♀Rose Doiron

Rose Doiron (about 1749 – 8 January 1808) was an Acadian exile and lacemaker who was widowed at Le Havre in her twenties and had remarried in France by 1775. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Rose Adelaide Bourg (1765–1804).

Acadia to France

The register of her first marriage calls her Rosalie Doiron, a minor, the daughter of the late Paul Doiron and the late Marguerite Michel, and a native of Acadia. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana calls her a daughter of Paul dit Grand Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel, places her birth about 1750, probably at Pigiguit^W, and puts her, at about age two, at Rivière-du-Nord-Est on Île Saint-Jean^W (now Prince Edward Island) in August 1752. Cormier has her deported from the island to Cherbourg, France, in 1758, at about eight years old, one of the thousands of Acadians the British removed from the island in the final wave of the deportation, and gives her trade as lacemaker.

Two marriages

Rose married Joseph Bourg, also recorded as Charles Joseph Bourg, on 8 January 1765 at Notre-Dame parish, Le Havre; the clerk headed the page “January 1764”, and Cormier’s date of 8 January 1764 follows that heading, while the volume is the register for 1765. The register gives her age as nineteen. Their only known child, Rose Adelaide, was born at Le Havre on 14 October 1765. By 15 September 1772, when a roll of the Acadian families still living at Le Havre listed “Rose Douaron, 23, widow of Joseph Bourg, lacemaker and dressmaker in linen,” with her six-year-old daughter, Joseph had died.

On 21 August 1775 she married Jean Baptiste Loiseleur, son of the late Robert Loiseleur and Marguerite Legendre of the parish of St-Jacques de Châtellerault, at Targé in Poitou^W. The register calls her a widow of Joseph Bourg of Acadia and a daughter of Paul Doiron and Marguerite Michel, and she signed the entry herself. By 24 October 1775 she was on the roll of the first convoy that left Châtellerault for Nantes, listed, at age 26, as “widow Bourg, wife of Loiseleur, lacemaker,” with her nine-year-old daughter. Cormier places her in Poitou from 1773 to 1775, and on his account of a September 1784 list of Acadians at Nantes she was there with her husband and no children.

To Louisiana

Cormier has Rose sailing to Louisiana in 1785 aboard Le Beaumont, the third of the Seven Ships, with no age given, “listed singly,” and concludes: “Evidently Rose’s husband remained in France.” She therefore crossed as a household of one, though her daughter Rose Adelaide, her son-in-law François Alexandre Daigle and two grandchildren were aboard the same ship. Cormier gives the 1788 Spanish list of the Acadians at Fort Bute^W, near Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, as showing “Rosa Duaron” alone in her household, with no corn and no rice.

On 2 November 1805 she was still living at Baton Rouge, when a Spanish succession record for the estate of her daughter, Rose Adelaide Bourg, listed 690 pesos owed to her by her son-in-law, François Alexandre Daigle. A burial recorded at Baton Rouge on 8 January 1808, for “Rosa, age 58 yrs. of Acadia,” is probably hers, though the entry names no husband or parent and shares its page with several similar, unrelated burials; Cormier’s table gives the same date and the same age.

Notes

Her age is not fixed. The 1765 register gives nineteen, which would put her birth about 1746; the rolls of 1772 and 1775 give 23 and 26, about 1749; Cormier says about 1750; and the burial age of 58, if hers, gives about 1750. Only the 1765 marriage act, the rolls of 1772 and 1775, the 1775 Targé marriage act, the 1805 succession record and the probable burial come from the records themselves; her residence in Poitou from 1773, her father’s by-name, her birth at Pigiguit, the 1752 and 1758 entries, the 1784 Nantes list and the 1788 line rest on Cormier’s compilation. The Targé marriage is dated 21 August 1775; one listing of it gives 20 August.