♂Olivier Daigle

Olivier Daigle (about 1674 – 22 September 1709) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, a son of Olivier Daigre and Marie Gaudet, who married Jeanne Blanchard about 1700 and died at about thirty-five, leaving her with five young children and a sixth not yet born. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Paul Daigle.

Early life

Olivier was born about 1674, the fifth of the nine children whom the censuses of Port-Royal name for Olivier Daigre and Marie Gaudet. His father had most likely died by 1686, when the census found Marie married to Jean Fardel, with Olivier, aged twelve, and his brothers and sisters in the household. He was still living with his mother and stepfather at nineteen in 1693. In 1698 the census counted him, at twenty-three, among the unmarried men of Port-Royal, and in 1700 he was once more in his mother’s household.

Marriage and children

No record of the marriage of Olivier Daigle and Jeanne Blanchard survives, as the parish register of Port-Royal begins only in 1702. The census of 1700 still found Olivier in his mother’s household, and that of 1701 lists him at twenty-eight with his wife Jeanne, twenty, so they most likely married at Port-Royal in 1700 or 1701. Jeanne was the daughter of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon, and most likely a niece of Martin Blanchard, another ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne. Olivier was born on 10 August 1703, Jeanne on 1 February 1706 and Marguerite on 2 April 1708, and each was baptized at Port-Royal, in September, March and June. Two more children, Marie and Paul, are known from their marriages, which name Olivier and Jeanne as their parents; no baptism is known for either.

Olivier died at Port-Royal on 22 September 1709, “around forty years old” according to the register of his burial, although the censuses make him about thirty-five. Their last child, Jean Baptiste, was born on 22 February 1710, five months after his father’s burial, and was baptized on 18 April, when the register called Olivier deceased.

The family after his death

A year after Olivier’s death the British took Port-Royal and renamed it Annapolis Royal. Jeanne married again there on 30 January 1715, to Jean Prince, son of the late Jacques Prince and of Marguerite Hebert, of Les Mines. They had five children, baptized at Annapolis Royal between 1715 and 1723, and her children by Olivier stood as godparents to their half-brothers and half-sisters.

Olivier’s children married in three parts of Acadia. Paul married Anne Arsenault at Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, on 18 November 1720, and Marie married Jean Thériot, of the parish of St. Charles at Les Mines^W, at Annapolis Royal on 19 October 1722. Marguerite married Germain Richard at Annapolis Royal on 3 February 1728, and Jeanne married Pierre Trahan at Grand-Pré on 17 October 1729. Each of these entries calls Olivier deceased and names Jeanne Blanchard as the mother.

Notes

The censuses are known from the transcriptions of the manuscript nominal censuses published on acadian-home.org; his entries are known only through those transcriptions. They write the surname Daigre, except in 1698, which has Daigle. The transcription of 1701 also lists a Pierre, aged five, and an Anne, aged three, in the household; Jeanne was then twenty, and the census does not say whose children they were.

The baptism of Marguerite in 1708 calls her mother “Anne” Blanchard; her marriage of 1728 names the mother as Jeanne Blanchard, and that is followed here. Jeanne’s parents are named in the register of her second marriage in 1715, where she is called the widow of Olivier D’Aigre; her descent from Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert through her father is discussed on her own page.

The baptisms, the burial and the marriages of 1715, 1722 and 1728 are known from the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755; the register wording given here follows that transcription. The register writes the surname D’Aigre or Daigre. Paul’s marriage is recorded in the Beaubassin register, which names him the son “de defunt Olivier Daigle et Jeanne Blanchard ses pere et mere de la paroisse de port Royal”. Jeanne’s marriage of 1729 is known from the abstracts of the Grand-Pré register published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s Catholic church records, volume 1A.

Declarations made in 1767 by Acadian exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer, printed in English in the Attakapas Gazette, name several of his grandchildren as descended from “Olivier Daigre and Jeanne Blanchard, both of whom died at Port Royal”. They give his son Olivier as born at Port Royal in 1703 and dead at Falmouth, in England, on 8 December 1756.

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadian families of Louisiana gives Olivier as the fifth son, born at Port-Royal about 1674, and as married to Jeanne Blanchard about 1699, a year or two earlier than the censuses of 1698 and 1700 suggest. It gives the couple six children, three sons who married into the Arseneau, Cormier, Granger and Thériot families and three daughters who married into the Thériot, Trahan and Richard families, which matches the six children found in the registers.