♂Pierre Dupuis

Pierre Dupuis (born about 1702) was an Acadian of Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal), in the French-speaking settlement that had passed under British rule in 1710, and the father of at least nine children baptised there between 1721 and 1740. On 3 February 1751 two of his children married two children of Guillaume Giroir and Marie Bernard on the same day: his son Justinien married Anne Giroir, and his daughter Theotiste married Anne’s brother Pierre. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Justinien Dupuis (born 1725).

Early life

No record of Pierre’s baptism is known; his birth year is an estimate from the census households of Port-Royal. He was the son of Pierre Dupuis and Magdelaine Landry. Their household in the census of 1701 lists Magdelaine’s Richard children from her first marriage and three younger children, Marie, 8, Jeanne, 6, and Charles, 4, but no Pierre; by 1703 it counts six boys. He was therefore most likely born between 1701 and 1703. His father was most likely buried at Port-Royal on 9 September 1709, when Pierre was a small child: the register’s burial of that date names a Pierre Dupuis, aged thirty-seven, but no wife or parents, so the identification rests on his age and the place.

Marriage and family

On 6 January 1720 Pierre married Jeanne Richard at Port-Royal. The register enters the groom as “Jean Pierre Dupius” and calls him the son of the late Pierre Dupius and Magdelaine Landry. The bride was the daughter of the late Alexandre Richard and Elizabeth Petitpas, so both fathers were dead by the time of the wedding. The priest who married them was Justinien Durand, and the couple later named a son Justinien; the register records both facts but does not connect them.

The parish register records nine children of the couple, born between January 1721 and January 1740. The eldest, Anne, was held at her baptism by her grandmother, entered as “Magdelaine Landry widow of Pierre Dupius”; she died in February 1736, about fifteen years old. Justinien was born on 24 March 1725, and his godparents, Germain and Angélique Richard, were most likely Jeanne’s own brother and sister. The son Michel married Anne Godet at Port-Royal in October 1747.

The double wedding of 1751

Justinien Dupuis married Anne Giroir, and his sister Theotiste married Anne’s brother Pierre Giroir, at Port-Royal on 3 February 1751. The register enters the two marriages one after the other and names Pierre Dupuis and Jeanne Richard as the parents of both Dupuis partners. Justinien’s marriage needed a dispensation^W because he and Anne were related, and the register gives only the degree, “du trois au quatre”, the third to the fourth. The route is the project’s reconstruction, made from the census households: it runs through a shared descent from the early settler Francois Gautrot, and the register does not state it. On that reconstruction Theotiste and Pierre Giroir, as siblings of that couple, stood in the same relationship.

A Pierre Dupuis witnessed Michel’s marriage in 1747 and both marriages of 1751, and a Pierre Dupuis was godfather to Justinien’s son Joseph in January 1752. The register does not say whether this was the groom’s father or his brother Pierre, born in 1728. Pierre himself was dead by 2 June 1760, when the marriage record of his son Cyprien at Ristigouche names him as the late father. The register does not show whether he lived to see the deportation of the Acadians in 1755.

Notes

Two entries in the same register pair a Pierre Dupuis with an Anne Richard rather than Jeanne: a son Cyprien baptized in 1733, and a Pierre Dupuis who married Anastasie Bourgeois in 1755 as the son of the late Pierre Dupuis and the late Anne Richard. Anne Richard was the wife of another Dupuis of the parish, Jean, and these entries have not been assigned to this family.