♂Pierre Arseneau

Pierre Arseneau (born about 1676) was an Acadian of the parish of Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, the husband of Anne Boudrot and the father of at least six children. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Anne Arsenault (died before 1748).

His parents

The censuses of 1686, at Port-Royal, and 1693, at Beaubassin, as printed in a published transcription, show a son Pierre, aged ten and then sixteen, in the household of Pierre Arsenault, which fits his age of twenty-four in 1700. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives his mother as Marguerite Dugas, his father’s first wife. The Marie Guérin named as Pierre Arsenault’s wife in those censuses was his stepmother.

Beaubassin

The census of Beaubassin in 1700 found Pierre Arseneau, aged 24, living with his wife Anne Boudrot, aged 23, and a son Pierre, aged two; the couple had married before 1698. They were still at Beaubassin at the census of 1714, where their household held six children, among them their daughter Anne.

Their daughter’s marriage

On 18 November 1720, at Beaubassin, their daughter Anne married Paul Daigle, son of the late Olivier Daigle and Jeanne Blanchard of the parish of Port-Royal. The register names the bride as “Anne Arseneau fille de Jean Arseneau et d’Anne Boudrot aussi ses pere et mere de cette paroisse”: her parents belonged to Beaubassin, and, unlike the groom’s father, neither is called late. No record of the deaths of Pierre Arseneau or Anne Boudrot has been found.

Isle Saint-Jean

The family had probably moved from Beaubassin to the Isle Saint-Jean^W, now Prince Edward Island, by about 1728. The census of the island taken in 1734 places the household at Havre de Malpèque: Pierre, with his wife, four sons and a daughter. The roll gives his age as 62 and his wife’s as 60, but by his birth about 1676 he would have been about 58, so the ages run high. Their son Charles’s household, with his wife and four children, stood beside theirs.

He was most likely last counted on the island in 1735. The date and place of the death of Pierre Arseneau are unknown.

Notes

The marriage record of 1720 calls the bride’s father Jean, while the censuses of Beaubassin in 1700 and 1714 name him Pierre; he appears here under the name the censuses give. An online family tree also gives Anne Arsenault’s father as Pierre.

The 1734 island census

The census of the Isle Saint-Jean for 1734 writes the head of the household as “Pierre Arceneau 62, sa femme 60”, with four sons aged 24, 18, 15 and 10 and a daughter aged 20; beside them stands “Charles Arceneau 30, sa femme 30”, with four children. The roll spells the surname Arceneau; elsewhere it is written Arseneau. The roll gives Charles an age of 30, but his birth is given as 1714, which would make him 20. The four sons’ ages do not fit the birth years given for the children either, and the names of the sons are not carried over here.

Malpèque after 1728

The move to Malpèque about 1728, and the later island rolls of 1730 and 1735 on which the family is last seen, come from a compiled history, WikiTree’s Arseneau-15 citing White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, and from transcriptions of those rolls; they are not the 1734 census itself. The marriage records of two sons, Joseph in 1739 on the island and Abraham in 1741 at Beaubassin, do not describe the parents as deceased, so a death after 1735 is not ruled out.