♂René Trahan

René Trahan (born about 1694) was an Acadian of Les Mines^W who married Isabelle Davoy at Grand-Pré in 1717 and saw their first children baptized there. He was probably the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Trahan (1719–1799).

Life

René was born about 1694, a son of Jean-Charles Trahan and Marie Boudrot, who probably made their home in the Trahan village on the Rivière des Vieux Habitants, today’s Cornwallis River, in the parish of Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rivière-aux-Canards. In 1701 the census of Les Mines counted the household on that river with two boys and two girls.

On 8 November 1717, at Saint-Charles-des-Mines in Grand-Pré, he married Isabelle Davoy, a daughter of Jérôme Darois and Marie Garault; the register writes her Elisabet Darois. Pierre Terriot and Jean Trahan signed as witnesses, and René made his mark. Their son Jean was born on 18 March 1719, the first of their children.

René is said to have died about 1733, before he was forty. On 6 June 1734, in the chapel of Sainte-Anne at Beaubassin^W, his widow married Sylvain Breau, the unmarried son of François Breau and Marie Comeau of the Rivière aux Canards.

The family

The register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines records three children of René and Isabelle, born between 1719 and 1723: Jean, Marie and Paul. The couple are said to have had a son Michel, born about 1726, and a daughter Ursule as well. Ursule married Joseph-Grégoire Broussard, a son of Alexandre Broussard dit Beausoleil, and was a widow with three children among the Acadian prisoners at Halifax in August 1763. Early in 1765 Jean, Michel and Ursule all came to Louisiana with the party led by Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil. On 8 April 1765, at New Orleans, Ursule married Joseph Girouard, in one of the earliest Acadian marriages in the colony; she was buried in the Attakapas country on 10 October 1765, two days before her mother, and Joseph died twelve days after her.

Notes

Sources

René’s birth about 1694, his parents, the family’s home in the Trahan village and his death about 1733 come from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens, which places his father on the river of the Vieille-Habitation, the present-day Cornwallis River, and has him dying there before 1729. Arsenault gives the couple three children, Jean in 1719, Marie in 1721 and Paul in 1724, and says that the widow married Sylvain Brault. The marriage of 1717 and the three births are in the register of Saint-Charles-des-Mines as published in the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, volume 1a. Most of the marriage entry is lost, and the volume completes it from a transcription made in 1895, which names the bride’s parents Jerome Darois and Marie Jareau and the groom’s Jean Trahan and Marie Boudrot; a modern abstract of the same act names her mother Marie Gareau. Paul was born on 16 December 1723 and baptized on 6 February 1724, which accounts for Arsenault’s 1724. The household of 1701 is in the census of Les Mines of that year, which names the head Jean Trahan.

Michel, Ursule and the journey of 1765 come from Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which places Michel “probably” in this family and names Ursule a daughter of René Trahan and Élisabeth Darois; the Attakapas Gazette (1971) also gives Ursule these parents. Ursule’s burial on 10 October and her husband’s on 22 October 1765 are as Cormier gives them.

His widow’s second marriage

The surviving text of the marriage of 1734, a later copy, writes the bride “Hisabelle Davoy” and calls her the widow of a Richard, not of René Trahan. Arsenault, Stephen A. White and Cormier all make Sylvain Breau’s bride Isabelle Darois, daughter of Jérôme Darois and Marie Garault and widow of René Trahan, and the family tree follows them.

The line to Floyd

The line runs from Jean Trahan through Anne Trahan (died about 1774), the wife of Charles Guilbeau. No record names Anne’s parents; she is placed in Jean’s family by the godparents and witnesses of her children’s baptisms and of the marriage of Jean’s son Germain.