♂Bernard Pellerin

Bernard Pellerin (born about 1691) was an Acadian of Port-Royal whose marriage to Marguerite Gaudet in 1713 was one of four marriages between the children of Étienne Pellerin and Jeanne Savoie and the children of Pierre Gaudet and Marie Blanchard. Between 1707 and 1716 two Pellerin brothers and two Pellerin sisters married two Gaudet sisters and two Gaudet brothers, so that the two households were joined four times over in a single generation. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Marguerite Pellerin (born 1718).

Life

Bernard was probably born at Port-Royal about 1691, a son of Étienne Pellerin and Jeanne Savoie, and grew up there among a large family of brothers and sisters. Port-Royal fell to the British in 1710^W and became Annapolis Royal, but its Acadian families stayed on their farms along the river and kept their own parish.

On 27 November 1713, in that parish, Bernard Pellerin married Marguerite Gaudet, daughter of Pierre Gaudet and Marie Blanchard, before the priest Justinien Durand. His sister Madeleine had married Marguerite’s brother Pierre in 1707, and early in 1716 two more weddings followed: his brother Alexandre married her sister Jeanne on 13 January, and his sister Marguerite married her brother Bernard Gaudet on 7 February. When Bernard and Marguerite’s own daughter Marguerite was baptized in May 1718, her godmother was that sister, “Marguerite Pellerin wife of Bernard Godet”. Bernard and Marguerite had nine children baptized at Port-Royal between 1714 and 1730, five sons and four daughters.

Under British rule

In December 1729 Bernard was among the heads of family of the Annapolis River who swore the oath of allegiance to King George II, alongside men who were most likely his brothers and the Gaudet brothers who had married his sisters. On 11 November 1731 the inhabitants of the river answered an order from the lieutenant governor, Lawrence Armstrong^W, to have their lands surveyed: their lands were already bounded by their contracts, they wrote, and the country was so poor that most of them could not pay a surveyor’s fees. Bernard, who could not write, put his mark to the letter.

He stood witness at the weddings of four of his children: Marie-Madeleine’s to Jean-Baptiste Brun in 1737, Marguerite’s to Joseph Brun in July 1743, Paul’s to Anne Savoye in February 1748, and Agnès’s to Amant Thibodeaux of Pisiguit^W in October 1748. Earlier in 1743 he and Marguerite had been godparents to their granddaughter Agnes Eulalie, the daughter of Joseph Brun and their daughter Marguerite, who had been baptized at home that February, months before her parents’ wedding. Their son Joseph died in May 1751, aged twenty-nine. Bernard’s last appearance in the register is at Agnès’s wedding in 1748; when and where he died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines of descent run through his daughter Marguerite Pellerin (born 1718), on Floyd’s mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). They meet again in Floyd’s grandmother, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), both descend from Bernard and Marguerite.

Notes

Birth and parents

The marriage act of 1713 names his parents as Etienne Pellerin and Jeanne Savoye. His birth about 1691 comes from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 711), a compiled genealogy; Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (vol. 2, p. 190) places it at Port-Royal. Arsenault’s extracts of the censuses in L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 107) give Bernard aged seven in his father’s household in 1698, which agrees, but aged twenty-eight in 1714, which would put his birth about 1686.

The four marriages

All four acts are in the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Annapolis Royal, and each names the same two sets of parents: Pierre Godet and Magdelaine Pellerin, 17 January 1707; Bernard Pellerin and Marguerite Godet, 27 November 1713; Alexandre Pellerin and Jeanne Godet, 13 January 1716; Bernard Godet and Marguerite Pellerin, 7 February 1716. Lanctôt dates the last to 17 January 1716 and calls Alexandre’s bride Marie; the register’s date and name are used here.

The oath and the letter of 1731

The lists of the December 1729 oath and of the 1731 letter to Armstrong are printed in Placide Gaudet’s Acadian Genealogy and Notes (Report concerning Canadian Archives for 1905, vol. 2, pp. 74 and 76). The letter’s signatures include “Marq. de + Bernard Pellerin”. Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 191) identifies the Pellerins and Gaudets on these lists as Bernard’s brothers and brothers-in-law.

Later years

The marriage act of 1737 names “Bernard Pelerin father of the bride” among the witnesses; the acts of 1743 and 1748 name a witness Bernard Pelerin without saying how he was related. The act of Grégoire’s marriage to Cécile Prejean on 10 January 1752 marks the bride’s mother as dead but says nothing of the kind of Bernard or Marguerite, which suggests they were both still living then.

Names

The register spells his wife’s surname Godet, and later spells his own Pelerin; Arsenault’s extract of the 1714 census calls her Marguerite Godin.