♀Renée Bourg

Renée Bourg (born about 1655) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, a daughter of the early settlers Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry and the first wife of Charles Boudrot. She died at about thirty, between about 1683 and 1686, leaving seven children under twelve. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through her daughters Marguerite and Marie Boudrot. She was also the sister of Floyd’s seventh great-grandfather Bernard Bourg (1649–1725).

Port-Royal

Renée grew up in a large farming family. At the census of 1671 her father, Antoine, was 62 and her mother, Antoinette, 53; four of their eleven children were married, and Renée, 16, was at home with six unmarried brothers and sisters, among them Martin, Huguette and Abraham.

Marriage and death

She is thought to have married Charles Boudrot in the early 1670s; by 1678 they had four small children. At the Port-Royal census of 1686 Charles, 40, was listed with no wife and seven children aged three to eleven, among them Anne, 8, and twin sons of 3. Renée seems to have died between about 1683, when her twin sons Claude and Jean-Baptiste were born, and 1686; no record of her death survives. By 1693 Charles had remarried and was living at Les Mines with Marie Corporon and children of both marriages.

Renée is named in a church record written long after her death: when her daughter Marguerite, widow of Jean Baptiste Babin, was buried at Port-la-Joye^W on Île Saint-Jean^W on 20 June 1751, aged seventy, the priest entered her as the daughter of Charles Boudrot and Renée Bourg.

Lines of descent

Renée Bourg is an ancestor of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, and both run down through her children. The first reaches her at ten generations above Floyd, through her daughter Marguerite. The second reaches her at eleven generations above him, through her daughter Marie.

The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), Floyd’s maternal grandmother, whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux, both descend from Renée Bourg.

Notes

Sources

Renée’s birth in about 1655 rests on her age in 1671. The entries in that roll and in those of 1686 and 1693 come from the original rolls. The roll of 1686 gives Charles no wife; a published transcription calls him a widower, but the word is the transcriber’s, and Renée’s death is inferred from the absence. The household of 1678 is known only from a published transcription. The Port-Royal registers before 1702 are lost, and no record of her marriage, death or burial survives.

Marriage and children

Her marriage rests on the burial of 1751 and on the transcription of 1678, which lists Renée as Charles’s wife. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadian families and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana give the same couple. Its date is inferred: Renée was unmarried in 1671, and the eldest of the seven, Marie, was born in about 1675, although the transcription of 1678 counts two boys of five and four.

Anne Boudrot

Arsenault’s compiled genealogy makes her daughter Anne the wife of Pierre Arseneau, but the Beaubassin census rows of 1686 and 1693 place that Anne in the household of Marguerite Bourgeois.

A conflicting declaration

Declarations made by Acadian exiles on Belle-Île-en-Mer, France, in 1767 disagree about the mother of a daughter of Charles Boudrot who married Jean Trahan: one gives her as “Magdelaine Bourg”, another as Marie Corporon, Charles’s second wife. Arsenault’s Marie, born in 1675 and so a child of the first marriage, married Jean Trahan. The Bourg surname agrees with the other sources; the forename does not.