In the hush of a Yarmouth County dawn, amid gull cries and the rhythm of lapping tides, a girl was born into the revival of a people. Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont came into the world around 1777, in the Acadian hamlet of Argyle, Nova Scotia. The air there smelled of brine and pine, of freshly hewn timber and prayer. Hers was not just a birth into a family—it was a birth into a resurrection. The Mius d’Entremonts had returned to rebuild what had been shattered.

She was the daughter of Charles Amand Mius d’Entremont, descendant of Acadian nobility, and Marie Josephte Molaison, whose lineage also traced the long arc of exile and return. Only a generation before, their ancestors had been torn from this land in Le Grand Dérangement, deported by British order in 1755. Men were shackled and shipped away. Women clutched infants to their breasts and cried out in French to a God whose name echoed across the Atlantic. Yet somehow, the Mius d’Entremonts came back—scarred, yes, but unbroken.

By the time Marie-Marguerite toddled across the packed earth floors of her family’s modest home, the Mius name still carried weight in Argyle. Her grandfather, Jacques Mius d’Entremont, had once held the title of Baron, and though the titles were now gone, the honor remained.

She was raised between hymn and hardship. The wooden chapel at Eel Brook stood as a center of both faith and memory, where Acadian Masses were whispered in candlelight and the Latin liturgy laced with salt-teared remembrance. Women knelt in long homespun skirts, mouthing rosaries while their sons fished herring from the frigid Gulf. Marie-Marguerite learned early that life was a covenant: between earth and God, between family and survival.

There was no opulence in her world—only dignity in repetition. Each day might begin with coals rekindled from the night before, a pot of coarse-ground cornmeal simmering in water fetched before sunrise. She likely shared a sleeping loft with siblings or cousins, curled under woolen blankets sewn from scraps and stories. They spoke French with defiance—la langue de nos mères—while the King’s English crept along the shorelines.

It is not hard to imagine her, perhaps age ten, standing barefoot near the water’s edge, watching the older men mend nets and carve longboats. Her hair wind-tangled, her skirt stiff with salt. Or sitting at her mother’s side during Lent, carefully threading a blue bead onto a rosary. She would have understood even then that she came from a people who had loved this land so deeply that they chose to return even after being banished from it.

That love—fierce, quiet, ancestral—shaped her. It filled her heart with a steadiness she would call upon in years to come, when love would call her across lines others feared to cross.

Chapter 2: A Marriage That Shook the Shore

It was the summer of 1800, and the small wooden chapel at Eel Brook stood quiet but electric. The bell did not toll. The priest's cassock was freshly pressed, the crucifix gleamed above the altar, and a hush fell over the pews like fog off the Gulf.

They came quietly, some barefoot, others in worn boots, their Acadian eyes lowered but alert. Word had spread: Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont—daughter of Charles Amand, granddaughter of nobility—was to be married. But it was not the union itself that stirred the coastal lanes of Argyle. It was the man she would marry.

Anselme Hatfield, baptized Catholic, a Black man.

To some in the community, it must have felt like the sea turning inside out.

They met, perhaps, not far from the chapel itself. He may have arrived with his family to labor along the coast, or as a free man of color moving between towns. By this time, Nova Scotia had become a complex mosaic—Acadians returned from exile, New England Planters, Loyalists, former Black Loyalists who had been promised land after the American Revolution but often received little. Some were free; others had to fight to be seen as such.

Anselme was one of them—a Black man baptized in the Church, a man of spiritual discipline and quiet defiance. He had dignity in his gait, perhaps a slight accent shaped by ancestors who had spoken Wolof or Ewe or French, before being dragged across an ocean. He, too, was descended from exile—just not the kind chronicled in French parish books.

Marie-Marguerite, twenty-three years old, stood with him at the altar. Not behind him. Not in secret. But beside him, before God.

The priest recorded their marriage in the St. Anne’s registry, a brief Latin note inked between more conventional unions:

"Anselme Hatfield, nègre baptisé, et Marie Marguerite Mius d’Entremont…"

The word nègre, while common in French Catholic records, was freighted even then. It labeled, othered, marked. And yet it was recorded. Their union was witnessed and sanctified.

We do not know who sat in those pews that day. Perhaps her family attended. Perhaps they wept. Perhaps they disapproved in silence, or gave their blessing in trembling hands. In the absence of photographs, we must imagine the moment as it might have felt:

Marie-Marguerite, in a modest white cotton gown, her hair braided and pinned, standing with hands clasped, chin high. Anselme beside her, in simple wool, maybe nervous, maybe resolute. The air inside the chapel thick with incense and judgment. Outside, the wind shifting over the Bay.

This was not just a wedding. It was an act of sacred rebellion.

There were no civil laws barring interracial marriage in Nova Scotia in 1800—but there were unwritten codes. Codes passed in whispers, in glances, in denied handshakes. Marie-Marguerite would have known that marrying Anselme meant exclusion from certain gatherings, the fraying of kinship ties, and perhaps a shadow upon her children’s futures.

But she married him anyway.

Some might have called her foolish. Others might have called her brave. History may yet call her both. But what no one can deny is that her decision, in that modest country chapel, redefined the boundaries of love and community. She trusted not in the customs of her neighbors, but in the embrace of her Church and the steadiness of her heart.

And Anselme—he who had likely seen the hardness of the world in full—found in her a harbor.

Together, they would go on to build a life that crossed racial lines, geographic boundaries, and generational expectations. And it all began on that summer day in Eel Brook, when two hands of different hues were joined in one prayer, one promise, one love.

Chapter 3: Across the Tides – Children, Community, and the War of 1812

The shoreline changed, but the rhythm remained.

After their marriage in 1800, Marie-Marguerite and Anselme Hatfield began a life that unfolded in motion—not unlike the tides that sculpted their coastal homeland. They lived first in New Edinburgh, later Weymouth Bridge, Digby, and ultimately Baie Ste-Marie. But no matter where they went, the wind spoke French and the roads were unpaved. Each new house smelled of woodsmoke and seawater, and each new town carried both the promise of acceptance and the risk of rejection.

They were a family that crossed lines—of race, of class, of expectation. But in a society shaped by hard land and harder winters, people often judged less by skin and more by survival. And survive they did.

By the year 1812, the Hatfields had at least five children and more on the way:

• Francois, the firstborn, quiet and observant
  
• Genevieve, named perhaps after an aunt or saint
  
• Samuel Anselme II, the son who would carry both names forward
  
• Marguerite Ann, born likely in Digby
  
• Charles, whose name echoed both Mius and Hatfield traditions
  

Eventually, the family would grow to eleven children, their names traced across parish books like footprints in the sand: Cyrille, Jean Baptiste, Pierre Joseph, Hilaire, Cecile, Pierre Archambault. Each child a testament to the life their parents were building—one rooted in devotion and defiance.

They moved often, not always by choice. Land was scarce, especially for those without the favor of the Crown. Black Loyalists—like Anselme’s possible kin—had been promised farms after the American Revolution, but what they received was often stony, remote, or denied entirely. Acadians, too, had their claims contested by waves of English-speaking settlers. So the Hatfields followed work, followed kin, followed hope.

Their life was intimately tied to the land and sea. Anselme may have worked as a laborer, fisherman, or shipwright’s assistant in the shipbuilding ports of Digby County. Marie-Marguerite, meanwhile, made a home wherever they landed—boiling clothes in lye water, planting beans beside the door, praying the rosary as the fire dimmed. She would have known how to cure fish, bind a child’s wound with yarrow, and press a dress from scraps of cotton or wool.

Each town brought new neighbors, new parish registers, new suspicions. There were surely those who refused to look them in the eye—a white woman with a Black man?—and others who offered kindness in quiet, unspoken ways. The Church remained their refuge. Whatever gossip followed them, the sacraments did not discriminate. The children were baptized, the family confessed and communed, their names inked in books that would outlast them.

Then came the War of 1812.

To Marie-Marguerite, it must have felt like déjà vu—a distant empire’s fight bleeding into the lives of humble folk. Nova Scotia braced for American invasion, its harbors militarized, its trade interrupted. Ships stopped coming. Salt prices soared. Fear blew inland on every cold Atlantic gust.

Some men enlisted in local militias. Others were conscripted to build forts or cut timber for British ships. If Anselme worked in a dockyard near Digby or Weymouth, the war would have strained his back and spirit. The Hatfields likely felt the pinch—rations thinning, supplies scarce, rumors thick. But they endured, as they always had.

There’s a moment we might imagine—a winter evening, the year 1813. The family has moved again, perhaps now in Baie Ste-Marie. A fire flickers in a stone hearth. Little Cecile is asleep in her mother’s lap. Samuel, now twelve, sharpens a bone fishhook by the light. Outside, a neighbor returns from town with news: the British have captured an American vessel near the Gulf. There will be no flour this week.

Anselme leans back in his chair, jaw tight. Marie-Marguerite places a calming hand on his arm. She has been through war before. Not with soldiers, but with silence. With stares. With all the things they said about her when she chose this man. And yet—her home is full. Her children are fed. Her love has endured.

The war would end in 1815. Life would continue. But the Hatfields would never stop moving—carrying their faith, their mixed heritage, and their legacy across the hills and bays of Nova Scotia.

Chapter 4: Ashes and Echoes – Death, Legacy, and What Remained

By the late 1820s, the shoreline had settled. The children were grown or nearly grown. The house at Baie Ste-Marie was filled less with wailing infants and more with voices—teenagers, young adults, arguing over chores or laughing at supper. Anselme, now older and likely weathered from decades of labor, rose early as he always had. But one morning, the rhythms of their shared life began to shift.

Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, matriarch of this unconventional, courageous family, passed away around 1829. No death certificate survives. No obituary was published. But her absence echoes.

She would have been just over fifty, perhaps fifty-two. Too young by modern standards, but already a woman who had witnessed the full arc of love, motherhood, war, displacement, and survival. Her body, likely tired from years of childbirth and the quiet weight of daily sacrifice, gave out in a small room near the sea.

We do not know the cause. Was it illness? Complications of childbirth? A winter fever that could not be broken? We only know that she died with much behind her—and much still to come through her children.

Her funeral, we can imagine, followed the old Acadian rites. The priest at Baie Ste-Marie may have swung a censer of incense above her casket. Her body perhaps dressed in her Sunday best—blue wool shawl, white bonnet, worn hands folded in prayer. Her children gathered beside her husband: Francois, Genevieve, Samuel II, Cecile, the others—all quieted by the loss of the woman who had bound them like thread to fabric.

And Anselme—left without the woman who had once stood beside him in defiance of the world’s rules. We do not know how long he lived after her. But we know he carried her name in memory, and that her blood continued through their sons and daughters.

Her body was likely buried in the Acadian cemetery near Église Sainte-Marie, among the white crosses and weathered stones of other settlers who had returned after exile. There may be no marker. Time and tide may have eroded any engraving. But her presence endures—not in stone, but in story and lineage.

Their eleven children went on to raise families of their own, weaving the Hatfield name into the roots of racially mixed Acadian communities across Nova Scotia and beyond. Some may have moved inland, some to New Brunswick or New England, but they carried with them the legacy of a love that had dared to break the boundaries of caste and color.

In a region where whiteness and Catholicism had long gone hand in hand, Marie-Marguerite became something quietly radical—a white Acadian woman who chose a Black man not for protection or survival, but for love. Her story, like so many women’s, does not appear in the official histories. But it is written in the DNA of descendants, whispered in oral histories, and found between the lines of parish registers that dared to name a nègre and a d’Entremont in the same breath.

She did not preach. She did not protest. But she lived her truth—and in doing so, redefined what was possible in a world still governed by separation.

Today, her descendants walk in both shadow and sunlight. Some bear her name. Others carry her strength without knowing its source. But every one of them is shaped by her choices—her courage, her faith, and her refusal to let the world define her love.