Research Guide

Le Grand Dérangement: Where the Families Went, and Which Records Follow Them

By François · Racines Genealogy · Published September 3, 2026

Acadian genealogy is, in one respect, unusually well served. The founding population was small and closely related, it has been worked on for generations, and the compilations are remarkable. Between the Acadian societies, the published family reconstructions and the Drouin microfilms, which cover historic New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Gaspé alongside Québec, a determined amateur can get back to a couple at Port-Royal or Grand-Pré without ever leaving the sofa.

Then comes 1755, and the ground moves. Not because the records stop, but because the family stops being in one place. A single household can leave traces in a Massachusetts town, an English port, a French parish and a Louisiana census, in four archival systems and two languages, under four spellings of the same name. And behind all of it sits the older question that the deportation buried: which village in France did they come from in the first place.

This is a guide to that dispersal: how many were actually deported, which numbers we can trust and which we cannot, where the families were sent, and what kind of paper each destination generated.

How many were deported, and why nobody can give you one number

Ask three reputable sources and you will get three answers.

Parks Canada, writing about the Beauséjour region, puts it at between six and seven thousand Acadians removed from their homeland, with the deportations running from October 1755 until 1762, and a further two thousand who escaped to Canada, to Île Saint-Jean, or into the woods along the Miramichi. The Canadian Encyclopedia states that between 1755 and 1763, approximately ten thousand Acadians were deported. You will also find substantially higher figures in circulation.

The gap is not carelessness. It is a question of what is being counted. The first Nova Scotia expulsion alone, or the whole series through the early 1760s, which includes Île Saint-Jean and Île Royale. Those actually put on ships, or those who fled ahead of the soldiers. Each person once, or each person again at every subsequent removal, because many were deported more than once. Change the definition and you change the number by thousands without anyone being wrong.

The one deportation we can almost count: Île Saint-Jean, 1758

Île Saint-Jean is today's Prince Edward Island. After Louisbourg fell in 1758, the island's Acadian population was deported to France, and Parks Canada calls it one of the largest and the deadliest of the deportations between 1755 and 1762: more than three thousand inhabitants forcibly transported, over half of whom died of shipwreck or disease. About eleven hundred escaped, by hiding on the island or reaching nearby French territory. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the same event as some 3,100 deported with an estimated 1,649 dead, a fatality rate of 53 per cent.

What makes this episode different is that the figures can be followed back to paper. In his study of the deportation in the journal Acadiensis, Earle Lockerby quotes the British returns directly: “By the Returns I have recd from the Island of St. Johns, Two Thousand four hundred & fifteen persons were Embark’d for France”, to which are added the 692 taken to Louisbourg in September. Those two figures are where the round number of 3,100 comes from.

The deaths are harder, and Lockerby's own material shows why. Of five transports that reached Saint-Malo, he records that they “embarked a total of 1003 passengers of whom 335 died at sea”. For the two worst losses he gives 360 perished on the Duke William and 400 on the Violet, while noting that a contemporary witness, the abbé Girard, put the figure at 300. Roughly 190 were lost on the Ruby. Add such numbers up and you approach 1,649, but the total is an estimate assembled from accounts that disagreed with each other at the time.

Where the families were sent

The dispersal had three broad directions, and each one produced a different kind of record.

The British colonies, from Massachusetts to Georgia

Much of the 1755 deportation was landed along the American seaboard, in colonies that had not asked for them and did not want them. The Commonwealth Museum, the museum of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, states that some two thousand found themselves bound for Massachusetts, where “these Acadian families were distributed among many Massachusetts towns, where they were forced to rely on local residents for basic support”, and that in 1763 many Acadians began to petition the Massachusetts General Court.

That last detail is the useful one. Dependence on a town meant the town wrote things down, and petitioning a colonial legislature meant naming yourself, your family and where you were. Colonial and provincial administration is where exiled Acadians reappear by name.

France

The Île Saint-Jean deportees, and later others, were shipped to French Atlantic ports, where they arrived destitute and became the responsibility of a state that did not know what to do with them. Some spent a generation in France before crossing again. For a researcher this direction matters, because France recorded them twice over: in the ordinary parish registers of the places they were parked in, and in the administrative paperwork of a population being fed at public expense.

Louisiana

The exiles who eventually reached Louisiana did not arrive there by deportation. They came in stages, over twenty years, by their own effort and with Spanish encouragement. The historian Shane K. Bernard, writing for 64 Parishes, the encyclopedia of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, puts the total at about three thousand Acadian exiles who eventually made their way to Louisiana, arriving from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and France among other places.

The largest single movement came at the very end, in 1785, when seven merchant vessels carried Acadians who had been stranded in France across to New Orleans. The Acadian Memorial's compilation of the 1785 arrivals counts 1,596 passengers across those seven ships. For a Cajun family it is often the first crossing that can be pinned to a named vessel and a date.

What the dispersal means for your research

Three practical consequences follow, and they are what make this period hard in a way that ordinary genealogy is not.

• One family, several archival systems. The same household may appear in a British colonial record, a French parish register and a Spanish colonial list within twenty years. No single database holds all three, and no search engine will join them for you. They are joined by names, ages and family composition, patiently compared.
• The name changes at every border. A French name written by an English town clerk, then by a French curé, then by a Spanish administrator, comes out three different ways. Search phonetically, and never let a spelling talk you out of a match that the family structure supports.
• The deportation is not the origin. This is the part most often forgotten. Tracing a family through the exile answers where they went. It does not answer where they came from, which is a French parish, usually in the west of France, and which needs the French registers on the other side. That is a separate crossing, and it is the one I do.

Common questions

How many Acadians were deported?

There is no single agreed figure. Parks Canada gives six to seven thousand removed between October 1755 and 1762, plus about two thousand who fled. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives approximately ten thousand deported between 1755 and 1763. The difference depends on whether you count only the first Nova Scotia expulsion or the whole series, whether you include those who escaped, and whether you count people once or at each removal.

Were the Acadians deported directly to Louisiana?

No. Louisiana was a destination they reached later and largely by their own effort, in stages between 1764 and 1785, coming from the British colonies and from France rather than straight from Acadia.

Do records survive from the exile years?

Yes, and more than people expect, because exiled families were administered: supported by towns, fed at public expense, listed on transports, and required to petition for what they needed. British embarkation returns, colonial provincial records, French parish registers and Spanish colonial lists all name Acadians during the dispersal.

Can I find the French village my Acadian family came from?

Sometimes, and it is a different search from the exile itself. The Acadian founding families came largely from the Atlantic side of France, which narrows the ground considerably, but many lines have no documented French parish and some never will. Honest research says which is which.

Sources and figures. The deportation totals are quoted as a range because the sources genuinely differ: six to seven thousand removed and about two thousand escaped come from Parks Canada, approximately ten thousand from The Canadian Encyclopedia. The Île Saint-Jean figures come from Parks Canada's account of that deportation, from the Canadian Encyclopedia, and above all from Earle Lockerby, “The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St.-Jean, 1758”, in Acadiensis, which quotes the British embarkation returns directly; the death toll of 1,649 is an estimate, and Lockerby shows that contemporaries disagreed ship by ship. The two institutional accounts of that episode agree closely, but they are not necessarily independent of the same underlying scholarship. The Massachusetts material is from the Commonwealth Museum of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Louisiana total is Shane K. Bernard's, in 64 Parishes. The count of 1,596 passengers on the seven ships of 1785 is the Acadian Memorial's compilation; that wave-by-wave breakdown traces back to a single compilation rather than to independent sources, and is given here on that basis. The Drouin collection's coverage of Acadia is as described by FamilySearch.

François is a French-born genealogist living in the United States. He traced his own family's history, and its old stone mill, back to the 1500s through the French archives, and now helps American and Canadian families do the same. Continue with Cajun and Acadian roots back to France · the three crossings, from Louisiana back to Acadia and to France · which French provinces the Acadians actually came from · how to find the French village your ancestor came from · French-Canadian ancestry back to France, if the line turns out to run through Québec · how to find your French grandparents, if part of the family left France within living memory. To see the whole method applied to one real family, read one real family, traced from New Jersey to two Alsatian villages, then the full report, with every source cited.