♂Paul Doiron

Paul Doiron (born about 1710 – died before 8 January 1765) was an Acadian plowman, recorded as “Paul Douaron dit le Grand Paul”, who moved his family from Acadia to Île Saint-Jean^W about 1750 and was counted there, with his wife and nine children, in the census of 1752. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Rose Doiron (about 1749–1808).

In Acadia

A compiled genealogy, Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (volume 4), gives his parents as Jean Doiron and Marie Trahan. Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel had married by about 1735, to judge from the age of their eldest child on the 1752 census, a daughter of 17; no record of the marriage has been found. The earliest known record of the couple is the baptism of their daughter Anne Apollonie, born on 16 September 1737 and baptized on 6 April 1738, whom the register of the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré names as the daughter of Paul Doueron and Marguerite Michel; her godparents were Jacques Girouard and Marie Doueron. That register was later carried to Louisiana by Acadian exiles and is printed among the Catholic church records of the Diocese of Baton Rouge. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana describes the couple as of Pigiguit^W and places the births of their older children there, most of them only as probable.

Île Saint-Jean

The census of Île Saint-Jean taken in 1752 by the King’s surveyor, Joseph de La Roque, counted the family on the north side of the Rivière du Nord-Est. In the English translation printed in the Report concerning Canadian Archives for the year 1905, his entry reads “Paul Douaron dit le Grand Paul, native of l’Acadie, ploughman, aged 42 years, has been in the country two years,” and names his wife as Marguerite Michel, also a native of Acadia, aged 46. They had three sons and six daughters, aged from 17 years down to 8 months, among them Anne Appoline, 15, and Roze, 2. The household kept four bulls, three cows, two heifers, two sows, two pigs and twenty-five fowls. Their land had been given to them by word of mouth by Monsieur de Bonnaventure, whom the same census calls the King’s commandant on the island, and they had made a clearing on it where they hoped to sow eight bushels of wheat the next spring.

Their arrival about 1750 places them in the Acadian Exodus^W, the flight of Acadian families from British-ruled Nova Scotia to the French islands: a letter of 20 August 1750 from the intendant at Quebec, printed in the same report, passes on Bonnaventure’s word that Acadians were taking refuge on the island in great haste, bringing even their livestock.

The census does not explain the by-name le Grand Paul, Big Paul. It also counted a second Paul Douaron of almost the same age, a plowman of 43 and a native of Acadia who had been on the island 26 months, married to a Margueritte Benoist, at Pointe Prime.

Exile and death

Cormier’s compiled history has the family still at the Rivière du Nord-Est when the British deported the island’s Acadians to France in late 1758^W, and follows five of the nine children through exile in France; all five sailed to Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont in 1785. Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel were both dead by 8 January 1765, when the register of their daughter Rose’s marriage at Notre-Dame, Le Havre, called her “fille mineure de feu Paul et de feue Marguerite Michel”, the minor daughter of the late Paul and the late Marguerite Michel. No record of either death has been found, and the records do not show whether either of them reached France.

Notes

Rose’s marriage register names her parents but gives them no place beyond Acadia. The household on the 1752 census is identified as theirs because both parents’ names match and because its Roze, aged 2, fits the ages given for Rose in France in 1772 and 1775; she is the only Roze aged 2 in a Douaron household on the census. A compiled account of a Paul Doiron and his wife Marguerite lost aboard the transport Duke William in 1758 concerns the Pointe Prime couple, Paul Doiron and Marguerite Benoit, not Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel. The Grand-Pré baptism of a Paul born on 11 April 1710 belongs to another man, the son of Noël Doiron and Marie Henry, whom the register calls Marie Robert; no baptism of this Paul survives.