52 THEISLAND ACADIANS

he noted, were all hired to fish for the British. There were thirteen families at St. Peters, five in Rustico, ten in Tracadie, one family in Bay Fortune and ten in Malpeque’*.

A number of Acadian families must have settled on the Island between the census of 1768 and 1798. According to the enumerator, Robert Fox, there were 115 Acadian families or 675 individuals located in three communities: Malpeque, Rustico and Bay Fortune’. Their family names are common amongst the Acadian population living on the Island today.

Some of the families that returned after the expulsion had been among the first inhabitants of the colony in 1720. The main family names in this group were: Blanchard, DesRoches, Cheverie, Gallant, Arsenault and Martin. Other families had lived on the Island for several years as refugees during the period that preceded the deporta- tion of 1758; their names were Gauthier, Poirier, Chiasson, Doiron, Buote, Pitre and Bourque. Lastly, there is another group of family names that were not present on the Island before the deportation, but that appear in the census of 1798: Blaquiére, Pineau and LeBrun. However, these more recent arrivals can be linked to the early Acadian families by their wives.

The Acadian families who settled on St. John’s Island after the British Conquest had come from several places: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands and the Island of Miquelon. Some of them had even spent time in France following their deportation. To give a better idea of their wanderings let us look at four representative cases.

Jean-Baptiste Gallant was born in Port LaJoie in 1750. His grand- father, Michel Haché-Gallant, was one of the first Acadian settlers there. At the time of the deportation of 1758, Jean-Baptiste fled with his parents to the mainland. Records show that in 1760 they were in Ristigouche on the Gaspé Peninsula. Fifteen years later, at the age of twenty-five, Jean-Baptiste was on the Island of Miscou from whence he came to settle in Malpeque’®.

Jean-Baptiste Arsenault was born in Malpeque in 1750 where his father had been living since he had left Beaubassin in 1741. To avoid being deported, Jean-Baptiste and his parents moved to the Bay of Chaleur region. He married in Miscou in 1773 and later returned to his birthplace, Malpeque’.