♂Alexandre Melancon

Alexandre Melancon (born about 1717 – died before September 1769) was an Acadian of the Minas district of Nova Scotia, deported to the British colony of Maryland in the expulsion of 1755 and resettled with his family on the Mississippi at Cabanocé, Louisiana, in 1766. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Charles Melancon (died 1818).

Acadia

Alexandre was born in Acadia, perhaps at Minas about 1717, and was most likely a son of Jean Melancon and Marguerite Dugas. About 1740, possibly at Minas, he is said to have married Marie-Josèphe Gautrot, daughter of Jean Gautrot and Anne LeBlanc. She is thought to have borne him four children before she died at Minas in March 1748. About a year later, still at Minas, the widower married Osite Hebert, a woman of about nineteen to his thirty-two. She is reckoned to have been a daughter of Jacques Hébert and Marguerite Landry.

Exile in Maryland

In the autumn of 1755 the British expelled the Acadians from Nova Scotia, and the family was shipped to Maryland, where two more sons seem to have been born. A French-language return of the Acadian refugees at Snow Hill, in Worcester County, dated 7 July 1763, lists Alexandre, “Osite Melanson son épouse”, and Jean, Madeleine, Jacques, Joseph, Étienne and Paul. Some of the six may have been children of his first wife.

Louisiana

Spanish Louisiana opened to the Maryland refugees in 1766, and Alexandre, then about forty-nine, brought his family to Cabanocé, on the Acadian Coast^W of the Mississippi above New Orleans, that year. His youngest child, Charles, was probably born there not long afterward, the only one of his children born in Louisiana; other accounts place Charles’s birth about 1764, in Maryland. Alexandre died before September 1769, most likely at Cabanocé; when Spanish officials counted the settlement in 1769, Osite was recorded there as his widow, with five sons and no husband in the household.

Notes

How his life is known

His Acadian birth is on record: at the marriage of his son Joseph at St. James on 24 May 1779 the parents are written “Alexandre & Osite Heber, Acadians”. The marriages of his sons Pierre Jacques (1773) and Charles (1790) also name him as father. The 1763 Snow Hill return states no relationships beyond “son épouse”, so it does not say whose children the six were. His parents, birth year and place, first marriage and the Louisiana chapter rest on compiled histories: Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians (1978), which gives 1716, and Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, cited there to the 1763 Maryland report and the Spanish Louisiana censuses. Osite’s parentage follows Stephen A. White’s dictionary of the Acadian families as corrected in 2011. None of this rests on an original register: the Grand-Pré register holds no baptism for Alexandre, and the family’s own records give no independent birth or death date for him.

His death

The compilations are not fully consistent about when he died. Arsenault says only that he was dead before 1769, when his widow held lot 122 on the east bank. Cormier’s entry for Alexandre places his death at Cabanocé before the census of 1769, but its entries for his sons describe Osite as already a widow when the family came to Louisiana in 1766.