♀Rose Bayon

Rose Bayon (born about 1631) was the wife of the cooper Pierre Comeau at Port-Royal in Acadia, recorded with him and nine children in the census of 1671. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by eight separate lines of descent, through four of the couple’s children.

Port-Royal, 1671

In 1671 Rose was 40 and her husband, the cooper (“Tonnelier”) Pierre Commeaux, was 75, thirty-five years her senior. The roll gives them “Leurs enfans neuf”, nine children. The eldest, Estienne Commeau, was 21 and married; the eight unmarried ran from Pierre, aged 18, down to Jehan, aged 6, and two of the sons were named Pierre and two were named Jehan. The two Pierres were later told apart, in compiled genealogies, as Pierre l’aîné and Pierre dit des Loups Marins.

Rose would have been about nineteen when Étienne was born, and the roll does not say whether she was his mother or his stepmother. Her son Jean, through whom two of the lines of descent run, was probably the elder Jehan, aged 14.

Death

Rose most likely died between 1671 and 1686, for by the census of 1686 Pierre was a widower, still living with their youngest son, Jean. Her parents are not known.

Lines of descent

Pierre Comeau and Rose Bayon reach Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by eight separate lines of descent, through four of their children: Étienne Comeau (born about 1650), Pierre Comeau (about 1653), and the two sons named Jean Comeau (about 1656 and about 1665). All eight run on Floyd’s mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990); the nearest is nine generations up. The lines meet again in several later couples, notably in the marriages that produced Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), where both parents descend from this couple. Some of these lines pass through a probable identification: the Jehan aged 14 on the 1671 roll, taken to be Jean Comeau (about 1656).

Notes

The 1671 roll

The roll writes her surname Bayon; printed transcriptions of it give Bayou and Bayols, and the compiled genealogies call her Rose Bayol. Placide Gaudet’s printed transcription of the roll names the eight unmarried children. The historian N. E. S. Griffiths, writing on the same census, notes that Rose was thirty-five years younger than her husband. Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of 1955 is the source that tells the two Pierres apart.

Her marriage

J.-Hervé Belliveau’s compiled dictionary has Pierre Comeau marry Rose Bayol in France about 1641, a date that cannot fit a woman aged 40 in 1671. If she was Étienne’s mother, the marriage took place about 1649, in all likelihood in Acadia; the surviving Port-Royal registers begin only in 1702. No source names her parents or where she was born.

Her son Jean

That Jean Comeau (born about 1656) is the Jehan aged 14 on the 1671 roll is a probable rather than proved identification, since that entry rests on printed transcriptions. His later ages fit the elder Jehan, not the younger: in 1686 he was 30 and had a daughter of eight, while the younger Jean was 21 and unmarried in his father’s house. Declarations made by Acadian exiles at Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 instead call Jean’s father another Jean Comeau who came from France; the census, taken in his lifetime, places him in Rose’s household.

Her death

Pierre’s widowhood in 1686 comes from Arsenault’s abstract of that census and a modern transcription, which give his age as 88.