Acadian History

Acadian History This section of the web site is devoted to the history of the Acadian people. It explains how and why the French lived in this place and called it “Acadia”, it was the part of New France. How a group of less that 100 families, including Francois Girouard and his wife Jeanne Aucoin, took a chance and left France to inhabit this new land and call it home. This Colony of people managed to prosper even under strict English rule. I can thinking the how the Acadian people lived and in what kind of the houses, and what food they eat??? .

In 1755, everything changed.
The years between 1755 and 1762 was a tragic time for the Acadians and the Girouard Family. The British and French were feuding over the control of rights and land.
Until 1713, all the Acadian were asked to swear loyalty to the British. When they refused the British authority decided for enforce a deportation. It was a bad news for Acadian. Acadians lost all of their rights and lands and were forced to leave in the hold of overcrowded ships bound to a unknown place.

The story of the Acadian deportation is not pretty.
During the late summer and fall of that year, troops acting under the authority of colonial officials rounded up about seven thousand French-speaking, Catholic Acadians. They were crowded into the holds of transport ship and dispersed in small groups throughout the British North American colonies. Many families were separated, some never to meet again. Another eleven thousand Acadians escaped into the woods and spent years as homeless refugees. At least three thousand were captured and sent to France, while others took up arms in guerrilla
resistance.

* Why did this happen? What offense had the Acadians committed? They had refused to take an unconditional oath of allegiance, insisting on remaining neutral in the violent and destructive imperial warfare between the colonial empires of Great Britain and France. They were willing to swear loyalty to the British crown, they declared, but only with the inclusion of a condition: "that we will take up arms neither against his Britannic Majesty, nor against France, nor against any of their subjects or allies."

* British colonial authorities tactily agreed to those terms for nearly forty years, and the Acadians became known as "the neutral French." But in 1755, on the eve of what would prove to the climactic war with the French in North America, British authorities used Acadian neutrality as the pretext for their expulsion.
The deportation of the Acadians began in the fall of 1755 and lasted until 1778. The first removals, comprising about 7000 people, were from settlements around the Bay of Fundy. After the British captured Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean and raided the Gaspé and the Saint John River in 1758, further Acadians were captured and deported. Farms and businesses were destroyed. A British officer arriving at Annapolis Royal in October 1757 observed “ruined habitations, and extensive orchards well planted with apple and pear trees,bending under their weight of fruit .”

Acadians were shipped to many points around the Atlantic. Large numbers were deported to the continental colonies, others to France. Some managed to escape to New France (Quebec). A handful arrived in the Upper Saint John Valley. Many moved several times; a great number left the American colonies at the end of the war and returned to Nova Scotia; many of those in France moved to the French Caribbean or to Louisiana, where they formed the basis of the Cajun
population.

Those Acadians who returned to Nova Scotia in the 1780s and 1790s found their former settlements occupied by American settlers and Loyalists. As a result, the Acadians occupied new areas in western Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, the eastern shore of New Brunswick, and the Gaspé Peninsula. In these areas, they drew a living from farming, inshore fishing, lumbering, and shipbuilding

The National Historic Park at Grand-Pré remember the Acadian deportation. The statue represents the maid Evangeline, the hero of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem about the deportation published in 1847.

* Recently, the Queen of England acknowledged that this was a mistake. In order to remember this event 250th anniversary, the Canadian postal service distributes a commemorative stamp, in the postage stamp design ticket the ticket for Canada in 1930 the commemorative stamp which distributed for this event 175th anniversary, the design for the same year Arab League Cady Asia's gospel church. In this kind of ticket the ticket design mentality is the Canadian postal service postage stamp advisory commission's suggestion. This postage stamp by Pierre-Yves the Pelletier design, the face value is 0.50 Canadian dollar, the postage stamp specification for 39.65×48mm, edition 16, the perforation 13+ degree, print by Canadian India Paper money Factory, the quantity issued is 2,500,000.

* The British and Canadian government have now acknowledged their responsibility for the wrong done to the Acadians. The role of New Englanders as the perpetrators in this episode of ethnic cleansing suggests that Americans ought to reflect on the larger context of our national history.