♂Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier was a ship’s carpenter living at La Rochelle, in France, who in January 1644 was hired to sail to Cape Breton Island with his wife and their eldest son and work for the commander of a French fort there. Most of the craftsmen recruited for Acadia in those years were single men hired for three or four years; only a few married men brought their families. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Thomas Cormier (died before 1693).

The contract of 1644

On 8 January 1644 a contract of engagement^W was passed at La Rochelle for “Robert Cormier, charpentier de navire, Péraude (Perrault), sa femme et Thomas Cormier, premier fils, demeurant en cette ville” - a ship’s carpenter, his wife and his first son, all living in the town. They promised to go aboard the Petit Saint-Pierre, whose master was Pierre Boileau, at the first call and sail to Cape Breton Island, where Robert was to work at his trade, and at whatever else he was ordered, for Tuffet, Duchanin and Chevery, under Louis Tuffet, commander of Fort Saint-Pierre on the island. The contract is known from the passage that Bona Arsenault^W quotes in his genealogy of the Acadians, citing an article by Archange Godbout published in 1951; the notarial minute itself has not been seen.

Thomas, the “first son”, was still a boy: the censuses of 1671 and 1686 place his birth between about 1631 and 1636. Compiled genealogies have Robert born about 1610 and married in France about 1634 to Marie Péraud, and Arsenault’s gives the couple a second son, Jean, born about 1643.

Notes

• The contract is quoted, with gaps, in Bona Arsenault, Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (2nd edition), volume 2, page 494, which cites Archange Godbout in the Mémoires de la Société généalogique canadienne-française, volume IV, number 3 (January 1951). Neither the notarial minute nor Godbout’s article has been seen.
• The contract as quoted gives Robert’s wife only as “Péraude (Perrault)”. The given name Marie and the spelling Péraud are those of the compiled genealogies of Arsenault and of J.-Hervé Beliveau, which both name Robert Cormier and Marie Péraud as Thomas’s parents.
• The later compilation adds that the engagement was for three years at 120 livres a year, and that Robert was the only man hired for the fort who took his family there. Neither detail is in the passage Arsenault quotes.
• Arsenault’s earlier book, L’Acadie des ancêtres, puts it as a possibility that Robert was one of the hired men of Nicolas Denys^W on Cape Breton, and says he had another son at La Rochelle; a history of Louisiana’s French heritage also counts him among Denys’s fishermen. The contract as quoted names Tuffet, Duchanin and Chevery as his employers.

After Cape Breton

What became of the family after the voyage is not settled. Arsenault has Robert reaching Saint-Pierre in 1644 and settling at Port-Royal about 1650, and John Mack Faragher^W’s history of the Acadians counts Robert Cormier and his wife Marie Péraud among the founding families who stayed in the colony. A later compilation of the Acadian families of Louisiana argues instead, after a suggestion of the genealogist Michael Melanson, that the family went home to La Rochelle when the Fort Saint-Pierre concession ended in 1645, and that only Thomas came back to Acadia as a grown man. The census of 1671 lists Thomas, a carpenter like his father, in his own household at Port-Royal, but neither Robert nor Marie. No record of the death of Robert or of Marie has been found.