♂Pierre Arsenault

Pierre Arsenault was an Acadian farmer who lived at Port-Royal in the 1680s and had moved by 1693 to Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where he raised the children of two marriages. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Arseneau (born about 1676). In 1686, while he still lived at Port-Royal, the census found that he already held land and livestock at Beaubassin: thirty arpents^W, eight cattle, four sheep and six hogs. He was one of only three men of Port-Royal with a stake in the young settlement, whose seigneurie had been granted just ten years before.

Port-Royal

No record of his birth or of his coming to Acadia is known. The genealogist Bona Arsenault, in his compiled history of the Acadians, has him arriving from France in 1671 as a young man and going to work as a pilot for Jacob Bourgeois, who ran boats along the coasts of the bay and was settling families at Chignecto. Arsenault has Pierre Arsenault marrying Marguerite Dugas at Port-Royal in 1676, and gives them two sons, Pierre and Abraham, born about 1676 and 1678. The census of 1671 lists a “Margueritte”, aged fourteen and unmarried, in Abraham Dugast’s household, so the marriage falls between 1671 and 1676.

By the census of 1686 Pierre Arsenault had a second wife, Marie Guérin, aged 24, too young to have been the mother of his sons Pierre, 10, and Abraham, 8. Bona Arsenault and Léopold Lanctôt both make Marguerite Dugas a daughter of Abraham Dugast, the gunsmith of Port-Royal, and so a sister of Claude Dugas; the census of Port-Royal in 1671 does list a daughter “Margueritte”, aged 14, in Abraham Dugast’s household. Lanctôt concludes that Marguerite had died, leaving the two boys. He also takes the three Port-Royal men who held land at Beaubassin in 1686, Pierre Arsenault, Guillaume Bourgeois and Claude Dugas, as brothers-in-law who most likely worked it together, since Guillaume was the brother of Claude’s wife, Françoise Bourgeois.

Beaubassin

Within a few years he had moved his household to Beaubassin. The census of 1693 found him there, aged 43, with Marie Guérin, 30, his two elder sons, now 16 and 14, and two small boys of the second marriage, Charles and Jacques; the family had fourteen cattle, ten sheep, five hogs, eight arpents under the plow and two guns. Five years later the farm had grown to twenty-one arpents. By then his eldest son had left home: the census of 1698 lists Pierre the younger, aged 22, with his wife Anne Boudrot in a household of his own, while his father, now 48, kept Abraham, 20, and the younger children, Charles, Jacques, François and Anne.

Arsenault adds three more sons of the second marriage, Claude, Abraham and Augustin, and has Pierre Arsenault dying at Beaubassin about 1710. No record of his death is known. In the census of 1714 a widow Arseneau headed a household with Jacques, François, Claude, Abraham and Augustin, most likely Marie Guérin with her sons.

Notes

His ages in the censuses, 40 in 1686, 43 in 1693 and 48 in 1698, put his birth between about 1646 and 1650. Arsenault gives 1646 in one place, but has him twenty-two on arriving in 1671 in another. Arsenault’s earlier book, L’Acadie des ancêtres (1955), abstracting the 1686 census, gives him as 36 and his sons as 9 and 7.

The censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1714 are cited from a published transcription. Lanctôt quotes the 1686 roll’s closing note on the three landholders, with 24 cattle and 7 sheep among them, which agrees with the transcription’s figures.

Arsenault gives the first marriage as about 1675 in one place and 1676 at Port-Royal in another, and dates the second marriage to 1688, although the 1686 census already lists Marie Guérin as his wife. He makes Marie Guérin a daughter of François Guérin and Anne Blanchard, and calls Pierre’s employer Jacques Bourgeois. The 1671 roll names Abraham Dugast’s wife Marie Judith Doucet; Arsenault calls her Marguerite Doucet.

The censuses write the name Arsenault and Arsenau; his son’s family appears as Arseneau.