♂Charles Melancon

Charles Melancon (died 21 December 1818) was an Acadian farmer of St. James Parish on the Mississippi and later of St. Martin Parish on Bayou Teche, Louisiana, who named a son Alexandre by each of his two wives. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Anaclet Melancon (1792–1827).

Early life

Charles was the youngest son of Alexandre Melancon and Osite Hebert, Acadians whom the British expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 and held in Maryland until Spanish Louisiana opened to them in 1766. The family settled at Cabanocé, on the Acadian Coast^W in what became St. James Parish, and Charles was probably born there early in 1768, the only one of the children born in Louisiana. When Spanish officials counted the settlement on 14 September 1769, his mother was already a widow, and Charles, seventeen months old, was the youngest of her five sons.

Marriage and family

On 25 January 1790, at the church of St. James, Charles married Marie Claire Braud, a daughter of Joseph Braux and Marie Josephe Landry, “of New England”. She had married once before, on 10 January 1785 at St. Gabriel, to Pierre Como, and their daughter Marie Constance Como was born on 23 October 1785. Louisiana was then a Spanish colony, and the register writes the couple as Carlos and Clara. Five children were born to them between December 1790 and January 1799, among them Anaclet, born on 27 August 1792 and baptized Alexandro Anacleto, that is, Alexandre Anaclet. Marie Claire was buried at St. James on 11 January 1802, aged 38.

On 31 August 1803, also at St. James, Charles married Scholastique Bourgeois, herself a widow. Their son Alexander, written Alexandre in the estate papers, was born on 11 November 1804, and Victorin and Marie Eliza are said to have followed by 1809. So the family had two living sons named Alexandre, twelve years apart; the elder went by his second name, Anaclet, and later compilations have often confused the two. The register calls the father Carlos up to 1802 and Charles from 1805: in 1803 Louisiana passed from Spain to France and then to the United States, and from then on the register gives the family’s names in French.

Bayou Teche

The family is thought to have still been at St. James in 1809. By 1818 Charles had moved west to the Pointe quarter of St. Martin Parish, most likely the later Grande Pointe, where he farmed five arpents^W of frontage on the left bank of Bayou Teche, still owing most of the land’s price to the estate of the widow Robichot. He died at his home at Grand Pointe on 21 December 1818, and was buried at Saint Martinville the next day. The burial entry calls him “Charles dit Migouin”, “native of Acadie”.

Succession

In the St. Martin Parish probate court, a family meeting on 4 February 1819 made Scholastique tutrix of her three young children and Anaclet their under-tutor; the heirs recited in the inventory and sale were the eight living children of both marriages. The inventory taken that day came to $11,272.80. It listed cattle, oxen and horses, a calash^W, a weaving loom and a grain mill, a desk, a silver watch and table linen, and seven enslaved people, who made up more than half the estate’s value: Figaro, Charles, Lindor, Sophie and her child Étienne, a boy of ten named Raimond, and a girl of thirteen named Éléonore.

The court kept Sophie and Étienne out of the public sale and adjudged them to the widow for $1,700. At the auction on 5 February, Anaclet bought Raimond, and Baptiste Semere, the husband of Charles’s daughter Marie, bought Éléonore; the three grown men went to other buyers. Another son, Eugene, bought his father’s cattle brand for $93, and the farm went to Dr. John Duhamel for $6,170.

Duhamel then challenged his own title because the family meeting that had ordered the sale was recorded in French. A second family meeting, held on 19 October 1820 at the house of Agricole Braud, unanimously recommended that the sale be confirmed. The court approved it the next day, closing the estate nearly twenty-two months after Charles’s death.

Notes

Birth

No baptism of his is known; his marriage record and the baptisms of two of his daughters name his parents. The 1769 census age points to a birth about April 1768, and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives March 1768, at Cabanocé in all likelihood. Other compiled accounts give about 1764, in Maryland, which the census age does not fit. The British list of the exiles at Snow Hill, Maryland, dated 7 July 1763, names his parents and six children, none of them Charles, unless the “jean” listed first was a boy baptized Jean Charles.

Marie Claire’s first marriage

The St. Gabriel register writes the bride as Claire, daughter of Joseph and Marie Landry, and records her marriage to Pierre Como, son of Alexis Como and Marguerite Babin, on 10 January 1785. The 1790 St. James marriage names the same parents, and it is the same woman. Their daughter, Marie Constance Como, was born on 23 October 1785 and baptized at St. Gabriel on 4 December that year, where the register writes her name as Maria Constancia. A different Marie Constance Como, a daughter of Jean Baptiste Como and Margueritte, was baptized at St. Gabriel on 24 April 1785 with Marie Claire as godmother, and was not her child.

Compiled dates

His death and burial come from an abstract of the St. Martinville burial register, which a compiled family history agrees with, and the 1819 succession confirms the death; the burial entry, recorded by Fr. Gabriel Isabey, gives his age as 54. The births of Victorin and Marie Eliza and the 1809 residence come from compiled family records.

Two register puzzles

The St. James burial register, as abstracted, also records an unnamed daughter of Carlos and Clara Braux, aged five weeks, buried on 29 March 1802, which would put her birth about six weeks after her mother’s burial: one of the two entries is misread or misrecorded. A Carlos Melanson “of this Parish” married a Francisca Arseno at St. James on 20 August 1787; that entry names no parents and cannot be tied to Charles, and the 1819 probate calls Marie Braux his first wife.