Family and Kinship

Until the Scottish expeditions of 1629, the European presence in Acadia was male; the first French woman came to the colony with the arrival of Isaac de Razilly as its governor in the summer of 1632. Thereafter, with the presence of both sexes in the region, male and female immigrants from the Old World, and their children, entered into marriages with each other. At the same time, intermarriage between newcomers and natives, according to the rites of the Catholic Church, is documented for a number of families in early Acadia, including that of Charles Saint-Étienne de la Tour, one of the colony’s most important leaders. In the early eighteenth century, the majority of Acadian marriages were between people whose families had been settled in Nova Scotia for a generation or more. However, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of the marriages between 1713 and 1748 involved a partner from elsewhere, including from among the British soldiers sent to the colony after 1713.

The Acadian community developed from a small number of core families. The official census of the colony undertaken by France in 1671 lists some forty-two family names, and, while other names are to be found in later censuses, these forty-two accounted for the surnames of two-thirds of the francophone population of the Maritimes in 1936. Although there was migration to Acadia after 1671, intermarriage between earlier and later migrants made the latter’s assimilation into the community relatively simple. Furthermore, the fertility rate among the core families was high; women married young and often bore children until their early forties. The infant mortality rate was low, a fact that becomes evident even when family development is traced through the male line alone. The barrel maker Pierre Comeau, born in 1597, arrived in Acadia around 1635 and was married at Port Royal in 1641. He had nine children: his grandchildren by four of his sons numbered forty-six, and their sons had some sixty-eight children. Daniel Leblanc, who was also married at Port Royal, probably in 1645, had seven children, six of them boys. He had fifty grandchildren in the male line. His great grandchildren numbered over 200 and included the offspring of the notary René Leblanc, whose life was given a fictional edge by Longfellow in Evangeline (1847). The Leblanc recorded in the parish records had two children by his first wife and eighteen by his second, including triplets born in 1721.

Recruitment to the core families continued even after 1713, when the colony became part of the British Empire in North America. Individuals frequently chose partners from the same families that their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, had already chosen from, and marriage between second cousins, which required a dispensation from the church, was relatively common. What is more, the unity that intermarriage gave to each village was carried throughout the colony, for the separate communities were also bound closely to each other by kinship ties. New villages were the result, not of the arrival of migrants to the colony, but of outward migration from the older communities. Thus, the pattern that has been discovered in the case of Quebec – where new communities flourished to the extent that they were established by kin groups, people linked by blood and marriage – also applies to the development of Acadian settlement along the Shepody, Petitcodiac, and Memramcook rivers. Another example is Beaubassin. Pierre Arsenault went there from Port Royal in 1687, and three of his sons later went to Île Saint-Jean. René Bernard (1663–1702) also moved to Beaubassin from Port Royal; one of his sons moved to Grand-Pré. Some second-generation members of the Comeau family moved to Beaubassin and Shepody, while some second-generation Leblancs went to Grand-Pré. Jean Caissey’s sons settled between Port Royal and Beaubassin.

By the 1740s every Acadian village was linked to its neighbour, and the result went considerably beyond the social friendliness frequently found in agricultural and frontier communities – in effect, the society brought into being by those who settled Acadia resembled that of the Scottish Highland clans. Afterwards, during the period of exile, kinship ties played a crucial role in the survival of deported Acadians. It has often been asserted that the deportation was marked by a deliberate separation of nuclear families. This is not so; in fact, those in charge made a considerable effort, both during and after the actual deportation, to keep nuclear families together. Still, communities were fractured by the deportation, and the Acadian extended family was severely weakened in the process because the broad kin lines within and between villages, linking families through extended cousinage, was ignored by those in charge of the enterprise. When the decision was made to deport, Lieutenant Governor Lawrence and those associated with him were well aware of the danger of adding to the France’s strength in North America. Accordingly, they decided to split up the various settlements, dividing their inhabitants among the British colonies in North America. Lawrence was confident that, since the deported Acadians could not “easily collect themselves together again,” it would be “out of their power to do any mischief.” The resulting breakup of extended families was a bitter blow for the Acadians. One of the Leblanc families at this time, that headed by Daniel Leblanc, consisted of the grandparents, 16 children, and 102 grandchildren. The old man, dying bewildered in Philadelphia, protested his loyalty to the English and wept because there were only 16 of his descendants at his bedside.

While the deportation separated many such large kin groups, the very existence of these relationships meant that there were kin networks in being among those deported. There would invariably be some kin relationships among each group of the exiles, even though the complete kin families were fragmented. In other words, brothers and sisters might find themselves in different places yet also have cousins and in-laws surrounding them. There is also no doubt that, in the years of the return from exile, kinship ties influenced the decision of individual Acadians as to where to rebuild their lives. Even after twenty years in exile, the Acadians who moved back to the Maritimes re-established themselves in villages where they were near relatives. Pierre Doucet, five years old in 1755, returned in 1775 with his wife and children to St Mary’s Bay, where they could live beside first cousins. Throughout the first thirty years of the nineteenth century a slow trickle of Acadian exiles continued to return, not to their old lands but to the same part of the world and to important family connections.

The Acadian family remained an important social institution in the opening years of the nineteenth century, both for the Acadians re-established in the Maritimes and for those who rebuilt their lives elsewhere. Within the Maritime provinces, kin relationships were called upon to support those in difficulty and to offer educational opportunities to the talented. Moreover, the importance of the nuclear family as the nexus of the extended family gave many, but not all, women, considerable social influence. As is often the case among peoples whose lives are torn apart by war, Acadian women in the years of exile had played a significant role in maintaining the family unit, not least by taking in orphan children. Their lives were in many cases truly remarkable – the heroine of one of the most famous contemporary Acadian novels, Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-Charette (1979), led her family back from exile – and they continued to be formidable figures long after the return to the Maritimes. Indeed, until the 1930s, married women in farming, fishing, and forestry communities wielded great power. Later, however, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of urban centres and Acadian migration towards Montreal and Toronto lessened the importance of the family and, in the process, eroded the position of married women. Contributing to the same result was the crisis in religious belief, which not only undermined the control that women had previously exercised over family life but increased the freedom of individuals to act in accord with their own desires rather than submit to social pressures. By the 1980s family size and divorce among the Acadians of New Brunswick was very much the same as it was among their anglophone neighbours.