What is the main driver for the interconnected nature of Acadian families? Was there an abundance of arranged Marriages?

Question

Would there be a class of documents the would contain these contracts for arranged Marriages if they exist?

Answer 1

Documents that would show arranged marriages in Acadie, such as marriage contracts, dowries and probate are extremely rare in Acadie. The few notaries that came to Acadie were in Louisbourg and in french forts. And many records were lost during the Grand Dérangement. The majority of Acadians did not have such contracts, nor many possessions to share, having been stripped of their property and livestock, and relocated so many times. 

The interconnected nature of Acadian families is better revealed in marriage records. When marrying a blood relative, a special permission from the Catholic Church was needed, and given in the form of a dispensation, explained in the parish register. The degree of consanguinity was noted. This is a valuable tool for genealogists to establish relationships.

Michael B. Melanson in his book Cormier Genealogy (p. 4) says it well: "When a relatively small population inhabits a limited area for generations and prefers to marry within its own community, as did the Acadians, the community becomes more and more genetically linked."

Other possible reasons: 

• Generally priests frowned upon mixed marriages.
• Acadians deported to distant colonies or countries were not always welcome there, considered a financial burden. Therefore it must have been difficult to marry outside their community.

Comments

Thanks for the star Cindy 

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"mixed marriages"? Meaning between Catholics and non-Catholics? If "mixed" in this answer is supposed to refer to marriages between people of different races then I'm curious to know about the evidence of this.

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The meaning is between Catholics and Non-Catholics.

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Ah, thanks for clarifying, Gisèle!

Answer 2

Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.

I would imagine for the same reason that there was so much interconnection at Plymouth, Massachusetts - the relatively small size of the population and the dearth of possible marriage partners.

Comments

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand

That was my first thought as well but I started thinking it was more about keeping Land in the family for farming and hunting furs but had nothing to back that up. Dowries and probate are the only two things I can think that would validate this theory.

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I think you're right, Roger:  Small, isolated populations end up intermarrying to an extent we, today, find utterly amazing.  I have a family line which settled in Hart County, Kentucky very early, when it was still part of Hardin and Barren Counties.  They married into the same families, generation after generation, and married each other - then all named their kids from the same list.  It gets very confusing, trying to sort them out.

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Edward, the 'silver spoon' and keeping family assets secure might have been a factor many years after Acadians settled in Louisiana and a few other locations.

It certainly wasn't after the Grand Dérangement when they probably had no spoons or other possessions at all.

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Susan:

      My wife is descended from some of the German families that settled two small towns in Archer County, Texas in the last 19th and early 20th centuries.

     When his daughter was old enough to date, my brother-in-law decided to analyze whom she could date without  violation of state law.  He could not find a single person.

                                         Roger

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Roger, I've tried to persuade a couple of DNA genealogy sites which offer trees to fill out that they should provide a capability to show cousins marrying - it does, after all, have a big effect on inherited DNA.  (I have no idea at all, at all how that would chart out on anything like a standard tree.)  It would be nice, though, to have a way to display the effects visually.

Answer 3

My first thought is that the Acadians had no reason to associate with others. They were expelled from their homes, by the British between the mid 1750s and mid 1760s, because they were suspected of colluding with the French, in the French and Indian War.

They were transported to many British colonies including some in the American colonies, they were forced labourers in many of the places they were sent to.

Why would they have wanted to associate with the people who became their masters? They would have felt safer with their families and other Acadians.

Even after some of them were able to return to New Brunswick they were not allowed to own land, much of their land had been given to other settlers and was also given to United Empire Loyalists and other American migrants after the revolution.

https://www.cbc.ca/acadian/timeline.html

Answer 4

You are dealing with a very small population base to start with, the interconnections between families also show up in the Canada colony (what is now Québec), which results in the truism among those known as ''de souche'' (deep roots in the colony) that we are all cousins to some degree.

As for those who were deported to various English colonies, their intermarriage with existing English population ran up against several factors:  outside of Maryland, English colonists were mainly Protestant, whereas Acadians were Catholic;  they spoke French, so communication barriers probably abounded; and from what I have read on the subject, the various locations they got deported to didn't want them there in the first place.  All these factors were certainly not conducive to the Acadians marrying outside their community.

Answer 5

I see some in my family tree.. A guy named D'entremont is the oldest record, first governor of acadia. (This is an actual grandpa, I would not be born without the offspring) I have part native as a result. My surname coming from an island myself..avoiding blood relations was a big deal. In two generations, my irish dna is in mid teens cM.. pedigree breakdown meets my 100% italian half of the family (and french and irish all collided). Long story short, whatever that couple hundred year trek of being too close.. it goes away much faster than it came.

Answer 6

Another resaon for "interconnected marriages" (e.g. brothers of one family marrying sisters of another family) is to increase the size of the support group during difficult times.  For example, there would be more options for the care of widowed grandmothers or grandfathers, or children of deceased family members.