| Notes |
- SÉBASTIEN CHIASSON
Guyon-Denis and Jeanne Bernard's fourth child, Sébastien, was born in Chebouctou (now Halifax) in 1670. As a child he moved with his family to the new Acadienne colony of Beaubassin where he helped his father and older brothers clear the land for crops.
When Sébastien was about twelve years old his mother died. Guyon-Denis took the family to Québec and got remarried to a woman only a few years older than Sébastien. They returned to Beaubassin where Sébastien's new step-mother gave him four more siblings.
In 1693, Sébastien (spelled Bastien in the 1693 census of Beaubassin) married Marie Blou (daughter of Jacques Blou and Marie Girouard). Their eventual family was small by Acadienne standards (Sébastien died in his early thirties) consisting of a son Jacques, and two daughters, Marie and Agnès; although later, a second (unnamed) boy appears in two censuses.
On September 21st 1696, New England militia led by Benjamin Church attacked Beaubassin, burning buildings, slaughtering livestock and killing some of its inhabitants, but most fled inland and survived because the English feared the Acadiennes? marksmanship and were unwilling to chase them beyond the reach of their ships? cannons. The following year the Treaty of Ryswick ended King William?s War and restored Acadie to France, but in 1702 after only a few years of peace, a new conflict began: The War of Spanish Succession.
By the 1698 census Sébastien and Marie's farm had sixty-three acres under cultivation, with 24 cattle, 12 sheep and 10 hogs, but by 1700 they were cultivating only twelve acres and the following year, just four acres. The 1701 census also reported that they had two boys and two girls. The existence of a fourth child in generally not known but this helps validate an entry in the 1703 census: The Widow Bastien, 2 boys, 2 girls. The inference is that Sébastien died between 1701 and 1703, and his widow Marie is referred to by what was perhaps his dit name: Bastien.
In late June 1704, Benjamin Church, the man who led New England militia against Acadie in 1696, returned with a force of seven hundred Bostonians and Massachusetts?s natives. They sailed into Bassin-de-Minas and attacked Grand-Pré, Pisiguit and Cobequid. At Grand-Pré, Church tried to sneak up on the Acadiennes by mooring his ships behind a small wooded island and approaching the village in whale boats, but after reaching the tideline and attempting to cross the mudflats on foot his men were blocked by deep tidal channels and returned to their boats to wait for the flood tide to cover the obstructions. The delay and rising sea revealed them to the locals, who fled into the woods.
His soldiers sacked the colony, killing livestock, burning houses, and breaking open the salt-marsh dikes which flooded the enclosed farmland with seawater, threatening to destroy the land?s usefulness for several years; but after Church?s men left the Acadiennes quickly repaired the aboiteaux, saving the soil from complete salt saturation and allowing them to plant crops the following year.
At Beaubassin, Germain Bourgeois (son of Jacques Bourgeois) negotiated with the New Englanders and showed them a signed document giving their sworn loyalty to the English king. This seemed to satisfy Church but many of his soldiers were less disciplined and went off to pillage the area and raze the village: burning houses, farms and the church.
Sébastien Chiasson's widow Marie Blou, with her family of young children, would have been there at the time and no doubt witnessed the destruction.
Around 1708 Marie got remarried to François Lapierre and had six more children with him.
In 1710, a fleet of English and New England ships commanded by General Francis Nicholson, sailed into Port-Royal basin carrying two thousand troops and laid siege to the fort. After a few days of bombardment Governor Subercase surrendered. Port-Royal was renamed Annapolis Royal.
In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended The War of Spanish Succession in Europe and its North American extension: Queen Anne?s War. France ceded Acadie and Newfoundland to England but retained the St. Lawrence valley and the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and Île Royale (Cape Breton Island). The treaty language however did not define the geographic extent of Acadie with enough detail, and France believed that a wide swatch of the mainland (the future province of New Brunswick and a portion of the future state of Maine) still belonged to them, while England held the opposite view, causing decades of conflict and skirmishes between French and British forces, finally erupting into full-scale battle during the Seven Years? War.
Families began to abandon their farms in peninsular Nova Scotia and started a migration to Île Royale and later Île Saint-Jean. The area of Beaubassin began to take on the role of a frontier, with French militia retreating into New Brunswick protected by their Micmac allies, and making lightning attacks across the Chignecto Isthmus against British targets of opportunity.
Marie Blou appears in the 1714 census of Beaubassin (Francois LaPierre and Marie Blou his spouse; children: Jacques, Michel, Marie-Josephe) and is presumed to have died after that year, which some unspecified sources say was 1726.
|
1670 - 1703 (33 years)