♂Pierre Cormier

Pierre Cormier (fl. 1730–1741) was an Acadian of the Minas and Chignecto settlements, married at Grand-Pré in 1730, whose sons Joseph and Michel settled as exiles in Spanish Louisiana. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Michel Cormier (1741–1790).

Life

Pierre was most likely born in 1704. The register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré names his parents at his marriage: Pierre Cormier, who had died by then, and Catherine Leblanc. A compiled history of the Louisiana Acadians gives the elder Pierre the by-name “Palette”, a marriage to Catherine Leblanc of Minas about 1702, with eleven children, three of whose sons married into the Thibodeau, Richard and Chiasson families.

On 17 July 1730 Pierre married Cécile Thibodeau at Grand-Pré, the daughter of Jean Thibodeau and the late Marguerite Hébert; she had been born there on 5 November 1712. The day of the month is illegible in the surviving register and is supplied from a transcription made in 1895. The bride and groom each made a mark rather than signing, while her father signed his name.

By 1741 the couple were at Chignecto, on the isthmus joining peninsular Acadia to the mainland: their son Michel was born on 19 January 1741 and baptized at Beaubassin^W on 12 March. A second son, Joseph, remarried in Louisiana on 25 April 1771, in an entry of the Pointe Coupée register, as the widower of Marguerite Saunier; the entry names his parents as Pierre and Cécile Tibaudot, Acadians, and describes the family as residents of Opelousas. Joseph stood godfather to Michel’s son in 1773.

In 1750 the household was probably at Ouescoque, in Beaubassin, among the refugees who had moved to the French side of the Chignecto isthmus. Before 31 January 1752 Pierre had apparently died, for on that date Cécile Thibodeau was listed as a widow at Aulac, a refugee from Ouescoque.

Notes

His birth and death are known only from compiled genealogies and the refugee lists. The compiled history calls Michel’s father “Pierre dit Palette”, the name it gives the elder Pierre; the refugee list of 1750 gives the same by-name to the Pierre Cormier at Ouescoque with Cécile Thibodeau.

Birth

Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadian families (vol. 3, p. 914) gives “Pierre Cormier, 1704, fils de Pierre et de Catherine LeBlanc”; Beliveau’s genealogy of the Belliveau families gives the same year (p. 107). Neither gives a place, and the year comes from a compiled genealogy, not from a record. The family’s rolls of 1703 and 1707 fit a birth between them.

The 1750 refugee list

The list for autumn 1750 to winter 1751 (Stephen A. White, Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne, vol. 50, 2019, p. 102, row 1750-7) gives “Cormier Pierre dit Palette” and Cécile Thibodeau at Ouescoque. A second Pierre Cormier on the same list, with a wife and ten children, is probably a different man.

The 1752 list and his death

The list of 31 January 1752 (White, vol. 50, p. 156, row 1752r-98; the original is in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Colonies G1 vol. 466 no. 32) gives a widow at Aulac, a refugee from Ouescoque, in a household of nine. White’s table identifies her as Cécile Thibodeau, the widow of Pierre Cormier dit Palette. The printed online transcription gives only “widow CORMIER” and a smaller family, and names no husband. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography places the family at Aulac in 1752 and says that about 1765 they returned to Sainte-Anne “with his mother and four brothers”, with no father named.

A later Pierre

Arsenault and Beliveau also put a Pierre Cormier at Missagouèche, on the Saint John River, in 1770. That conflicts with the 1752 list and with the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. It is probably a namesake or a son, and it is not used here.