Roger Casey : Short Biography

We have very little information about the origins of Roger, the ancestor of all the Acadian Caissie-Quessy-Roger. We do know that he was Irish. The censuses in Acadia give him four different years of birth namely 1646 which appears on the first census and 1648 which appears in two of the next four censsuses. He would have arrived in Acadia between 1657 and 1665.

The socio political context in Ireland at the time that Roger, a young boy, would have lived there was extremely difficult. In 1649, England was trying to reestablish its domination over the territory following the Irish revolution of 1641 which saw the massacre of many English settlers. There followed an era of terror for the Irish Catholics. There were massacres, women and children were captured and sold as slaves in the West Indies, and what little land the peasants had was taken away from them.

In a letter dated March 1755, Father Antoine Maillard describes Roger as an Irish Catholic who have arrived in Port Royal from New England where “ he had been indented servant and had obtained at length his discharge from his master, with permisssion to remain with the French Acadians for the freer exercise of his religion. ”