The Founding French Acadian Pioneer We Descend From
All of the Bourgeois, Bushways,Bushwas,Bursways, and some Burgesses in North America are descended from Jeanne Trahan and Jaques-Jacob Bourgeois.
Jacques-Jacob Bourgeois arrived from France in Port Royal, Acadia (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia)in 1640 with 18 families and the the Sieur d'Aulnay. Jacques was a well educated man and had studied medicine in France. He was Sieur d'Aulnay's surgeon on the trip and afterwards in Acadia. But being a man of many talents, he soon began building ships, so essential to a primarily coastal community, and he set up a flourishing maritime trade with merchants in Boston, especially one named John Nelson. Because the French and English were enemies, such trade was illegal, but it flourished none-the-less. Jacques learned to speak English well, and among his many other occupations, he served as an interpreter in Acadian dealings with the English.
Jacques became the wealthiest Acadian, in what was generally a community of equals. Jacques and his family of seven girls and three sons and their spouses were the most prominent Acadian family, based not only on income, but for starting new enterprises valuable to the Acadian community, founding a whole new town, Beaubassin,now, I thinnk, Amherst, NS, and for their civic involvement in the affairs of their new country. Jacques also built a saw mill and the first flour mill in Acadia.
In 1672 he sold part of his Port Royal property and moved to Beaubassin, which was first called the Bourgeois Colony. With this enterprise he became the first person to promote settlement outside of Port Royal in Acadia. The new town was located at the top of the Bay of Fundy where New Brunswick and Nova Scotia connect. I went there in 1997, not knowing it had any relation to our family story, and thought the towns in that area were really lovely. Jacques brought his sons Germain and Charles, as well as some sons-in-law, and from scratch built an agricultural community that became a town. Germain's son Claude (very hard to find in the records and confused often with a different Claude Bourgeois) grew up there, and alas, was deported to Massachusetts with all his family but one son in about 1756 by the English in their ethnic cleansing of Acadia. This Germain was the progenitor,a few generations later,of the
part of the family that took the name Bushway in New England, through HIS son Joseph Hosea Bourgeois.
When Jacques was in his old age, he settled again in Port Royal, some ime before the census of 1699, and died there in 1701 in his eighties, having led a truly useful and remarkable life. Jacques' wife Jeanne Trahan lived at least another four years, as her name is there as Jacque's widow in the 1714 Acadian census.
Jacques never knew that all he had worked for would be taken over by the English or that another people would settle on the lands he and his sons had worked so hard to clear and build on. Nor did he dream that his own grandchildren would be killed, or scattered to the four winds, some dying of starvation and exposure trying to escape to Quebec, others exiled to far away lands.
Nevertheless, many of his descendants did survive all of that turmoil and abuse, and today are found in Quebec, New England, Louisiana, France and in fact in many parts of the world. The Bushway descendants seem to be mostly in Vermont, New Hampshire and Minnesota.
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Re: The Founding French Acadian Pioneer We Descend From
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