Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/55

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OUR FIRST FAMILIES.
49

and he was married to Madeline Girouard, and had one child, a girl, who was also named Madeline. CormiƩ was a carpenter and was in comfortable circumstances, being the owner of seven head of horned cattle and seven sheep and having six arpents of land under cultivation. When the census of 1686 was taken he was no longer at Port Royal but had removed to Mines. He appears to have been one of the first settlers of that place, and probably went there in company with his two brothers in law, Germain Girouard and Jacques Belou, who married Marie Girouard. In 1686 CormiƩ had become the father of nine children four sons and five daughters, the eldest, Madeline, being then a young woman of eighteen. He had prospered in the meantime and cultivated forty acres of land. He was the owner of twenty horned cattle, ten sheep and fifteen swine. Chignecto and its vicinity always remained the home of the Cormier family, for there were none of that name at Port Royal in 1730 or at Mines in 1755. In 1752 there were thirteen families named Cormier gathered at Beausejour, all residents of settlements near it, eight being from Westcock and three from Nappan. It is evident that the Cormiers were not driven from Acadia to any large extent in 1755, for probably their thirteen families embraced most of the name then in Acadia, so that their multiplication in 136 years to 600 families is a pretty good proof that the deportation of the Acadians was a failure so far as they were concerned. Among the settlers on the St. John River in 1783 at the time of the arrival of the Loyalists, were eight families named Cormier, numbering in all fifty-one persons. These people were probably the descendants of some of those Acadians from the Annapolis River who, in the autumn of 1755, seized the ship in which they were being deported and took it into the harbor of St. John.