♂Michel Thibodeau

Michel Thibodeau (born about 1678) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, a son of the miller Pierre Thibodeau and Jeanne Thériot, who married Agnès Dugas there in 1704 and raised at least fourteen children through the first decades of British rule. In 1724 and 1725 his two eldest daughters, Marguerite and Agnès, married two brothers, Alexandre and Joseph Broussard, who went on to lead Acadian partisans against the British. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through his daughter Marguerite Thibodeau (born 1705).

Port-Royal

Michel grew up in a large household on the upper river of Port-Royal, where his father farmed and kept a mill. In 1693 he was one of five sons still at home, with Anthoine, Pierre, Claude and the youngest, Charles.

Michel Thibodeau and Agnès Dugas were married at Port-Royal on 13 November 1704, and the register names the bride as the daughter of Claude Dugas and Françoise Bourgeois. Six weeks later, on 26 December, Michel’s father died. In October 1710 a British and New England force captured Port-Royal^W, which became Annapolis Royal, and the family stayed on under British rule. The census of 1714 lists them in the parish of Port-Royal, Michel aged 36 and Agnès 29, with four sons and two daughters. They had at least fourteen children, born between 1705 and 1728.

The Broussard marriages

On 7 February 1724, at Port-Royal, their eldest daughter, Marguerite, married Alexandre Broussard, the son of the late Jean-François Broussard and Catherine Richard. Nineteen months later, on 11 September 1725, her sister Agnès married Alexandre’s brother Joseph^W, so that the Broussard and Thibodeau families were joined twice over. The brothers were called Beausoleil, after the hamlet above Port-Royal where they were born, and in the wars of the 1740s and 1750s they led Acadian partisans against the British.

When their son Michel married Anne-Marie Richard at Grand-Pré on 18 September 1729, the register entered both the bride and the groom as of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal. Michel Thibodeau was probably buried at Port-Royal on 24 November 1734.

The family

Three of the sons, Michel, Joseph and Benjamin, were among the Acadians carried to South Carolina in the deportation of 1755. André-Carl Vachon’s history of the deported Acadians records that Michel and Joseph escaped in 1756 and made their way north by river and portage to Fort Duquesne^W, and from there to Québec, where they stayed; Benjamin, one of five Acadians who fled from John Williams’s plantation on the Santee, was deported to England. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy has Michel marrying a second time at Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce on 24 January 1763.

Notes

The marriage

The marriage of 13 November 1704 is entered in the Port-Royal parish register (Nova Scotia Archives, An Acadian Parish Remembered, RG 1 vol. 26 p. 273), which names the bride as Agnès Dugat, daughter of Claude Dugat and Françoise Bourgeois. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 808) gives the same date and place. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes gives 3 October 1704.

His age

The census of 1714 gives his age as 36, which places his birth about 1678. Arsenault and Lanctôt both give 1678, and Lanctôt gives Port-Royal as the place.

The census of 1714

Lanctôt prints the household as “Michel Tibodeau [36 ans] et femme [Marie-Agnès Dugas], m.4, f 2”, with the children Marguerite, 9, Agnès, 8, Michel, 6, Pierre, 4, Joseph, 3, and Charles, 1. Placide Gaudet’s printing of the same census lists Pierre, Joseph and Charles, Marguerite and Agnès, both 8, and a daughter Madeleine a few months old.

Where the family lived

Lanctôt places Michel at the Prée Ronde of Port-Royal, where his father had his mill, in one volume (tome II, p. 303), and has the couple settle at Chipoudy, on Chignecto Bay, in another (tome I, p. 199). Arsenault has the sons Michel, Pierre and Joseph settle at Chipoudy and Charles on the Petitcodiac. The census of 1714 and the marriage of 1729 both place the family in the parish of Port-Royal.

His death

The burial date comes from Arsenault’s genealogy (vol. 2, p. 808), a compilation: “Il fut inhumé à Port-Royal, le 24 novembre 1734.” A Thibodeau genealogy published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1985 also gives his death as 1734.

The marriages of 1724 and 1725

The Port-Royal register enters the marriage of 7 February 1724 (RG 1 vol. 26 p. 335), naming the bride as Margueritte Thibaudault, daughter of Michel Thibaudault and Agnes Dugas, and the marriage of 11 September 1725, of Joseph Brossard, 23, to Agnes Tibaudeau, 19. The brothers’ part in the resistance rests on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana and on John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme (2005).

The line to Floyd

No record names the parents of Anne Trahan (died about 1774), the daughter of Marguerite Thibodeau’s daughter Marguerite Broussard on the line to Floyd. She is placed in that family by an argument from the godparents and witnesses at her children’s baptisms, so the line is probable rather than proved.