The Feisty Fugitive
Guillaume Trahan
Guillaume Trahan (1611-1682) was my 10th great-grandfather (6 times), my 9th great-grandfather (twice) and my 8th great-grandfather.
Guillaume was born probably in Bourgeuil, France in 1611, the son of Nicolas Trahan (1570- ) and Renee Desloges (1570-1632). The parents of Guillaume Trahan likely originated in or near Montreuil. He married Francoise Charbonneau (1615-1665), daughter of Mathurin Charbonneau and an unknown wife, on July 17, 1627, in the Parish of Saint-Etienne de Chinon.
On April 1, 1636, along with other families who came from Bourgeuil (Inde and Loire), Guillaume Trahan, his wife Francoise, their daughter Jeanne (1629-1702), my great-grandmother, another child and a servant left the port of La Rochelle onboard the ship Saint Jehan to arrive in Acadia where they were one of the founding families of the colony.
The passenger list of the Saint Jehan showed, Guillaume Trahan, marshal of Trachant, wife and two children and a valet, all from Bourguel. The second child presumably died as there was no subsequent record of her.
The circumstances that brought Guillaume and his family to the new world may never be fully known. But it could well be that in 1634 a sentence had been issued against a group of residents of the town and
Guillaume's name was among the lot. He was charged and fined with illegally cutting wood for his hearth from the private forest of Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), the chief minister to King Louis XIII (1601-1643). Persons from various walks of life were also listed and fined, including members of the clergy. The powerful Richelieu certainly was not a person to cross.
The small town of Bourgeuil possessed an indefinable charm and a beautiful gothic church of the 12th century, where Guillaume and Francoise enjoyed singing for long hours.
Guillaume served in the military for several years. When he left the service he took up the trade of a toolmaker. Toolmakers are workers in the manufacturing industry who make jigs, fixtures, dies, molds, machine tools, cutting tools (such as milling cutters and form tools), gauges and other tools used in manufacturing processes. Depending on which area of concentration a particular person works in, he or she may be called by variations on the name, including tool maker (toolmaker), die maker (diemaker), mold maker (moldmaker), tool fitter (toolfitter), etc. Guillaume was a skilled artisan who learned his trade through hands-on instruction, with a substantial period of on-the-job training that was functionally an apprenticeship. He was mostly likely had the skills of a toolmaker and a tool fitter.
Guillaume Trahan played a very important role in Acadia. In 1640, shortly after his arrival, he was the representative of the people of Pentagouet, La Have and Port Royal. In 1644, his daughter married the military-surgeon, Jacques Bourgeois (1621-1701), my great-grandfather.
In 1651, when King Charles I (1600-1649) and Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) were battling for control of England, Parliament passed a Navigation Act, requiring that goods from Asia, Africa and America be carried to England only on English ships. The act was aimed chiefly at the Dutch, who were supporting the king in his feud with Parliament. War broke out over the issue, and France became an ally of the Dutch against the British.
That European conflict spilled over into North America in 1654, when an English force from Boston headed to Acadia with orders from Cromwell to clear the French from the place. At the head of the force was Robert Sedgwick (1611-1656), a major of the Massachusetts militia. Second in command was John Leverett (1616-1679), Sedgwick's son- in-law and a future governor of Massachusetts.
They sailed first into Saint John Harbor where, after three days of discussion, Charles de La Tour (1593-1666) was forced to surrender his fort. Then they sailed across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal, where Emmanuel LeBorgne (1610-1675) was entrenched in the Acadian fort. LeBorgne had no stomach for fighting and gave up after a single skirmish, showing "lack of courage" according to a contemporary history written by Nicholas Denys even though he had "all kinds of munitions of war and provisions of which he had ample to hold out well rather than capitulate."
Sedgwick followed up his victories at Saint John and Port Royal by taking the Acadian forts at La Have and Penobscot Bay. He did not bother Denys, who was entrenched at St. Peter's on Cape Breton Island, probably because Denys was too far away and too likely to fight.
Under terms agreed to on August 16, 1654, Sedgwick left the Acadian colony in the control of a local council headed by Guillaume Trahan. In fact in 1654 Guillaume Trahan was the official Receiver and President of the inhabitants in the area and he signed the act of capitulation of Port Royal on behalf of the citizens.
According to Charles Mahaffie, "The agreement permitted the people to stay or go as they chose, and most of them chose to stay. It may indeed have occurred to them that new rulers might not be so bad. In the years since d’Aulnay's death, they had known no effective government, only a tangle of competing claims and quarreling claimants to their lands and loyalties. Their king had done nothing to protect Port Royal from annual plunder. They probably figured that Sedgwick and whoever came after him could not be much worse, so they stayed, hoping to adapt as best they could and wanting more than anything else to be left alone. For the most part they got their wish."
Indeed, little changed in everyday life during the council's administration. The Acadians farmed their lands. There was no new flood of British settlers to disrupt their lives. Indeed, the masters in control in Europe, Cromwell in England and Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661), who had succeeded Cardinal Richelieu as chief advisor to the king in France, were much more worried about affairs at home than overseas. At best, and as usual Acadia would be used a pawn in the greater game of continental warfare. And whenever there was a chess game going on, Charles de La Tour was not far from the board. This time, he watched the game from England, where he had been sent after surrendering his fort in Saint John.
Cromwell had taken power in England by force and King Charles I had been beheaded. But, instead of making Cromwell more powerful, the Charles’ death turned the monarch from tyrant to a martyr in the eye of many Britons. Cromwell faced continued warfare from the backers of the late King, and Cromwell was afraid that France would become an ally of his enemies.
Mazarin had his own set of problems. King Louis XIV (1638-1715) was only 5 years old when he inherited the throne in 1643. Mazarin and the queen mother, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), ruled in his name, but they were under almost constant rebellion or the threat of rebellion from nobles who wanted to take power in France much as the barons of Britain had done with Cromwell's succession.
Looking at their own self-interest, the two men negotiated the Treaty of Westminster, promising that neither country would come to the aid of rebels trying to take power. That settled things for a while in Europe, but left open to negotiation the status of the "three forts, namely Pantaoet, St. John and Port Royal, very recently captured in America." Acadia would remain in British hands until the negotiations were over.
In fact, the negotiations never began. Neither country appointed anyone to negotiate and, in 1656, Cromwell decided to turn over Acadia to three men: Thomas Temple (1613/14-1674), an ambitious British aristocrat; William Crowne (1617-1682), a wealthy member of the Puritan Parliament that put Cromwell into power, and the wily Charles de La Tour, who laid claim to the land by reminding the British crown that, during the last spell of British control, he and his father had been made knights baronet of Nova Scotia. He apparently failed to remind them that he had not accepted the title and had refused to join with the British at the time.
The three men were named joint owners of "the country and territory called Acadia, and part of the country called New France." But part of the deal was that La Tour had to pay debts he ran up in Boston and to help pay for the garrisons that Robert Sedgwick left in Acadia after taking the forts there.
La Tour did not have the money to do that, so he almost immediately sold his interest to his other two parties and retired to his old homestead at Cape Sable, where he lived for another 10 years in comfortable retirement with his wife, Jeanne Motin.
Temple and Crowne held the territory jointly for a while, then Temple, with financing by a British merchant named Thomas Breedon, leased Crowne's half. In 1658, Emmanuel LeBorgne, the French financier who tried to claim the land, sent his son, Alexandre LeBorgne de Belle-Isle, to try to reclaim La Have, but Temple ran him back to France with hardly a shot fired.
The monarchy was restored in England in 1660, and King Charles II (1630-1685) began to make his own gifts of land to royalist backers. Temple, whose grants came from Charles' enemy, the Cromwells, rushed back to England when it appeared that he would lose his lands. He may have learned something from La Tour. Not only was his claim upheld by the king in 1662, Temple also wheedled a knighthood for himself.
In 1664, Britain went back to war with the Dutch. Once again, the French allied with the Dutch, and this time they fought Britain to a standstill. The Treaty of Breda (1667) settled the conflict. This time, King Charles II traded lands in South America to the Dutch for clear title to the former New Netherlands, which he gave to his brother, James, the duke of York. New Amsterdam became New York. At the same time, France agreed to give back to England some islands in the Caribbean that had been taken during the war. In exchange, England gave back "the country which is called Acadia, situated in North America."
Acadia was French again. But, this time, things were different. Anglos in New England had been trading regularly with Acadia and had taken notice of its beauty and its fertility. They began to think that maybe, next time, they ought to ship those Papist Frenchmen someplace else and keep the pretty Annapolis Valley for themselves.
Given the regularity of wars in Europe between England and France, it was almost a certainty that there would be a next time.
It was at Port Royal, near 1666, that Guillaume Trahan became a widower and married his second wife, Madeleine Brun 1645-1686), my great-grandmother, the daughter of Vincent Brun (1616-1659) and Renée Brault (1616-after 1671). The couple had six children. Guillaume died before 1684 in or around Port Royal. He lived the last dozen years of his life in a French colony.
Guillaume Trahan is "The Father of all Trahans of North America."
Meaning of the Trahan Name
Trahan(d) is of French origin,. It is an occupational name for a silk worker who drew out the thread from the cocoons, from a derivative of traire “to draw or stretch”. It has been “translated” into English as Strong.
Touraine was a region known for silk production from the days that the King Louis XI (1423-1483) introduced the silk worm and the mulberry tree to feed them around his city of Tours. Just as he brought the silk worms, this king could also have brought the Trahans, the workers of silk.
Sources:
A Land Divided Always, Charles D. Mahaffie, Jr., Down East Books, 1995
Ancestry.com
http://www.ancestry.com/facts/Trahan-family-history.ashx
http://www.trahan.org/TrahanNameOrigin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_and_die_maker
http://doucetfamily.org/heritage/Anglos.htm