Dugas

or Dugast, Dugat

Abraham Dugas was born about 1616 or 1618, some say in Toulouse, but more likely in Ste-Anne d'Auray in Morbihan, Brittany. The photo above shows the present 19th-century church there. An Abraham Dugas and Marguérite Carsonne lived there, and are very likely his parents. He was in Acadia by 1640; he was an armorer, and evidently was in the army or worked for the army as a civilian contractor. He married Marguérite Louise Judith Doucet at Port-Royal in or about 1647 (see Doucet; she was 17, and the daughter of the garrison's commander). In 1671 they owned 16 arpents.

Their children, all born in Port-Royal: Marie (born and died 1648); another Marie (1650-1737, married Claude Melançon); Claude (1652, married Françoise Bourgeois, 12 children, and then Marguérite Bourg, 10 children); Anne (1654-1740, married Charles Bourgeois and then Jean-Aubin Mignault, 6 children); Martin (1656-1679, married Marguérite Petitpas, see below); Marguérite (1565, married Pierre Arsenault); Abraham (1661, married Jeanne Guilbault); Madeleine (1664, married Germain Bourgeois, see Bourgeois for descendants).

Claude Dugas and his first wife Françoise Bourgeois (daughter of Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan) were married about 1673 in Port-Royal. Their children were Marie-Catherine (1674-1733, married Philippe Melançon); Claude (1676-1747, married Marguérite Bourg); Françoise (1678), Joseph (1680, married Claire Bourg); Marguérite (1681, married Jean Melançon); Anne (1679, married Abraham Bourg and Étienne Hébert); Jeanne (married Pierre Forest), Agnès (1686, married Michel Thibodeau); François (1688, married Claire Bourg); Madeleine (1689, married Jean-Baptiste Hébert); Marie (1691, married Claude Broussard); and Cecile (1690, married Claude Brun). Françoise married René Forest (see Forest) and was a great-great-grandmother of Victor Prince, who in 1795 married Marie-Esther Bourgeois, a granddaughter of Claude Dugas and Marie-Josèphte Melançon, see below).

Martin Dugas and Marguérite Petitpas were married in 1677, and he was dead by 1679 or 1680. There were two children: Abraham (see below) and Marguérite (1680), who married first Joseph Guyon in 1697 (who took her to live in Québec, where she gave him 3 children) and then François Cressonnet, sieur de Beauséjour, in 1717. Marguérite Petitpas remarried, to Claude Guédry, a coureur de bois who had children by a previous wife and also by a Micmac Indian woman. The Dugas children live with their mother and stepfather during the 1680s and 1690s, evidently across the Bay of Fundy it what is now New Brunswick. The 1698 census finds them back in Port-Royal. In 1708 they had a large farm at La Hève.

Abraham Dugas dit Grivois (1678-1720) married Marie-Madeleine Landry in 1702 at Port-Royal. We know of six children: Marie (1703, married Michel Bergeron); Joseph (1705-1788, in 1728 married Marguérite Robichaud, who died in Port-Royal in 1752; in 1755 Joseph was in Massachusetts with his ten children); Marguérite (1707, married Joseph Boudreau); Claude (see below); Jean (1712, married Marie-Charlotte Gaudin); and Abraham (1714, married Marguérite Fougère in 1735).

The British capture of Acadia and the subsequent scattering of the French settlers took members of the Dugas family to Boulogne in France and to Massachusetts and Louisiana, along with many of their cousins - Forest, Petitpas, Landry, Bourgeois, and others. It appears that our ancestor Claude Dugas, who lived in Massachusetts for about fifteen years, eventually migrated with many other Acadians to the Lanaudière region on the left bank of the St Lawrence between Montréal and Sorel.

Claude Dugas (c1710-1792) married Marie-Josèphte Melançon on May 29, 1731 at Port-Royal, before they were exiled to Sturbridge, Massachusetts. It appears that most of their children were not yet married when they migrated to L'Assomption in the Lanaudière. Known children: Joseph (married Marie Vaillant, 1776); Daniel-Jean (married Louise Vaillant, 1782); Marie-Félicité (married François Forest, 1771); Madeleine (married Joseph Leblanc in Massachusetts; revalidated in Canada 1767); Anne (married Joseph Richard, 1771); Osithe (married Charles Béliveau, 1767); and our ancestor Marie-Marguérite (married Armand Bourgeois in Massachusetts, revalidated 1767). Note that their daughter Marie-Esther married her cousin Victor Prince in 1795; they were great-grandparents of Marie Eva Jean Martin.