♂Olivier Daigre

Olivier Daigre (about 1643 – before 1686) was a farmer at Port-Royal in Acadia, counted in the census of 1671 with his wife Marie Gaudet and their three small sons. A century later his descendants, exiled to France, still remembered him as the ancestor who had come from France, though by another name. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through two of his sons, Bernard Daigle (born about 1670) and Olivier Daigle (about 1674–1709).

Life

No record of his birth or marriage survives; the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. In 1671 Olivier was a farmer of twenty-eight, living with his wife Marie Gaudet, twenty, and their sons Jean, four, Jacques, two, and Bernard, one. The household kept six cattle and six sheep and worked two arpents^W of cultivated land. With a son already four years old, the couple had most likely married by about 1666.

The Port-Royal censuses name nine children of Olivier and Marie, born between about 1667 and 1681: Jean, Jacques, Bernard, Louis, Olivier, a second Jean, Marie, Anne and Pierre. Two sons were named Jean, one aged four in 1671 and the other aged ten in 1686. The first Jean and Jacques, aged four and two in 1671, are absent from the household of 1686, and no record of what became of them is known. The census of 1678 found Olivier and Marie at Port-Royal with six sons and two daughters; Pierre, the youngest of the nine, came after it.

Bernard, the baby of that census, grew up to marry Marie Bourg, and by 1693 he was farming at Les Mines^W, aged twenty-two, with a wife of nineteen and a son of one.

By 1686 Marie was the wife of Jean Fardel. The census of Port-Royal taken that year lists them together with Bernard, Louis, Olivier, the second Jean, Marie, Anne and Pierre, the Daigre children. The censuses of 1693, 1698 and 1700 list the couple again, the husband’s surname written Fredelle in 1693 and 1700 and Fardel in 1698, and the latest census listing for Marie is that of 1700.

Olivier himself is not in the household of 1686, and he most likely died between 1678, when the census still counted him, and 1686. No record gives the date or place of his death. A compiled history of the Acadian families of Louisiana likewise gives his death at Port-Royal before about 1686, in his early forties.

A son and a granddaughter

Their son Olivier, born about 1674, married Jeanne Blanchard and stayed at Port-Royal. The census of 1701 lists him at twenty-eight with Jeanne, twenty, and he was buried at Port-Royal on 22 September 1709, “around forty years old” in the parish register. Four children were baptized at Port-Royal between 1703 and 1710, Olivier, Jeanne, Marguerite and, in April 1710, Jean Baptiste, whom the register names as the child of the deceased Olivier.

Their daughter Marie Daigre, her father already deceased, married Jean Thériot, of the parish of St. Charles at Les Mines, at Annapolis Royal on 19 October 1722. The register of Grand-Pré records the baptisms of two daughters of Jean Thériot and Marie Daigre in 1723 and 1725, and no other couple of that name appears in those registers. She is therefore most likely the Marie Daigre whose son Jean Baptiste Thériot, born at Rivière-aux-Canards on 16 August 1740, declared at Belle-Île in 1767 that his parents had died in England.

Lines of descent

Two of the sons of Olivier Daigre and Marie Gaudet are ancestors of Floyd Amatus Delahorne. Bernard Daigle (born about 1670), who married Marie Bourg and settled at Les Mines, stands at the head of the nearer line, which makes Olivier Daigre the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne. Olivier Daigle (about 1674–1709), who married Jeanne Blanchard and stayed at Port-Royal, stands at the head of the other, which has one more generation between Olivier and Floyd Amatus Delahorne than the line through Bernard has.

The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906). Her parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850), both descended from this couple, so they were distant cousins.

Notes

The censuses of 1671, 1678, 1686, 1693, 1698, 1700 and 1701 are given here from the transcriptions of the manuscript nominal censuses published on acadian-home.org; the account rests on those transcriptions, not on the original rolls. The transcriptions write the surname Daigre; by 1755, a compiled history notes, the family mostly wrote it Daigle. From 1678 they write Marie’s surname Godet, and the husband she is listed with in 1686 as Jean Fardel, in 1693 as Jean Fredelle, in 1698 as Jean Fardel and in 1700 as Jean Fredelle.

The ages in these censuses drift. The second Jean is ten in 1686, twelve in 1693, twenty-two in 1698 and nineteen in 1700, and Louis and Olivier stand a year apart in the censuses of 1686, 1693 and 1700. In 1700 an Anne of twenty-one is in the Fardel household, although the census of 1698 lists an Anne Daigre as the wife of Pierre Poitevin. Pierre, five in 1686, appears in no later census. The ages are given as printed and nothing is corrected from them. The censuses name nine children; Cormier’s ten, below, leave one daughter who is named in none of the censuses named here.

The burial of 1709 and the baptisms and the marriage of 1722 are given in the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755; the account rests on that transcription, not on the register’s page images. The register writes the surname D’Aigre, and the groom of 1722 Thieriot. The burial’s “around forty years old” is loose against the census of 1701, which puts Olivier’s birth in 1673 or 1674; the baptism of April 1710, naming the father as deceased, identifies the man buried. The Grand-Pré baptisms are given in the abstracts of that register published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s Catholic church records, volume 1A. The Belle-Île declaration of Jean Baptiste Thériot is given in the printing by Abbé Casgrain; no register entry for his birth at Rivière-aux-Canards is known.

The 1767 declarations are given in the English translation printed in the Attakapas Gazette, volumes 16 (1981) and 17 (1982). Three of them bear on this couple: the declaration of Honoré Daigre, the one recording the marriage of Angélique Daigre, a granddaughter of Bernard, and the one made for the young Joseph Daigre, a great-great-grandson through Bernard. All three call the immigrant Jean Daigre and his wife Marie Gaudet. The census of 1671, made while Olivier was alive and showing a son Jean aged four, gives the name used for him here.

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadian families of Louisiana gives Olivier as born in France about 1643, as having reached Acadia by about 1666, when he married Marie, and as the father of ten children, seven sons and three daughters, born between 1667 and 1681. It places Bernard as the third son, born about 1670, and the younger Olivier as the fifth, born about 1674, married to Jeanne Blanchard about 1699. It says that Marie married again after Olivier’s death, to a Fardel or Fredelle, which the censuses bear out. Cormier’s lineage for François Alexandre Daigle (born 1763) runs through Olivier, Bernard and Abraham, agreeing with the census and the registers.

Frère J.-Hervé Beliveau’s genealogical dictionary of the Belliveau families gives “Bernard Daigre dit Daigle, né en 1643, arrivé de France en Acadie vers 1663, épousa vers 1666 Marie Gaudet”. That is Olivier’s year of birth under his son’s name; the census shows Bernard as the son, aged one in 1671.

Remembered in exile

In 1767 the Acadian exiles living on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, declared their ancestry, family by family. Several of the declarations trace their families back to this couple. They remember the founder of the line as a man who had come from France and married Marie Gaudet at Port Royal, where both of them died, but they call him Jean Daigre, not Olivier. The census, taken in his lifetime, names him Olivier and gives Jean as the name of his eldest son; most likely the son’s name had passed to the father in the family’s memory. Marie Gaudet’s name is the same in every source.

The declaration of his great-grandson Honoré Daigre also names a son of the couple, Olivier, who married Jeanne Blanchard and died at Port-Royal, as the census and the register also show.