Sunday, October 17, 2010

Acadians in the Mylott Family: Family of Alexandre Guilbault & Marguerite Girouard and the "The Pembroke"

Arthur Homer Mylott (1918-2006), his mother was
   Edith Lida Glode (1889-1965), her mother has
      Marie Angeline Allard (1865-1918), her father was
          Louis Allard (1841-1900), his mother was
            Marie Marguerite Guilbault (1808-1844), her father was
               Louis Guilbault (1772-    ), his father was
                  Gregoire Guilbault (1750-1808) who was likely born (there's no documentation) in Port Royal about 1750 and was about five years old at the time of the Grand Expulsion of the Acadians from their farms in today's Nova Scotia. The story of Gregoire and his family is just one of many tragedies the Acadians endured as a result of their expulsion.


The Deportation Cross


Gregoire was a son of Alexandre Guilbault (1708-1776)  and Marguerite Girouard (1713-1757). Their other children were Armand (born in 1734), Joseph (born in 1736), Marie (born in 1741), Ursule (born before 1745), Jean (born 1749), then Gregoire, then Marie Gertrude (born before 1754). So at the time of the expulsion some of the children ranged from young adults to a baby.

It is believed the family of Alexandre Guilbault and Marguerite Girouard were among the passengers on The Pembroke, the only ship to rebel against their English crew.  The Guilbault family is listed as Family #12 in Paul Delaney's Reconstructed Passenger list. Although Gregoire does not seem to be identified among the Guilbault children in Delaney's passenger list, I suspect he was with his parents. The Pembroke was at anchor in the Dauphin River (today it is named Annapolis River) along Goat Island near Port Royal and embarked in December 1755 with 232 Acadians headed for the colony of Carolina.  The Acadians on board commandeered the Pembroke into the St John River in present day New Brunswick and spent a harsh winter with little food and shelter in the northeast woods. The full story can be found at The Pembroke Passenger List Reconstructed at Acadian Ancestral Home. Please take some time to read their story.

The Acadians who survived, gradually made their way into Quebec via the St John River but their troubles were hardly over.  War with the English and a poor harvest tore open the countryside. Smallpox was ravaging in the cities & countryside, in military troops and families at this time. When finally, the family was in safely in Québec city, under the French troops, smallpox hit the family. The first to succumb was sixteen year old Marie on 7 December 1757.  Next was Jean on December 23rd - he was only eight years old. Two days later, on Christmas Day, the mother, Marguerite Girouard, died from smallpox. A mother and two children all dead within eighteen days.

Gregoire survived.  Whether he had the disease and lived, I do not know but he married in 1771 in Sorel, Quebec to Marie Agathe Angelique Hus dit Millet and had several children. Gregoire Guilbault was the great-great-great-great grandfather of Arthur Homer Mylott.




Here's other stories about illnesses and disease in our families...




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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Acadians in the Family


Now it is time to write about the Acadians in the family - and there are many!  

Statue of Evangeline at Grand Pré historic site

You may ask "who"and "what" are Acadians? Well, when I first learned about the Acadians I was seven,  maybe eight,  years old. My mother Dorothy, read me a poem from a book in our home titled "Evangeline, a tale of Acadia".  I don't think I completely understood all the details, I only understood it was a sad love story.  Poor Evangeline and her boyfriend, Gabriel were planning to get married and something terrible happened to separate them.  They never reunited until, many years later, Gabriel was on his deathbed - a romantic drama just like the kind my mother liked!  I am not certain if my mother realized she actually had Acadian ancestors who lived through the events and time of the heroine. The story made me interested enough to learn more about these people.  Years later, I had a Doug Kershaw, the "Ragin' Cajun",  album and listened to the fiddlin in  "Louisiana Man" over and over.  When I lived in northern Louisiana, I couldn't wait to travel to Cajun county - Lafayette and St. Martin County.

Evangeline, a Tale of Acadia is a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and can be found here and/or here.

An image of Grand Pré

And what were the terrible events? Acadians lived in the French colony since 1630; the English conquest of Port Royal in 1710 ultimately brought the colony under British control.  In  September-October of 1755, amid the Seven Years War in the land that is now called Nova Scotia, English troops gathered all the French speaking colonists around the area of Grand Pré, Port Royal and Beaubassin in Acadie. Six thousand individuals were impounded on ships, their  homes burned, their lands confiscated.  Hundreds, if not thousands perished in the ordeal. Families were split apart and shipped to destinations in the British colonies including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Georgia, Carolina and Pennsylvania. Survivors to those destinations were usually shunned because of their Catholicism in Protestant communities. Even in Maryland, founded as a Catholic colony, Acadians were not welcomed. Over the next 10 to 15 years , many Acadians made their way back to French speaking areas of Quebec or other areas in present day New Brunswick, Maine and of course Louisiana. This event is referred to as Le Grand Dérangement or the Great Expulsion or the Great Upheaval.



The best sites to read for details about Acadian History are ACADIAN-CAJUN and the EXILE

Some of the Acadian colonialists were shipped to French colonies and some even back to France. The Acadian ancestors of the families noted in this blog, Mylott, Rivet, and Wills were shipped to New England ports - Connecticut and Massachusetts.  Over the course of a decade, they made their way to settlements created by French speaking communities of Québec especially for Acadian refugees in Québec: St Jean de L'Acadie (south of Montréal) and St. Jacques de L'Achigan  (east of Montréal).

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Location: Annapolis, Subd. A, NS, Canada
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