♂Vincent Breau

Vincent Breau (died before 1686) was a farmer of Port-Royal in Acadia and the husband of Marie Bourg, a daughter of the early settlers Antoine Bourg and Antoinette Landry. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his sons François Breau and Antoine Breau.

Port-Royal

Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians gives Vincent’s birth as 1631 and his origin as La Chaussée, near Loudun in western France, and has him arriving in Acadia about 1652 and marrying Marie Bourg about 1661. John Mack Faragher’s history of the Acadians counts him among the young men who came out to the colony unattached, stayed, and married the daughters of settlers.

When the census of Port-Royal was taken in 1671, Vincent was a farmer of forty, with his wife Marie, 26, and four children, Marie, 9, Antoine, 5, Marguerite, 3, and Pierre, 1. The family had nine cattle, seven sheep and four arpents^W of land.

Death

Vincent died before 1686. The census of 1686 records Marie as his widow with ten children, from Antoine, 22, to a daughter only a few months old. With the elder daughter Marie, aged 9 in 1671 but no longer at home in 1686, the censuses name eleven children of the marriage, the same eleven that Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy gives the couple. Since the youngest was still an infant, Vincent had most likely died within a year or so before the census. His death fell before the surviving parish registers of Port-Royal, which begin in 1702.

Their son François was twelve in his mother’s household in 1686, and was still living with her at twenty-five in 1700.

Lines of descent

Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) descends from Marie Bourg and Vincent Breau by two separate lines of descent, both on his mother’s side. One runs through their son François Breau (born about 1674). The other runs through their son Antoine Breau (born about 1666), and from him through Alexandre Breau, Joseph Braux and Marie Claire Braud to Anaclet Melancon, then through the Melancon and Daigle families to Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) and Ida Serrette (1903–1990), Floyd’s mother.

The two lines meet again in Amelia Pennison Daigle, whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), both descend from Marie Bourg and Vincent Breau.

Notes

The census entries are known here from an online transcription of the Port-Royal rolls; they are not drawn from the original rolls. The transcription spells the surname Brot in 1671 and 1700, Breau in 1686, Brau in 1693 and Brun in 1698. The Brun of 1698 belongs to this household, where the widow Marie Bourg and her children are the same as in the other years; the same rolls list a different and older Vincent Brun as the head of his own household at Port-Royal, aged 60 in 1671 and 70 in 1686.

The transcription renders the widow’s household of 1686 twice, giving the youngest daughter as “Susanne 2 months” in one and “Isabelle 5 months” in the other; the later censuses call her Elisabeth, and Arsenault gives her as Elizabeth-Suzanne, born in 1686.

François’s place as a son of Vincent and Marie rests on the census households, in which he is the only François Breau of his age, and on Arsenault’s genealogy. Arsenault’s birth year of 1631 agrees with Vincent’s age of forty in 1671; his French origin and the dates of his arrival and marriage rest on the compiled genealogy alone.