Hi Jackie and Listers, This post is a correction to what I had posted earlier on this couple and comes from Stephen White. ;o) <<Abraham Vigneau was born at Beaubassin on Sept. 2, 1733, and was baptized there on the same day. He and Marie Bourg had their marriage contract drawn up by the notary Louis de Courville at Fort Beauséjour on Jan. 24, 1755. Their marriage presumably took place soon after, but no record of that has survived. Abraham and Marie went to live at Baie-Verte, on what is now the Northumberland Strait, where most of Abraham's family was settled. They and all the rest of the Jacques Vigneau clan at Baie-Verte were taken prisoners in September 1755 and loaded aboard the schooner Jolly Phillip, which took a total of 129 Acadians to Georgia, leaving Chignecto on the following Oct. 13th. (We know that the Vigneaus were on this ship because the ship's captain, John [or Jonathan] Waite, noted a few births and deaths of Vigneau family members in the ship's log. These notes were published in the Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne, vol III, 1970, p 211) The Vigneaus did not long stay in Georgia. Determined to return to Acadia, and furnished with passports by the colony's governor, who was happy enough to see them leave, they obtained a boat and set out to return up the coast. Unfortunately, during the time that they were travelling, war was officially declared, and the group was stopped on Cape Cod in 1756. The entire group was detained in Massachusetts, in various towns. The baptismal records of Abraham's children Henriette and Isaac specify that they were both born in Roxbury, in 1760 and 1762, so it is known that he and his family were there during those years. All the Vigneaus and the rest of the group who came from Georgia were listed at "Boston" in August 1763, but "Boston" in this context really means all of Massachusetts, the entire area under the jurisdiction of the governor and general court that sat in Boston. Realizing that returning to Acadia meant staying under the British, the Vigneaus very soon set out for the one bit of territory remaining to France in North America, the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, where they were the first Acadians refugees to arrive, early in October 1763. Abraham Vigneau and Marie Bourg and the three children who had been born to them while they were in Massachusetts, Marie (Rébecca), Henriette, and Isaac, were in this group, and they were accompanied by Marie's first cousin, Pierre dit Paul Bourg, who was the second male "child" listed with them the preceding August. Miquelon soon became overcrowded with Acadian refugees, and the French government ordered an evacuation in 1767. In the autumn of that year, Abraham and Marie boarded the snow Le Saint-Jacques, bound for France, with their children, now five in number, two more daughters, Modeste and Anastasie, having been born on Miquelon. The following year, however, they returned to Miquelon. Life resumed. Four more daughters were born to them, Rosalie, Jeanne, Apollonie, and Marie-Marguerite-Madeleine, making a family of nine children in all. Then in 1778 as another war was raging the British captured Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and deported the local population to France. Abraham Vigneau and his family went to La Rochelle aboard the Betsy. By 1784, Abraham Vigneau was back on Miquelon. But now his family was smaller. Marie Bourg and their only son, Isaac, did not come back from this third exile. So, Abraham was left a single parent, with a household filled with daughters, eight in all. The oldest girls were already young women, and they began to find themselves husbands. In the fall of 1784, the eldest, Rébecca, married another Acadian, Laurent Cyr. A year and a half later, the third girl, Modeste, married a young Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Garnache. The records concerning the Garnaches provide the best indication of the timing of the family's next move. Modeste and Jean-Pierre's eldest child was baptized at Miquelon on March 6, 1787, and their second child was baptized at Bécancour on June 5, 1788. So, they moved between those two dates, most likely in the autumn of 1787. And the godmother of that second child was Abraham Vigneau's second daughter, Henriette, who had not yet married, so she must have accompanied her sister, and it is quite likely that the whole family moved at that time, with the sole exception of Rébecca, who waited until 1789 to join them. The records concerning the members of this family in the first years after their arrival in what is now Nicolet County are mostly found in the registers of Bécancour and Nicolet, but it would appear that it was actually in what became in 1802 the parish of St-Grégoire that they settled. And it was at St-Grégoire that Abraham Vigneau died on June 13, 1802. The record says he was seventy-seven, but he was in fact only sixty-eight. In all the records concerning this family, I have never seen Abraham called "Laverdure." Many of the Vigneaus were known by the nickname "Maurice," which comes from the given name of Abraham's grandfather, who was the first of the line in Acadia. So, Abraham Vigneau's personal history is much more complicated than some secondary sources may suggest. Even more detail will probably eventually be added to the above story as research goes on. The Acadians who lived on Miquelon were a group that was much beset by misfortunes and upheavals, but their descendants are fortunate in that they are one of the few groups about whom so many very detailed records were kept and are still preserved. >> Lucie LeBlanc Consentino Acadian & French Canadian Ancestral Home www.acadian-home.org <http://www.acadian-home.org/> Am-Can Gen Soc www.acgs.org <http://www.acgs.org/> CMA 2004 - www.cma2004.com Grand-Pré - http://www.grand-pre.com/ www.umoncton.ca/etudeacadiennes/centre/cea.html <http://www.umoncton.ca/etudeacadiennes> <http://www.grand-pre.com/>