♀Rose Adelaide Bourg

Rose Adelaide Bourg (14 October 1765 – buried 19 July 1804) was an Acadian exile, born at Le Havre in Normandy, who married at Nantes in 1783 and raised a family at Manchac and Baton Rouge in Spanish Louisiana. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Beloni Daigle (1791–1822).

Early life

She was born and baptized the same day, 14 October 1765, at Notre-Dame du Havre; the register names her father as Charles Joseph Bourg and her mother as Rose Doiron, and notes that her father was absent from the church that day — the register does not say why. He was dead within a few years: a September 1772 roll of Acadian exiles at Le Havre already records her mother as his widow, “lacemaker and dressmaker in linen,” with six-year-old “Adelaide Rose” as her only listed child. Her mother had remarried, to Jean Baptiste Loiseleur at Targé on 21 August 1775, by the time the two appear on the roll of the first convoy that left Châtellerault for Nantes on 24 October 1775, with “Adelaide Bourg, 9, her daughter.”

Marriage and Louisiana

On 23 September 1783, at the parish of Saint-Martin de Chantenay near Nantes, Rose Adelaide — a minor, “decretée de justice” in the register’s words, and the daughter of the late Joseph Bourg — married François Alexandre Daigle, son of François Daigle and Jeanne Holle, himself an exile born at Cherbourg. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, the couple were on a September 1784 list of Acadians at Nantes with one daughter. Cormier, citing a study of the Acadians at Nantes, has that daughter, Émilie-Adélaïde, baptized at Chantenay in November 1783 and a son, François-Joseph, there in April 1785.

That year they sailed for Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont. The ship’s passenger list enters them as its twenty-third family: François Alexandre Daigle, a laborer of 22, and Rose Adelaide Bourg, his wife, 19, with their daughter of 1 and their infant son. Her mother, Rose Doiron, crossed on the same ship. The ship reached New Orleans in late August, and most of its passengers went on to Manchac. Cormier gives the Spanish list of the Acadians at Fort Bute^W, Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, in 1788 as counting Rose Adelaide with her husband and three others, and the family remained in the Manchac and Baton Rouge area thereafter.

Family

In Louisiana she bore nine more children, and the church registers name her as the mother of all but one of them, Jean. Jeanne Scholastique was born in July 1787 and Marie Christine in December 1789, both baptized at St. Gabriel. André Joseph, the son known as Beloni, through whom the line runs, was born on 15 November 1791 and baptized at St. James. Daniel, born in January 1795, was baptized at Baton Rouge, the family described as “of Manchac”; Sara Dorothée, born in December 1796, was baptized there as well. Marceline Eulalie was baptized at Baton Rouge on 4 October 1802 at the age of a year and a half, and the entry names Rose’s own parents, Joseph Bourg and Rose Doiron.

Jean Baptiste was baptized at Baton Rouge on 3 November 1801 at about two and a half. Thomas was baptized at Baton Rouge on the same day as Marceline, at five weeks old. No baptism for Jean has been found.

Rose Adelaide was buried on 19 July 1804 at St. Joseph Church, Baton Rouge, recorded as “wife of Alexander Dagle.” She was 38. In November 1805 her property was inventoried for her eleven minor children, and on 26 November it was adjudicated to her widower, who described himself as “father and tutor of eleven children.” At the inventory he still owed money to her mother, Rose Doiron, so her mother was alive at Baton Rouge that November. Her husband’s estate papers of 1817 name ten of the children, among them two minor sons, Baptiste and Jean, born after 1796; Thomas, baptized in 1802, is not among them, and he apparently died in the years between 1805 and 1817.

Notes

Cormier’s Synthesis gives her age at marriage as twenty and dates the marriage “c1782, France”; the Chantenay register itself dates it 23 September 1783, by which her own birth date makes her not yet eighteen. The register is followed here. Her family’s surname is spelled variously across the surviving Baton Rouge records — Burquet, Bourg, Burgh, Bourke — and once, in the Le Havre baptismal register, given in full as Charles Joseph Bourg. The children’s baptisms are in the Diocese of Baton Rouge church records; the 1785 passenger list is printed in the Attakapas Gazette, volume 8 (1973), page 170. Cormier counts six sons in the family, and the 1805 inventory names all six; the 1817 petition names five, and Thomas, the sixth, apparently died in the years between. The 1805 inventory and its adjudication are in the Archives of the Spanish Government of West Florida, in an English translation. No death record, only the burial, has been found for her.