♂Pierre Guilbeau

Pierre Guilbeau (born about 1639) was a farmer of Port-Royal in Acadia, listed on the censuses of the colony from the first nominal roll of 1671 to that of 1700. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by four separate lines of descent, through three of his children.

Origins and first census

His parents and his place of origin are not known, and the parish registers of Port-Royal from before 1702 are lost, so no baptism or marriage record is known for him. On the census of 1671 he is “Pierre Guillebau”, a farmer of thirty-two, with his wife Catherinne Terriau, twenty, a daughter Marguerite of two, and fifteen arpents of land under the plow; a transcription of the roll adds six cattle and five sheep. The same roll lists a married Catherinne, twenty-one, among the children of Jehan Terriau and Perrine Rau; as the only married Catherine Terriau on the roll, she is taken to be his wife, Catherine Thériot.

A growing household

The later rolls, as transcribed, follow the household as it grew. In 1686 Pierre is forty-seven and Catherine thirty-three, with seven children from Marguerite, eighteen, to an infant Jeanne, and the family kept a gun, eight cattle, six sheep and eight hogs on eight arpents. The same transcription also lists a Marguerite Guilebault, eighteen, as the second wife of Martin Blanchard, a man twenty years older; by her name and age she is taken to be Pierre’s eldest daughter. Martin’s son Rene, by his first marriage, is also an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne. By 1693 Pierre had twelve arpents, eighteen cattle, twenty-five sheep, ten hogs and two guns, and in 1698 twenty-six arpents and 150 fruit trees. The roll of 1700 gives him as sixty-one and Catherine as forty-six, with three children still at home: Charles, twenty-two, Marie, seventeen, and Jeanne, fifteen. That Marie is the Marie Guilbeau who later married Abraham Landry of Pisiguit rests on her name and age, as drawn together in Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families. The parish register records his death at Port-Royal on 17 November 1703 and his burial the next day, 18 November.

Lines of descent

Four separate lines of descent run from Pierre to Floyd through three of his children: Marie Guilbeau, Jeanne Guilbeau (born about 1670) and Charles Guilbeau (born about 1677). Two run through Marie, one through Jeanne and one through Charles. Two of the four come through Floyd’s father, Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), and two through his mother, Ida Serrette (1903–1990); the nearest is nine generations up, through Marie. At least one line on Floyd’s father’s side passes through a link that is probable rather than recorded. The lines meet again in Emilie Croker (born 1834) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), and finally in Floyd himself, whose parents, Jeffrey Delahorne and Ida Serrette, both descend from him.