♂Pierre Giroard

Pierre Giroard (born about 1672) was an Acadian from a Port-Royal family who settled at Pisiguit^W, on the Minas Basin, where he was twice married and raised two families. In the autumn of 1709 he and his brother Denis married daughters of Pisiguit families four weeks apart, and Denis was dead ten weeks after his own wedding. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Claude Giroir (born about 1699).

Early life

Pierre was born at Port-Royal about 1672, the son of Jacques Girouard and Marguerite Gautrot, habitants of Port-Royal, and a grandson of the colony’s founding generation. The census of Port-Royal taken in 1686, as transcribed in Bona Arsenault’s compilation of 1955, lists him in his parents’ household as “Pierre, 14 ans”, which places his birth about 1672. The records spell the family name in many ways, among them Girouar, Giroir and Girouard.

First marriage

Pierre’s first wife was Marie Comeau, whom the registers call Comau and Commeaux. No record of their marriage is known, but their son Claude was about 27 when he married in 1726, so the couple were married by about 1698. Their children included Claude, a son Jacques, who married at Grand-Pré in 1730, and Etienne, born on 21 December 1708 and baptized on 14 April 1709 in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré. Marie died within months of that baptism. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives fifteen children in all, six of them by Marie Comeau: Marie (1698), Claude (1699), Pierre (about 1701), Anne (about 1702), Jacques (1707) and Etienne (1708). The censuses fit a family of that size: in 1701 he is at the Rivière de Kiniscour in Pigiguit with his wife, one boy and one girl; in 1707 he is at Les Mines with two boys under fourteen and two girls under twelve; and in 1714 the census gives six sons and two daughters at Pigiguit. A Pierre Girouard, aged 18 to 19, was buried at Grand-Pré on 27 January 1719; the act names no parents, but he is probably this son.

Second marriage

On 14 November 1709, at Saint-Charles-des-Mines, “Pierre Girouar, widower of Marie Commeaux”, son of “Jacques Girouar and Margueritte Gotrot, habitans de Port Royal”, married Marie Douaron, the daughter of Jean Douaron and Marie Trahan, habitants of Pigiguit (Pisiguit). Four weeks earlier, on 17 October, Pierre had stood witness when his brother Denis married Margueritte Barillot, another daughter of a Pisiguit family, in the same church. Denis died on 26 December 1709 and was buried two days later; in 1712 Pierre witnessed his widowed sister-in-law’s second marriage, to Louis Douaron.

Pierre and Marie Douaron had nine children born between 1710 and 1729, according to Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy, five of them baptized in the Grand-Pré register: Charles (1710), Veronique (1712), Honore (1714), Louis (1716), Marie Joseph (1717), Magdelaine (1719), Marguerite (1723), Pierre (1727) and Jean (1729). Veronique’s godfather at her baptism in 1712 was “Sieur Mouton, chirurgien” - the surgeon Jean Mouton, who signed the act. The register styles the godfather “Sieur” and “chirurgien” and does not say why the family chose him.

In 1752 a census taken by the Sieur de la Roque lists several of the children on Île Saint-Jean and Île Royale. Anne was with her husband Thomas Douaron and Veronique with Pierre Barriaud on the Rivière du Moulin à Scie; Louis, with his wife Marie Thibaudeau, and Magdelaine, with Joseph LeBlanc, were at Malpèque; Marguerite was with Basile Boudrot at Saint-Pierre du Nord; Marie was with Jean Trahan at the Baie des Espagnols; and the younger Pierre, a fisherman aged 24, was at Petit-Degrat on Isle Madame with his wife Cécile Detcheverry. The census names the spouses rather than the parents; each couple is the one Arsenault records. In exile in Brittany, on 25 January 1763 at Pleudihen, a “Marie Giroire”, widow of Charles Benoit and daughter of Pierre and Marie Douaron (written Doiron in the register), described as “les deux acadiens”, married Charles Landry; she is probably the daughter Marie Joseph.

Later life

When his son Claude married at Port-Royal on 3 June 1726, the act, as transcribed by the Nova Scotia Archives, named Claude’s parents as Pierre Giroard, “habitant of the parish of the Assumption of Pegighit”, and Marie Comau, deceased, and described Claude himself as living in the parish of Pegighit, that is, Pisiguit. Pierre was himself a witness to the act, so he was alive in 1726. The baptism of Pierre’s son Jean in 1729 is the last record in which he appears as a parent at a baptism. On 31 July 1730, when his son Jacques married Marie Boissau, the act named Jacques as the son of Pierre Girouard and the late Marie Caumau, and gave his parish as “l’Assomption de Pigidy”; it does not mark Pierre as deceased, and it is the last record found that names him. No record of his death is known, and the records do not show whether he lived to see the deportation of the Acadians in 1755.