♂Pierre Gaudet

Pierre Gaudet (born about 1654) was an Acadian farmer at Port-Royal, the younger of two sons of Denis Gaudet who were both named Pierre. The censuses told the brothers apart as “the eldest” and “the younger”, and both of them married women named Blanchard. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Marguerite Gaudet (born 1688).

Life

Pierre grew up on his father’s farm at Port-Royal. In the census of 1671 Denis Gaudet and his wife Martine Gauthier had three unmarried children: the two Pierres and a younger Marie.

He married Marie Blanchard, probably about 1675; she was most likely a daughter of Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert. By 1678 his mother had died, and the census of that year listed his widowed father in the same household as Pierre, Marie and their two small sons, with four acres of land and six cattle.

The farm grew with the family. In 1686 Pierre, thirty-two, and Marie had five sons, the youngest two months old, and kept ten cattle, eighteen sheep and ten hogs on three arpents^W. In 1693 Denis, still a widower, was at the head of the household, with Pierre, Marie and seven of their children, twenty cattle, thirty-two sheep and twenty-nine arpents. By 1698 Denis was listed on his own beside them, and Pierre’s household held nine children, twenty-five cattle, thirty-five sheep, fifteen hogs and seventy-two fruit trees. Denis lived until 1709. The censuses of 1698 and 1700 between them name eleven children, seven sons and four daughters.

The marriages of his children

Seven of Pierre’s children were married at Port-Royal between 1707 and 1718, in the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Port-Royal fell to the British in 1710^W and became Annapolis Royal, but its Acadian families stayed on their farms and kept their own parish.

Four of those weddings joined his children to the children of Étienne Pellerin and Jeanne Savoie. His son Pierre married Madeleine Pellerin on 17 January 1707, and his daughter Marguerite married Bernard Pellerin on 27 November 1713. Early in 1716 his daughter Jeanne married Alexandre Pellerin on 13 January, and his son Bernard married Marguerite Pellerin on 7 February. Eleven days later his daughter Marie married Jean Baptiste Prejean, so that three of his children were married within six weeks. His son Jean married Madeleine Brun in November 1718. When and where Pierre died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines of descent run through his daughter Marguerite Gaudet (born 1688), who married Bernard Pellerin, on Floyd’s mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). They meet again in Floyd’s grandmother, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born 1850), both descend from Pierre Gaudet and Marie Blanchard.

Notes

Birth, parents and marriage

His birth about 1654 and his marriage to Marie Blanchard about 1675 come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 555), a compiled genealogy. Arsenault calls him Pierre Gaudet dit le Jeune and his elder brother Pierre dit l’Aîné, born in 1650, and names Marie’s parents as Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert. The censuses give Pierre’s age as thirty-two in 1686, thirty-nine in 1693 and forty-six in both 1698 and 1700, which bears out a birth in the early or middle 1650s. The census of 1693 calls him the son of Denis Gaudet, and the census of 1678 already lists him with Marie Blanchard and two sons, the elder about three.

The censuses

The censuses of 1671, 1678, 1686, 1693, 1698 and 1700 are given here from the transcriptions of the Port-Royal nominal censuses published on acadian-home.org, and the figures rest on those transcriptions alone. The census of 1678 is given in acres, the later ones in arpents. In 1686 the elder brother appears as Pierre Gaudet, thirty-five, with Anne Blanchard, forty-one; in 1693 he is “Pierre Godet, the eldest”, with the same wife. The census of 1701 lists a “Pierre Godet, the younger”, forty, with a Marie Blanchard of thirty-five and four grown sons named Louis, Jacques, Clément and Augustin; that household matches none of the others and is not used here.

The marriage acts

The marriages are given from the Nova Scotia Archives’ transcription of the registers of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal, 1702–1755. Each act names the groom’s or bride’s parents as Pierre Godet and Marie Blanchard, except that of Guillaume, married to Marie Boudrot on 21 October 1709, which writes his mother as Marguerite Blanchard; a son Guillaume is in every census of this household from 1686 to 1700. The register writes both brides named Madeleine, Pellerin in 1707 and Brun in 1718, as Magdelaine, and the groom of 18 February 1716 as Prijean; Arsenault dates that marriage to 8 February 1716, and the register’s date is used here. None of the acts down to Jean’s marriage on 7 November 1718 calls Pierre deceased, which suggests that he was still living then.

Names

The censuses and the parish register write the surname Godet; the family’s later spelling, Gaudet, is used here.