♂Pierre Dupuis

Pierre Dupuis (about 1671 – before 9 September 1709) was an Acadian of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) who married Magdelaine Landry, a widow who was, by most census ages, about fifteen years his senior (the rolls of 1693 and 1700 make the gap about six), and headed a household of her five Richard children. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Dupuis. On the project’s reconstruction, through his mother he was a grandson of the early settler Francois Gautrot, and that descent would make his grandson Justinien Dupuis a blood relation of the bride Justinien married in 1751, in the degree the Church’s dispensation for that marriage names; the register gives only the degree.

Early life

No baptism survives for Pierre; he is known as a child only from the nominal censuses of the colony. The census of 1671 lists him as “Pierre 3 months” in the Port-Royal household of Michel Dupuis, written Dupont, a farmer of 37, and his wife Marie Gautrot, 34, with the children Marie, 14, Martin, 6, and Jeanne, 4. The fourteen-year-old Marie was his mother’s daughter by an earlier marriage. The census of 1686 finds him, aged 17, still in his parents’ household, with his brothers Martin and Jean and a younger sister Marie. His parentage therefore rests on these census households rather than on a record naming his parents.

Marriage and family

By the census of 1693 Pierre was already head of a household at Port-Royal, married to Magdelaine Landry, the widow of René Richard, and raising her Richard children; the copyist first wrote the husband’s name as “Pierre Richard”, struck it out, and wrote “du peux” above. In 1698 Pierre, then 28, and Magdelaine, 43, had her children Michel, 17, Anne, 16, Antoine, 15, Pierre, 13, and René, 12, with two younger girls, Marie, 5, and Jeanne, 3. A later hand has bracketed the older five in pencil as “Rychard” and the two girls as “Dupuis”, which would make Marie and Jeanne Pierre’s own daughters; the roll itself does not say. No record of the marriage has been found. The household appears again in the census of 1700. The census of 1701 lists him as head of the household, written Dupuy and aged 30, with Magdelaine Landry, 47, her Richard sons and her Dupuis children, and the household is listed again in the censuses of 1703 and 1707.

The couple’s son Pierre married Jeanne Richard at Port-Royal on 6 January 1720. The bride was a daughter of Alexandre Richard, and Alexandre was the younger brother of René Richard, Magdelaine Landry’s first husband: the son of Pierre’s marriage thus married a first cousin of his own half-brothers and half-sisters. The parish register of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal) calls the groom the son of “the late Pierre Dupius” and Magdelaine Landry.

Death

The parish register records the burial of a Pierre Dupuis at Port-Royal on 9 September 1709, aged 37 and described as a habitant, a settler-farmer. The entry names no wife or parents, so the identification rests on the age and the place: it fits the “Pierre 3 months” of 1671 and the 30-year-old of 1701 within a year, and no other grown Pierre Dupuis appears in the Port-Royal censuses of those years. His widow was living at least until February 1721, when she stood godmother to her first grandchild as “Magdelaine Landry widow of Pierre Dupius”. The couple’s son Pierre went on to have at least nine children baptized at Port-Royal between 1721 and 1740.

Notes

The censuses do not agree on his age. He is 28 in 1698, 30 in 1701 and “thirty-seven” at his burial in 1709, all pointing to a birth about 1671. But the rolls of 1693 and 1700 give him as 32 and 39, which would place his birth about 1661. The identification with the infant of 1671 follows the majority of the records.

The 1751 dispensation

When Pierre’s grandson Justinien Dupuis married Anne Girouard at Port-Royal on 3 February 1751, the register records a dispensation from the impediment^W of kinship “du trois au quatre”, the third to the fourth degree, without saying how the two were related. The family as reconstructed from the register and the censuses gives exactly that degree. Pierre’s mother, Marie Gautrot, and Anne’s grandmother, Marguerite Gautrot, were both daughters of Francois Gautrot; Justinien stood four generations below him, through his father, his grandfather Pierre and Marie Gautrot, and Anne three, through her father Guillaume Giroir and Marguerite Gautrot. Because both Pierre’s place in Michel Dupuis’s household and Guillaume’s in Marguerite Gautrot’s rest on census households, the register’s independent statement of the degree is corroboration of both.