The Acadian Story
The Acadian story spans four centuries and two continents. It begins with French colonists who crossed the Atlantic in the early 1600s to settle a wilderness they called Acadia — and it continues today in a diaspora stretching from Atlantic Canada to Louisiana to France. The Girouard family is part of this story from the very beginning.
Origins in France
Most Acadians came from western France — the provinces of Poitou, Saintonge, and Aunis along the Atlantic coast. In the early seventeenth century these were farming communities, and the people who left for the New World brought their knowledge of salt-marsh agriculture with them. That knowledge would define Acadian civilization for generations.
The name Girouard is French, meaning weathervane (girouette), and the family appears in records from the western provinces before emigration. François Girouard arrived in Acadia around 1650 — likely from Poitou — and married Jeanne Aucoin. They settled in Port Royal, the heart of French Acadia, in what is today Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. They are the founding couple from whom all Girouards of Acadian descent trace their line.
Settlement of Acadia
The French had established a presence in Acadia as early as 1604, when Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua de Mons founded a settlement at St. Croix Island (in present-day Maine), then moved across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal in 1605. These early colonies were fragile, but Port Royal survived, and by mid-century a permanent community was taking root.
The settlers who arrived between 1630 and 1680 — the founding generation — were a small, tight-knit group. Genealogical research has identified fewer than 100 founding families whose descendants would eventually number in the millions. The Girouards were among them, intermarrying with the Aucoin, Comeau, Melanson, Brun, and LeBlanc families and weaving the dense web of kinship that characterizes Acadian genealogy to this day.
By the 1670s Port Royal was the most established European settlement north of Boston, with cleared fields, a church, a mill, and a community of several hundred souls.
Acadian Life
What distinguished the Acadians was their mastery of the tidal marshes along the Bay of Fundy. Rather than clearing dense forest, they built an ingenious system of earthen dykes and wooden sluice gates — called aboiteaux — to reclaim the fertile salt marshes from the sea. A clapper valve in each sluice allowed fresh water to drain at low tide while blocking the return of saltwater. Over years, these reclaimed marshes became some of the most productive farmland in North America, without a tree stump to be found.
The Acadians grew wheat, rye, oats, peas, and flax; raised cattle, sheep, and hogs; and fished the rich waters of the Bay of Fundy and its tributaries. They lived in extended family compounds, often with several generations sharing adjacent farms. Over time they developed their own dialect — Acadian French — distinct from both Parisian French and the French of Quebec, preserving archaic forms alongside words borrowed from English and Mi’kmaq.
Their relations with the Mi’kmaq people, the original inhabitants of the region, were notably peaceful. Acadians intermarried with Mi’kmaq families, traded with them, and learned from their knowledge of the land and sea. Acadian society was organized around the Catholic parish church, with feasts, saints’ days, and communal labor shaping the rhythm of the year.
A Century of Conflict
Acadia occupied an unfortunate geography — between two empires. France and England contested the region repeatedly through the seventeenth century, and the colony changed hands several times. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 finally ceded mainland Acadia to Britain, leaving the Acadians as French Catholic subjects under a Protestant English Crown.
For forty years the Acadians navigated this situation with characteristic stubbornness. They refused to swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to Britain — they were willing to pledge neutrality, but not to bear arms against France. British governors accepted this for decades, finding the Acadians economically indispensable. The Acadians became known as the “French Neutrals.”
The balance shifted in the early 1750s as France and Britain moved toward what would become the Seven Years’ War. British officials in Nova Scotia, led by Lieutenant Governor Charles Lawrence, concluded that Acadian neutrality was no longer tolerable. Lawrence sought and received authorization from London to act.
The Deportation — Le Grand Dérangement
On September 5, 1755, the men and boys of Grand-Pré were summoned to the church and told they would be removed from their lands. Colonel John Winslow read the order aloud: their lands, livestock, and possessions were forfeit to the Crown, and they would be transported out of the colony. The sentence was imposed without trial, without appeal, and without warning.
Over the following years, British forces deported an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 Acadians — roughly three-quarters of the entire Acadian population — to destinations across the British Atlantic world: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and England. Many were loaded onto ships before the harvest, leaving their crops standing in the fields. Families were separated in the confusion. Ships were overcrowded; hundreds died of disease in transit or in the colonies where they arrived, unwanted and destitute.
Others escaped into the forests and swamps, sought refuge with the Mi’kmaq, or scattered into what is now New Brunswick and Quebec. Some eventually reached Louisiana, where their descendants became known as Cajuns. Others made it to France — a country most of them had never seen.
The Deportation is known in French as le Grand Dérangement. It was one of the largest forced migrations in North American history. Villages were burned. The dykes were abandoned, and the sea reclaimed the marshes. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II issued a Royal Proclamation acknowledging the Deportation and expressing deep regret for the suffering caused.
Return and Survival
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the Seven Years’ War and lifted the formal barriers to Acadian return. But the land was gone — British settlers had taken it. Returning Acadians found themselves in the margins: the rocky shores of New Brunswick, the forests of Prince Edward Island, the highlands of Cape Breton.
They rebuilt anyway. By the late eighteenth century, Acadian communities had re-established themselves along the Petitcodiac, Memramcook, and Miramichi rivers in New Brunswick, and in dispersed settlements across the Maritimes. The population that had been reduced to perhaps 2,500 survivors in British territory grew steadily over the following century.
Many Girouard descendants moved through Quebec during this period, appearing in church records at Wickham, Saint-Hyacinthe, and other Quebec parishes. In 1847, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, an epic poem about a young Acadian woman separated from her fiancé during the Deportation. The poem brought international attention to the Acadian story.
The Acadian Renaissance
In 1881, Acadians from across the diaspora gathered at Memramcook, New Brunswick, for the First Acadian National Convention. They adopted a national holiday — August 15, the Feast of the Assumption — a national flag (the French tricolor with a gold star of the Virgin Mary, adopted in 1884), and a national anthem, Ave Maris Stella. The Acadian Renaissance had formally begun.
Through the twentieth century, Acadian identity strengthened rather than faded. New Brunswick became Canada’s only officially bilingual province. Université de Moncton was founded in 1963, providing a French-language university in the heart of Acadian New Brunswick. Acadian literature, music, and film emerged as distinct cultural expressions recognized internationally.
The World Acadian Congress (Congrès mondial acadien), first held in New Brunswick in 1994, has gathered hundreds of thousands of people of Acadian descent every five years — in New Brunswick, Louisiana, Poitou-Charentes, Nova Scotia, and beyond. The 2024 congress returned to New Brunswick. These gatherings are among the largest genealogical and cultural reunions in the world.
Today an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 people identify as Acadian, with several million more of partial Acadian ancestry. The language, the culture, the aboiteaux — and the family names, including Girouard — endure.
The Girouard Family
François Girouard and Jeanne Aucoin are the root of the family tree on this site. Their children intermarried with other founding Acadian families, and within two generations the Girouard name was woven into the broader Acadian kinship network that genealogists now trace through thousands of connected records.
After the Deportation, Girouard descendants followed the same diverging paths as other Acadian families — into Louisiana, into Quebec, into the eastern United States, and eventually back to the Maritimes. One branch runs through Wickham, Quebec, and into Vermont. The family tree on this site traces over 14,000 individuals, most connected to the original Acadian founding generation.
Genealogical research has accelerated dramatically since the 1990s. FamilySearch has digitized millions of Quebec and Maritime parish records. The Drouin Institute registers are now searchable online. DNA testing has connected cousins who never knew they shared Acadian roots. The tree on this site will grow as those resources continue to expand.
Search the family tree → · Search all records → · Research resources →