Category: Acadian heritage

Many people know about Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard. That name is a proud part of Acadian history. If you’re familiar with Beausoleil, (English: Beautiful Sun), then, you know that Beyoncé is a direct descendant. I happen to share that distinction through my paternal grandmother.

Broussard is widely regarded as a hero and an important historical figure by both Acadians and Cajuns in Louisiana.

This story is about Catherine Richard, Beausoleil’s mother, (c1663 – after 1714). I’m working on a fun book which has to do with the Acadians, so, I’ve been thinking a lot about Catherine.

It is somewhat bittersweet because the content is for elementary-age school children. Naturally, the tone of the book will be appropriate for children. I considered putting the following thoughts here in this blog. Below are some facts I’ve collected from my genealogy work.

Born around 1663 in Port Royal, she came into a world where Acadia itself was unstable, contested, and vulnerable.

Catherine Richard’s life was not a neat genealogy line. It was a life lived under pressure, in fear, in grief, and in stubborn endurance.

Her parents, Michel Richard dit Sansoucy and Madeleine Blanchard, were among the early Acadian families trying to build a life on land that was never fully secure.

Catherine grew up in a place where survival meant farming, faith, family, and the constant awareness that history could break into your home at any moment.

By the time she was a teenager, Catherine had likely married François Broussard. She was still very young, probably about fifteen, when she began the life that would define her: wife, mother, mourner, survivor.

The records suggest that she and François had children almost immediately, and that some of those first babies died.

That kind of loss is easy to flatten into a line in a family tree, but in real life it meant a young mother burying infants before she had even learned how to fully live as an adult. It meant grief so early that it became part of the architecture of her life.

Then came the larger violence of history. In 1690, English forces attacked Port Royal.

Catherine would have seen the ships on the river, the cannons, the panic, the helplessness. The town was plundered. Homes were burned. Livestock was killed. The church was desecrated. The place where her children were baptized and where her dead were buried became a target. And this was not the only attack. More raids followed.

The family’s life in Port Royal became increasingly impossible, and like many Acadians, they moved upriver to Beausoleil, seeking safety, land, and some measure of peace.

But peace was always temporary. Catherine’s family was large, and the records show both growth and loss. She had children who survived into adulthood and children who vanished from the record, likely buried in unmarked graves.

She lost her mother, probably around the time she was still a young woman herself. She lost her father later. She likely lost siblings, children, neighbors, and the sense that the world could be trusted.

Catherine’s life was marked by repeated bereavement: babies, parents, perhaps even a child or two in the years after 1690. Her suffering was not singular; it was cumulative.

Her sons Alexandre and Joseph Broussard became the most famous members of the family.

Joseph, known as Beausoleil, became one of the great Acadian resistance leaders. He and Alexandre did not simply endure the English conquest and deportation; they resisted it.

They fought, hid, escaped, regrouped, and kept going when surrender would have been easier. Their story is one of courage, but it is also one of relentless loss.

They lost homes, land, freedom, relatives, and eventually, in exile, many more family members to disease and hardship.

François Broussard and Catherine Richard made the move to the village of Beausoleil between the 1693 and the 1698 census.

In today’s language, they would rightly be framed as “freedom fighters”, but that freedom came at a devastating cost.

The Acadian Expulsion was not just a relocation. It was a tearing apart of a people. Families were separated. Children were taken. Homes were burned. Entire communities were erased.

The Broussards’ story shows the human scale of that catastrophe. Catherine’s sons became symbols of resistance, but they were also sons of a mother who had already lived through decades of fear and grief before the final catastrophe even arrived.

In 1698, according to census records, Françoise, age 45, and Catherine, age 35, have Madeleine, 18, Pierre, 15, Marie, 13, Catherine 7, Elisabeth 5, François, 3, and Claude, one-half.

They have 15 cattle, 20 sheep, 14 hogs, on 16 arpents of land, with two fruit trees. Additionally, they have two guns and a servant, so all things considered, they are doing very well.

Of Catherine’s 10 known children, meaning those who did not die as children, and for whom we have names, the oldest three disappeared from the records around the time of the Expulsion, three died in Port Royal, one is last found in Maryland, one died in Quebec, and two founded the Cajun community in Louisiana.

These latter two, Joseph Beausoleil and Alexandre, were born 2 years apart. Catherine had one more child after Alexandre. I happen to be a direct descendant of Joseph through my paternal grandmother. Catherine gave birth to anywhere between 10 to 19 children, according to records, and perhaps more.

Catherine herself likely died before the Expulsion, but her life was the foundation from which her children’s resistance grew.

She raised them in a world that taught them how to survive, how to endure, and perhaps how to refuse submission.

What makes Catherine’s story so powerful is that it is not only about famous ancestors. It is about the ordinary, brutal reality of Acadian life.

It is about a woman who buried children, watched her home burn, moved to survive, and kept raising a family in a land repeatedly threatened by war. It is about the quiet heroism of mothers whose names are often preserved only in censuses and parish registers, yet whose lives shaped entire peoples.

Catherine Richard was not a footnote to Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil. She was the root system beneath him.

And that is the deeper truth of the Acadian story. The famous names matter, but they were carried by mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children who lived through terror without the luxury of being remembered as legends.

Catherine’s life reminds us that history is not only made by battles and treaties.

It is made in kitchens, fields, graveyards, and burned-out homes.

It is made by women who keep going after loss, by families who rebuild after raids, and by people who refuse to disappear even when the world tries to erase them.