Marguerite Guilbeau (1739 - bef. 1775)

Born 3 Jul 1739 in Port Royal, Acadia, Canada

Ancestors

Wife of Simon Joseph Daigre — married 23 Nov 1762 in Montmagny, Quebec, Canada

Descendants

Died before 2 Oct 1775 before age 36 in Montmagny, Quebec, Canada

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Biography

Marguerite Guilbault was born on July 13, 1739 in Port Royal, Acadia, Canada. Her parents were Pierre Guilbault and Marie-Madeleine Forest. ^[1]

She married Simon Daigle on November 23, 1762 . All of their parents were deceased. ^[2] Together they had 6 children, of whom 4 reached adulthood:

1. Joseph Marie Daigle (1763-1839)
2. twin - Marie Marguerite Daigle (1765-1841)
3. twin - Pierre Daigle (1765-1767)
4. twin - Jean Baptiste Daigle (1767-1836)
5. twin - Marie Angélique Daigle (1767-1768)
6. Marie Josephte Daigle (1769-1846)

She died before September 1775, when her widowed husband remarried.

Oral and documented family history

By: Robert G. Daigle

Based on oral history passed down in the Upper St. John River Valley, it is highly likely that Marguerite and her family were passengers on the Pembroke. ^[3]

Azilda Daigle of Baker Brook, New Brunswick, used to explain that she was alive because one of her ancestors stopped crying during the Deportation. The story that was passed down in her family reported that during the Deportation, a family of her ancestors was hiding from English soldiers on a boat in thick fog. The youngest child of the family was crying, and because noise travels far over water the parents were desperately trying to get the child to stop. Fearing that the crying would alert the English soldiers to their whereabouts, the parents were trying to decide if they should drown the child in order to save all the other people on the boat. As the story goes, the child eventually stopped crying, the parents were not forced to drown her, and the child lived on to become Azilda's ancestor.

The details of this oral history account match up quite well with the historical account of the Pembroke. The Pembroke was one of eight ships of Acadian deportees that left Port Royal on December 8, 1755, headed for North Carolina. It was separated from the seven other boats in bad weather and since there were only eight English crew members on board, the Acadians were able to seize control of the ship and eventually lead it up the St. John River.

The Pembroke survivors spent the winter of 1755-56 in the Acadian settlement of Ste-Anne-des-Pays-Bas in the region of modern-day Fredericton. Many of them eventually made their way to the French parishes on the south of the St-Lawrence. In the winter of 1757-58, a devastating epidemic broke out among the Acadian refugees. Of the eight members of the family of Pierre Guilbault and Madeleine Forest who managed to escape to Québec during the Deportation, six of them died between December 17, 1757 and April 7, 1758. Only Marguerite and her youngest sister Marie-Anne survived.

In all likelihood, Marie-Anne Guilbault is the young child who was crying aboard the ship while her family and others were hiding from the English soldiers in the fog. Marie-Anne was four years old in 1755 and her big sister Marguerite was sixteen. As the older sibling, Marguerite would have likely become the family storyteller, but after she died around 1775, her sister Marie-Anne would have been the only remaining member of her family to transmit the story to her descendants. The story could have passed down to Azilda Daigle from either of her parents, or both of them. Her parents were second cousins who were both descendants of Marguerite Guilbeau AND Marie-Anne Guilbeau.

Marguerite married the Acadian refugee Joseph Simon Daigre/Daigle and Marie-Anne married another Acadian refugee named François Cyr. Their husbands both appear with their families in the 1783 census of the French Inhabitants on the Lower St. John River. After they were displaced by the arrival of the Loyalists in 1783-84, both men became founders of the Madawaska Settlement and settled nearby to one another on the south bank of the St. John River near the modern-day St. David church in Madawaska, Maine.

Sources

1. ↑ Birth, Marriage, Parents Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique, Université de Montréal (paid subscription) PRDH: Research Programme in Historical Demography (membership): Individu: 164538 PRDH citing BAPTISÉE LE 14. SOURCE : ACTE DU REGISTRE PAROISSIAL AIMABLEMENT PORTÉ À NOTRE ATTENTION PAR ROBIN HEIDER
2. ↑ Drouin Genealogical Institute (needs subscription) Marriage
3. ↑ Consentino, Lucie LeBlanc, and Paul Delaney. “Pembroke Passenger List Recontructed.” Acadian & French Canadian Ancestral Home, http://www.acadian-home.org/PD-Pembroke.html

• http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca/GenealogieQuebec.aspx?genealogy=Joseph-Simon_Daigle&pid=33915&lng=en&partID=33914