Surnames of Bay St George

The First Acadian Mi'kmaq Benoit's, three brothers named Luc, Georges, Paul ( along with the widow of the fourth brother, Isaac) came from Arichat, Cape Breton . The first three brothers had married three sisters, Elisabeth, Victoire and Seraphic LeBlanc of Margaree. Isaac's descendants settled in the Codroy Valley where, according to Stephen White, his descendants spoke English and Gaelic. Descendants of Paul went to the Bay d'Espoir area, while Luc and Georges remained in the vicinity of St. George's Bay, where the brothers had first settled in 1850. Their descendants spoke French until the third generation, when the males began taking english speaking wives; their children tended to be mostly anglophone.

Stride takes up Brosnan's 1948 account. Brosnan relates the story of Henry L'Official who, having left Quebec with his Mi'kmaq wife, was shipwrecked off Newfoundland, eventually settling at Sandy Point, Bay St. George, where his daughter "formed an alliance with a Frenchman born on the passage from France, this man's name was Benoit." Of L'Official's three children, Marie, Anne and Georges, Stride notes that Marie married Jean-Rene Camus of St. Pierre in 1792. and Anne married Francois Benoit at Sandy Point in 1790. Stride then refers to an Augustin Benoit, deported with his parents Claude Benoit and Anne Comeau from Ile-Royale to France in 1758. At the same time, Pierre and Marguerite Guerin, and their daughter Francoise, also deported from Ile Royale, were linked by marriage at St-Servan-sur-Mer, near St-Malo, with the union of Augustin Benoit and Francoise Terriot in 1760. Together with their children, Sebastien (b. St-Servan, 1760), Francois (1764), Adelaide (1765), and Anne (1767), these last three all born in the Falkland Islands, they returned to St-Servan, where Louis was born in 1769 and Anne-Marie in 1773, and thence to St. Pierre, which the growing Family may have reached as early as 1776. Adelaide was married in St. Pierre in 1787. by which time both Augustin and Francoise had died.

It is the son Francois Benoit, born in the Falkland Islands, who married a Mi'kmaq Anne L'Official in 1790, at Sandy Point. He is widely considered to be the father of all Mi'kmaq Benoit's in Newfoundland. Their marriage was "rehabilitated" at St. Pierre in 1791 in the presence of Georges L'Official, Anne's brother, and Magdaleine Terriot, a maternal aunt. In the autumn of 1799, together with Jean-Rene Camus and Georges and Marie L'Official, Francois Benoit journeyed to Quebec City where Jean and Marie's marriage was blessed; Jacques, Jeanne and Elisabeth Camus were baptized, as were Marie-Magdaleine (b. 1795) and Georges (b. 1798) Benoit. The Benoit family took root in the Bay St. George region. Butler (33), drawing on Fr. Belanger's records, notes that a Benoit from "Canada" settled in St. George's in 1788. It may be the Francois Benoit born in the Falkland Islands. In 1839, however, three families of Bennetts are noted at Sandy Point: a Brzou (?) Bennett with a family of three, a native of Cape Breton; a John Bennett, one in his family, also born in Cape Breton; and a Francis Bennett, a native of Canada, aged 80, established at Sandy Point for 50 years- i.e. since about 1789 or 1790. He is certainly the Canadian who married Anne L'Officiall in 1790 at Sandy Point. An annotation says that Francis Bennett was an English subject, but of French descent.

That branches of the BENOIT family were well established in the area by the middle of the nineteenth century is attested to by documents published by the Newfoundland and Labrador Genealogical Society. The Society's Newsletter of the Summer, 1987 (Vol. 3, No. 3) contains (pp. 15-17) in an article by Provincial Archivist David Davis entitled "A Document from St. George's Bay, 1858," an appendix from the Journal of the House of Assembly. It was an appeal for relief for the distressed people of Bay St. George addressed to the Governor, Sir Alexander Banerman, by Henry H. Forrest, a merchant of St. George's. It concludes with the names of destitute families and the number of children in each. Seventy-nine families are named, including a John BENOIT, an Oliver BENOIT, a George BENOIT Sr., a George BEN01T Jr., a Louis BENOlT Sr., and a Louis BEN0IT Jr. Between these six heads of households they had forty mouths to feed. According to Ommer (226) there were as many as five families of BENOIT in the Codroy Valley in the period 1845-1870.

In 1871, fishermen of Bay St. George petition the Governor of St. Pierre & Miquelon. The petition, with a list of 123 petitioners, is provided in translation in an article by Stride (1988). In the petition we find twelve BENOITs listed, including Edouard, Francois, George, Honore, James, Jean, Jean pere, John, Magloire, Maxime, Michel and Paul. We note how the first names are in a majority French, with English names occurring George for Georges, James for Jacques, John for Jean. But none as yet have apparently changed BENOIT to BENNETT.

Benoit, like its English equivalent BENNETT, is a very widespread name in their respective countries, deriving from the medieval BENEDICTUS, 'blessed.' It is listed in Le Menn as the 367th most common surname in Brittany, but the 100th overall in France. One must assume that the vast majority of BENNETTs in the area were originally BENOITs, the name, like so many others in the region being anglicized over time.

The northwest coast BENNETTs or BENOITs presumably descend from a branch related to that which settled in the Bay St. George area in the early decades of the 19th century. According to Hutchings and Buehler (25), Charles, Moses, John and Henry (Harry) benoit came to Cow Head from Bay St. George, Charles and John BENNETT being listed in 1871 by Lovell. A Sebastian benoit may have come from Arichat, Cape Breton Island. Charles BENOIT, a Mi;kmaq settled at St. Paul's in the 1850s, and alter marrying Rebecca HUTCHINGS, a daughter of Elias GIFFORD, an Englishman who was the first settler at St. Paul's, became the progenitor of all the BENOITs, or BENNETTs as they now are, at St. Paul's.

On the south coast, six instances of BENOIT, and eleven of BENOITE are recorded al Burgeo. BENOITE may be an anglicized spelling of an already anglicized family, an alternative to the outright anglicization of the name as bennett, also found in some south coast, communities; bul the form bunoite is also known in France, as a malronymic version of the name. Following two and a half columns of BENNETTs in St. John's, there are 13 BENOlTs listed, twelve in St. John's, one in Upper Gullies. Two BENOITs occur at Maryslown, one each at Shoal Harbour, Applelon. Lewisporle and Seldom. Amongst a dozen BENNETTs in the Placentia area, there was a single BENOIT at Little Barasway. There were three instances at Labrador City-Wabush.

A final mention should be made of the BENOITs of Conne River and St. Alban's. with respectively 31 and 17 occurrences. We may assume that the majority of these BENOlTs are Micmacs, who, following the custom noted by Scary, sometimes adopted the surname of Europeans with whom they worked as guides. It was noted' earlier that Paul BENOIT, one of four brothers coming to Newfoundland fron Arichat, Cape Brelon Island, moved to Bay d'Lspoir. According to Bob Cuff (corr.. Jan. 1997), Paul BENOIT apparently acted as a guide to the telegraph survey in the1850s, living with his family at White Bear Bay; he and members of his family were later telegraph linemen on the south coast, finally settling at Conne River, in documents Paul benoit is mentioned as being a Micmac Indian, though the reference may be to a "Jackytar" son of the same name. Jackylars, or Jacotars c French Jacquotard?) were the offspring of mixed French-Micmac marriages. It also means that the four original brothers, from Arichat, must themselves have been Mi'kmaq.

Sources:

French Family Names of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1999, by Gerald Thomas

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