Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/208

this subject. The prompt manner in which the four widows of Chignecto secured for themselves new life partners is worthy of notice, and shows that marriageable young women were not a drug on the market in ancient Acadia.

Germain Bourgeois was 21 years old and unmarried when the census of 1671 was taken. In 1686 he was a resident of Chignecto. He was married to Michelle Dugas in 1673, and had four children, the oldest being William, aged 12 years. Germain Bourgeois continued a resident of Chignecto, but he had returned to Port Royal to visit his son William at Annapolis for, in 1711, after the capture of that place by the English, he and his son and two others were imprisoned by the commandant, Col. Vetch, as hostages, and in reprisal for hostility to the English. It is said by Murdoch that Germain died as a result of his ill treatment while in prison, a story we would like not to have to believe. Indeed it is highly improbable, for Paul Mascarene, who was then at Annapolis, says that the hostages were well treated and soon released.

Jacob Bourgeois was dead in 1702, but he was living in July 1699, when he addressed a memorial to the French minister in Paris concerning Acadia. This was written at the fort on the lower St. John, that is to say in Fort La Tour, which had been rebuilt by Villebon. The name of Jacob Bourgeois also appears in a memorial written in October 1687, in which he signed his name as one of the ancient inhabitants of Acadia, with reference to the work that d'Aulnay had done at Port Royal, La Have, Mercier, Ste. Anne and other places in the colony. The other "ancient inhabitants" who signed this memorial with their own hands were François Gauterot, Pierre Martin, Matthieu Martin, Claude Teriot and Philip d'Entremont; while Antoine