♂Étienne Pellerin

Étienne Pellerin (about 1646 – 17 November 1722) was a settler and farmer of Port-Royal in Acadie and the father of a large family, four of whom married four children of Pierre Gaudet and Marie Blanchard. Between 1707 and 1716 two of his sons married two Gaudet daughters and two of his daughters married two Gaudet sons, so that the two households were joined four times over in a single generation. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Bernard Pellerin (born about 1691).

Life

Étienne is said to have been born in 1646 at Saint-Étienne-de-Bacilly, near Avranches in Normandy, and to have been a younger brother of François Pellerin, who had settled at Port-Royal by 1665. When he crossed to Acadie is uncertain. About 1675 he married Jeanne Savoie, the daughter of François Savoie and Catherine LeJeune, who was then about seventeen.

The census of 1686 found them at Port-Royal with five children, Madeleine, Marie, Pierre, Anne and Jean-Baptiste, and with eight cattle and twelve sheep. By 1698 the household held five younger children: Jeanne, Charles, Bernard, Alexandre and a second Charles. A last daughter, Marguerite, followed about 1699.

The Isle aux Cochons

About 1687 Étienne bought part of the Isle aux Cochons, a stretch of marshland at Port-Royal, from Jacob Bourgeois. The “island” lay at the mouth of the river, about a kilometre from the fort, and was cut off from the mainland only at high tide. With two neighbors he built aboiteaux^W on either side of the neck of land that joined it to the shore, so that the tide could no longer flood the marsh behind them. The three men spent more than eleven hundred livres on the work, and on the reclaimed ground Étienne grew hay and wheat.

In 1702 the new lieutenant governor, Jacques-François de Brouillan^W, arrived at Port-Royal and wanted the land for a farm of his own. Étienne would not sell. By the account of memoirs sent to the court in France, Brouillan forced him to sell it. He had Jacob Bourgeois’s son petition the judge to undo his father’s sale of fifteen years before, on the claim that old age had taken the father’s judgment, and under that pressure and Brouillan’s threats Étienne agreed to the price he was offered. Jeanne refused to sign the deed. Six months later Étienne was summoned either to pay for the works done on the land or to have his wife ratify the sale, on pain of the seizure of their furniture and cattle, and in the end Jeanne, pressed by her husband and her grown sons, consented. One memoir called him “ce malheureux Pèlerin”, that unfortunate Pellerin.

Later years

Between 1707 and 1716 six of his children married at Port-Royal, four of them into the Gaudet family: Madeleine to Pierre Gaudet in 1707, Bernard to Marguerite Gaudet in 1713, and early in 1716 Alexandre to Jeanne Gaudet and Marguerite to Bernard Gaudet. Port-Royal fell to the British in 1710^W and became Annapolis Royal, but the family stayed on. He was probably the man the census of 1714 entered simply as “le Vieux Pellerin”, the old Pellerin, living with his wife, two sons and a daughter.

Étienne Pellerin died on 17 November 1722 and was buried that day in the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Annapolis Royal; the priest gave his age as about eighty. When their son Charles married in 1725, the register marked Étienne as dead but not Jeanne, who was most likely still living.

Lines of descent

Both lines of descent run through his son Bernard Pellerin (born about 1691) and Bernard’s 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 Étienne and Jeanne.

Notes

Birth and origin

His birth about 1646 rests on his ages in Bona Arsenault’s extracts of the Port-Royal censuses in L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 107: forty in 1686) and in Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (vol. 2, pp. 186–187: forty in 1686, fifty-two in 1698); Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2, p. 710) gives 1646. The burial entry of 1722 calls him about eighty, which would put his birth nearer 1642. The birthplace Saint-Étienne-de-Bacilly comes from Lanctôt alone (vol. 2, p. 186); Frère J.-Hervé Belliveau’s dictionary of Acadian families (p. 44) says that the origins of the Pellerins are unknown. Arsenault and Lanctôt both make him a brother of François Pellerin, and Lanctôt makes François the elder, born in 1636.

Arrival and marriage

The sources disagree on when he came. L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 107) says he arrived about 1674; Lanctôt lists François and Étienne among the settlers of 1661–1664 (vol. 1, p. 11) and argues that they probably came on a ship of 1659 (vol. 2, p. 186), explaining his absence from the census of 1671 by the census-taker’s habit of leaving out single men who did not live with their parents. Arsenault dates the marriage about 1675, Lanctôt to 1675 at Port-Royal.

The children

The register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste names “Etienne Pellerin” and “Jeanne Savoye” as the parents in the marriage acts of six of the children: Madeleine to Pierre Godet, 17 January 1707; Jeanne to Pierre Suret, 4 February 1709; Jean-Baptiste to Marie Martin, 11 February 1710; Bernard to Marguerite Godet, 27 November 1713; Alexandre to Jeanne Godet, 13 January 1716; and Marguerite to Bernard Godet, 7 February 1716. The act of Charles’s marriage to Magdelaine Robichaux on 30 January 1725 gives him as twenty-seven and calls his father deceased. Arsenault (vol. 2, p. 710) lists ten children born between 1676 and 1696; Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 189–190) lists eleven, with two sons named Charles, born in 1690 and 1696, the elder not heard of after 1698.

The forced sale

Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 187–189) quotes an anonymous Mémoire important sur l’Acadie of 1702 in the archives of the French Marine, which he says was confirmed by a letter of 27 February 1703 and by a memoir of Mathieu Desgoutins, the lieutenant général of justice in Acadie, dated 29 November 1703. The 1702 memoir tells of the petition, the threats, the wife who would not sign and the summons, and names “ce malheureux Pèlerin”; Desgoutins gives the price as 500 livres, says the seller would part only with what he had bought from Bourgeois, and puts the cost of the dykes at more than eleven hundred livres for the three neighbors together. Arsenault (vol. 2, p. 710, note 102) also says that he had acquired the island from Bourgeois and was evicted from it by Brouillan, citing Desgoutins’s memoir. Lanctôt dates the purchase about 1687 in his second volume and 1685 in his first (vol. 1, p. 97); the 1702 memoir calls it an acquisition of about fifteen years.

The census of 1714 and his death

The census of 1714 gives no first names for this household; Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 189) identifies “le Vieux Pellerin et femme” as Étienne and Jeanne. The burial is in the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Annapolis Royal (RG 1, vol. 26, p. 364), entered by the priest Charlemagne Cuvier: “died 17 November 1722, about eighty years old”. Arsenault and Belliveau give the same date for the burial, and Lanctôt gives it as the date of death, at the age of seventy-six.