Researcher studying Acadian wills says they were ‘an act of resistance’

When Hilarion Thériault felt his time was coming at 71 years old, he decided to leave a will — an uncommon occurrence for Acadians in the 19th century. 

That’s because many Acadians did not have much property to pass down. After the Acadian deportation, many lost their land and homes. Additionally, Roman Catholics in the province were not allowed to own property until the 1780s. While many occupied the land they lived and worked on, they struggled for decades to get land titles. 

But Thériault was, as his will puts it, “unwilling to die unprepared.”

Colby Gaudet, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, studied Thériault’s and 23 other wills from the small Acadian community of Clare, N.S., to better understand how some families navigated the legal and religious practices associated with grief and death. 

“It’s simultaneously both an act of resistance, but also adherence. [Acadians] using the model that’s already there, these Anglophone property lines,” said Gaudet. “But they’re also making clear that this is the will of a Roman Catholic.”

Thériault asked that his debts be paid and that reparations for any wrongdoing be made in his memory. His will also said that he wanted to provide peace for the family.

Maurice Basque, a historian at l’Institut d’études acadiennes at the Université de Moncton, said these wills were written in the context of great social shunning of Acadians. 

In 1755, Lt.-Gov. Charles Lawrence ordered the deportation of the Acadians after they refused to align themselves with the British Crown. Thousands were forced out of their homes and many also escaped into the woods and to Quebec. 

Basque said Acadian land became property of the Crown, which distributed it among settlers from New England. 

“It was a plan for decades of the British to replace the Acadian population,” said Basque. 

Some Acadians were able to return years later, but it was far from a warm welcome.

Basque said they were systematically kept from holding certain positions of power through oath tests, which were intended to make people renounce core Catholic beliefs. 

Because of this, Gaudet said all of the county judges that looked over wills in the area were Anglo-Protestant, which added a language barrier for the Acadians, who had to somehow write their wills in a language many did not speak.

All of the wills Gaudet read were written by a priest named Jean-Mandé Sigogne, who left France due to the French Revolution, took refuge in London, where he learned English, and ended up in Clare in 1799. 

“This priest who’s acting as basically the intermediary between the people on the ground, his parishioners, the Francophone Acadian families and then the judiciary system,” he said. 

Unapologetically Catholic

The wills that Gaudet studied were left behind mostly by community leaders. Thériault, for example, was one of the founding churchwardens of the parish. 

Because the church and Catholicism were such an integrated part of their daily lives, many made sure to honour that on their wills, even when society at large at the time looked down upon it. 

“Protestant wills would kind of just invoke the name of God, amen,” Gaudet said. “But there are these distinct Catholic details, right? Like invocation of the Virgin Mary and so on.”

He said some wills, like that of Argyle resident Paul Surette, went as far as to mention saints. His will specifically mentioned “the Sufferance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Apostles and especially St. Paul my Patron and of all the Saints.”

Racial relationships in Clare

The wills also revealed more information about the relationship between Black people and Acadians. 

In fact, Gaudet got started studying wills when he came across the will of Amable Doucet, who in his will passed a Black slave named Jerome to his wife, along with the rest of his property.

In another will he studied, Étienne Thibodeau chose his neighbours Paul Dugas and Anselm Hatfield as witnesses. Hatfield, who was a Black man from New York, had been an indentured servant to Dugas, and was a free man living in the community.

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