I’ve been neglecting my blogs - I’ve
spent a lot of time chasing DNA cousins.
The finds are few and far between but I made a good one a few days
ago. I matched with a woman who gave me
full access to her family tree on-line.
I reciprocated. She didn’t see
any matches but I found a match on the very end of one of her lines. Some of my new cousin’s roots were Louisiana
Cajun and so I looked carefully and compared each name to my names on my mom’s
side. One line caught my eye because the
woman died in Port-Royal, Acadia: Andrée
Guyon (b. 1615 La Chausee, Poitou – d. bef. 1714 Port-Royal, Acadia) who was
also my 8th great-grandmother.
I wanted to know more so I thought that I should go to Lucie
Leblanc Consentino’s (www.acadian-home.org)
website and spend some time looking at
the mitochondrial DNA study where she has posted Stephen A Leblanc's "Founding Mothers of Acadia." I began to compare all my grandfather
Perusse’s ancestors with the women listed there. I can’t help out with the mtDNA study (wish
that I could) but my mtDNA may be Irish, may be Welsh, may be something else
entirely (J1C2). I did enjoy comparing
my tree to 5 of the names of the Founding Mothers of Acadia which seemed familiar to
me.
In addition to Andrée Guyon who married André Bernard, there
was Catherine LeJeune who married Francois Savoie; and Catherine Vigneau who married Pierre René Martin. There was also a Suzanne Jarouselle and a Marie-Madeleine Martin in the lists of
Mothers of Acadia but after reading more in Peter J Gagné’s Before the King’s Daughters I determined that Suzanne Jarouselle who
married Robert Cottard was not the same woman as Suzanne Jarousseaux who
married as her second husband Robert Coutard.
The latter lived in Quebec and is
my ancestor, too. Then there was the
problem of Marie-Madeleine Martin, actually the two Marie-Madeleine Martins. I remembered when I first encountered these
women years ago that I had to call one of them Marie-Madeleine and the other
just Madeleine because when I started using a computer program to keep my
genealogy data, the program wanted to merge the two. Very confusing.
The Marie-Madeleine Martin who is my ancestor is the
daughter of Catherine Vigneau and technically a child of Acadia, I believe the
first child born in Port-Royal, rather
than a founding mother so she is not the woman on the list. It doesn’t help that the other
Marie-Madeleine Martin was the second wife of Guyon Denis Chiasson dit Lavallee
but to keep things organized it’s nice to know she was born in Sillery, Quebec,
in 1666 and married in 1683. To add to
the confusion, Guyon Denis, just mentioned, and his first wife are also my ancestors. His first wife, Jeanne Bernard, is the daughter
of our mutual ancestor Andrée Guyon - Jeanne is also a child of Acadia.
The players in this drama who were my ancestors moved to
Beaubassin. They were apparently very
prosperous farmers and husbandmen thanks to the transcripts of the early census
records. Prominent in the story are the Pierre Morins
dit Boucher, père et fils, (son-in-law and grandson to Catherine Vigneau). Pierre, Catherine’s grandson, married Francoise Chiasson (Guyon Denis, and
Jeanne Bernard’s daughter). Guyon Denis and Jeanne Bernard also had a son
named Gabriel who was in Beaubassin when he married Marie Savoie who was the
daughter of Catherine LeJeune and Francois Savoie. I am also descended from Gabriel so that
makes his parents and grandparents my ancestors twice over and I am proud to be descended from three Mothers of Acadia. So to summarize this tangle of people please
look at my chart.
So, time passes and everybody is now related and living in
Beaubassin. Unfortunately, there was a
scandal surrounding Pierre Morin and Marie-Madeleine’s son Louis in 1688. He was charged with being the father of the
child of a pregnant 17-year -old
daughter of the area’s Seigneur. The
entire family was blamed. Louis was charged
with rape and swiftly sentenced (the local priest serving as magistrate) to a
life-time of service in the French Navy.
One translator said that he was “inserted into the fog of the ocean” and
was never seen again. That is certainly
an ominous phrase. The rest of the
family, including in-laws, were to be banished from Acadia and all their goods
confiscated for the benefit of the Seigneur.
There is more to the story here.
The family was prosperous through hard work. Perhaps there was some bad feelings and
jealousy at work here as well. The
family was helped by business associates to relocate to Ristigouche on the Bay
de Chaleurs in Quebec. Nineteen people
had to re-locate including sons-in-law of the elder Pierre. Among the group were two of Francoise Chiasson’s brothers, Jean and Michel. Unfortunately, Pierre Morin dit Boucher died
within one or two years of the relocation.
Many members of his family then re-located to Montmagny, Quebec. This was around 1690.
So that is why I have Acadians in my French-Canadian
lines. It is a very different story to the
one that can be told by my new cousin who has her Acadians in her Louisiana
lines. I’ve already added to my understanding of the Grand Dérangement and how my distant cousins were dispersed.
Who knows where else the Morins and Chiassons have gone?
www.AcadiansinGray.com The Table of Contents for the Appendix lists
Acadian Families in Louisiana. The
write-up on the Chiassons is a genealogy.
www.AncestorBios.blogspot.com
Stories on Pierre Morin, father and son,
and Guyon Chiasson dit LaVallee and other Acadians.
“The Morins of Acadia”
French-Canadian and Acadian Genealogical Review, Vol 1. No 2. Rev. Archange Godbout, translated by G. P. Hebert,
1968.
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