel or Marie.

Notes

His birth and parents

His age of twenty in the census of 1671, and thirty-seven and forty-two in the transcriptions of the censuses of 1686 and 1693, place his birth between about 1649 and 1651. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives his birth at Port-Royal about 1650; Frère J.-Hervé Béliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families gives 1651 and names his parents as Jehan Poirier and Jeanne Chabrat. The two accounts differ on his father: Cormier has Jean Poirier come to Acadia in 1641 aboard the Saint-François with his wife and die about 1654, while Béliveau has him marry Jeanne in France about 1648, reach Acadia about 1649 and die in 1652. Béliveau dates Jeanne’s marriage to Antoine Gougeon 1656. The census of 1671 shows only that his father was dead by then.

Marriage and the move to Beaubassin

No record of the marriage survives, since the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. Cormier and Stephen A. White’s published transcription of the Beaubassin census rolls (2019) both date it about 1673, and Cormier places the eldest son’s birth at Port-Royal. Cormier dates the family’s move to Chignecto to the late 1670s or early 1680s, and Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens counts Michel Poirier among the settlers of Beaubassin about 1682. The marriage of 30 November 1679, which survives in a copy of the Beaubassin register, names a Michel Poirier as the bride’s brother-in-law among the witnesses; Michel, as the husband of Jean Boudrot’s sister, fits that description, and it is the earliest record that may place him at Beaubassin.

The censuses

The ages and the nine children of 1686, and the ages of 1693, are given from a transcription of those rolls. White’s transcription lists the household on the Beaubassin rolls of 1686, 1693, 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1703, naming Michel as a son of Jean Poirier and Marie as a daughter of Michel Boudrot. Cormier gives the couple eleven children, nine sons and two daughters. Arsenault names the sons Michel, Pierre, Jean-Baptiste, Jacques, Joseph, Louis and François as children of Michel Poirier and Marie Boudrot.

Two Michel Poiriers at Beaubassin

White’s transcription keeps this household apart from that of another Michel Poirier of Beaubassin, who married Marie Chiasson about 1692.