♂Paul Daigle

Paul Daigle (born about 1723) was an Acadian ploughman of Beaubassin^W who married his kinswoman Marie-Josèphe Hébert in 1748 under a Church dispensation^W for kinship in the fourth degree, and who farmed at Malpèque on Île Saint-Jean^W, now Prince Edward Island, in the years before the expulsion. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Agnes Daigle (about 1752 – 1812).

Marriage

He was the son of Paul Daigle and Anne Arsenault, who had married at Beaubassin on 18 November 1720; his own marriage act names them so and describes his mother as already dead. His father was the son of the late Olivier Daigle and Jeanne Blanchard of Port-Royal, and his mother the daughter of Pierre Arseneau and Anne Boudrot (the marriage act of 1720 calls her father Jean, but the censuses of Beaubassin of 1700 and 1714 name him Pierre). A compiled genealogy of the Acadian families, as quoted on WikiTree, adds that his father was the eldest son of Olivier Daigle; that detail rests on the compilation alone.

The baptism of a Pierre Daigle at Beaubassin on 29 August 1721 gives the child’s father as Pierre Daigle rather than Paul, but his mother as Anne Arseneau; Pierre is counted as Paul’s elder brother because the mother’s name and the date fit the 1720 marriage, and no Pierre Daigle married to an Anne Arseneau is known.

On 19 June 1748, at Beaubassin at the head of the Bay of Fundy, he married Marie Hébert, daughter of Joseph Hébert and Anne Boudrot. The register notes a dispensation for kinship in the fourth degree, which meant the two shared a great-great-grandparent. Unions that close required the bishop’s leave, and they were frequent in the small, intermarried Acadian settlements.

Île Saint-Jean

About 1750 the couple moved from Beaubassin, then at the center of the border dispute between France and Britain, to the French island of Île Saint-Jean. The island’s census of 1752, in a published translation transcribed on the Island Register site, lists him at Malpèque as a plowman, aged 29, a native of Acadia who had been there two years. With him were his wife, aged 22, and their daughters Marie, four, and Agnes, eighteen months. The household kept two oxen, three cows, a bull, two calves, a horse, seven ewes, four pigs and four fowls. The family held its land on verbal permission from Monsieur de Bonnaventure, and had sown eight bushels on a neighboring piece of ground, with no clearing of its own beyond a little cut wood.

After 1755

A compiled edition of the census roll of the Acadian refugees at Aulac, taken between late 1754 and early 1755, lists the household as one man, one woman and one boy, three people. A published genealogy of the Beaubassin families places the family at Aulac in 1755 and among the refugees at the camp of Espérance on the Miramichi about 1757. According to the same compilation, Paul married again about 1760, after Marie-Josèphe’s death. On 12 August 1771, at Arichat, a visiting missionary blessed that second marriage before more than a hundred witnesses, one of several couples whose unions, made without a priest, he “rehabilitated” after banns on three Sundays; the register names the pair as “paul daigle veuf avec marie Bourg”. Paul was therefore a widower of his first wife, and still living, in the summer of 1771. The compilation adds that he later lived on the Baie des Chaleurs; no record of his death has been found.

Their children

The couple’s elder daughter, Marie, was four in the census of 1752. A compiled genealogy (Stephen White’s Généalogie des 37 familles, as quoted on WikiTree) says she married François Richard in the north about 1768. The same compilations give the couple three further children, none of whom can appear in the census of 1752: sons Paul, born about 1753, and Fabien, about 1755, and a daughter Marguerite, about 1760. Marguerite’s date falls so close to Marie-Josèphe’s death and Paul’s second marriage that she may belong to the second wife. Of Fabien, the compilation says he lost his mother young, was raised in the household of Abraham Dugas, lived at Miquelon until 1778 and then on the Gaspé coast. A Fabien Daigle married Marie-Rose Robichaud at Carleton on 7 November 1780, and that marriage record names his mother as Marie-Josèphe Hébert.

The younger daughter, Agnes, reached Louisiana without her parents. In September 1769 she was seventeen and living as a “cousin” in the household of Joseph Sonnier at St. James, on the Mississippi. At her marriage there in 1771 the register named her parents as “Paul & Marie Heber”. The link between the Louisiana Agnes and the Malpèque child rests on those names and on her ages, which a compiled Acadian genealogy draws together. No single record follows her from the island to the Mississippi.

Notes

A compiled online family tree gives his death as 19 February 1759 and cites no record for it; the Arichat register of 1771 shows him alive twelve years later. Another online tree gives 12 August 1771 as his death date, which is the day of the blessing at Arichat.

The Aulac roll

The roll is printed in Stephen A. White’s edition of the Beaubassin census rolls, in Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne, vol. 50 (2019). The copy is among the Thomas-Pichon papers at the Bibliothèque de Vire, France, fonds C 857, nos 17–21. Its dates run from about 20 November 1754 to after 25 January 1755. Its three people are one man, one woman and one boy, and it lists no daughter, though the census of 1752 gives two.

The 1780 marriage

The Carleton (St-Joseph) marriage record of 7 November 1780 spells the groom’s surname Daigre and the bride’s Robicheau. It names the groom’s parents as Paul Daigre and Marie Josèphe Hébert.