♀Francoise Melancon

Francoise Melancon (27 February 1709 – before June 1777) was an Acadian woman born at Grand-Pré, in the last years of French rule over Acadia, who lived through the Acadian exile and reached Louisiana a widow. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Thomas Theriot (died before 1812).

Early life

She was born on 27 February 1709 and baptized the next day in the parish of Saint-Charles-des-Mines at Grand-Pré, the daughter of Pierre Melancon and Marie Blanchard. Her godfather was the French officer commanding at Les Mines, recorded as “Deteinville, lieutenant of a company of the naval detachment and commandant aux Mines”. The following year Port-Royal fell to British forces, and by 1713 the whole of peninsular Acadia had passed to the British crown.

Marriage and family

On 14 October 1725, at sixteen, she married Joseph Theriot, son of Pierre Theriot and Marie Bourg, at Grand-Pré, before six witnesses including several of her own Melanson and Blanchard relations. She signed the register with a mark.

By 1731 the couple were settled at Cobequid, at the head of the Minas Basin, where her son Estienne was born that June. Her son Thomas was born about 1745. A compiled online tree credits the couple with eleven children, born between 1726 and 1753.

About 1750 the family moved to Île Saint-Jean, now Prince Edward Island, where her son Paul was born and baptized on 6 October 1751. In the spring of 1752 the Sieur de la Roque’s census found her there, aged forty-four, with Joseph and seven children on the Rivière de l’Ouest, and her married daughter Françoise-Josèphe and son-in-law Charles Henry settled on the same lot.

Death

She reached Louisiana a widow: the census of the Acadian settlers at St. James, taken on 9 April 1766, lists “Francoise Melancon, widow Theriot, age 57” with her sons Thomas, Ambroise, Paul and Xavier, her age agreeing exactly with her baptism at Grand-Pré fifty-seven years earlier. Steven A. Cormier’s compilation of the Acadians of Louisiana has her arriving in 1765, from Halifax by way of Cap-Français, with the four sons, and says she stayed at St. James and did not remarry. She was dead by 2 June 1777, when the St. James register in Louisiana recorded the marriage of her son Ambroise and described both his parents as deceased. The census of 1769 lists her sons at St. James without her. A compiled online tree gives her death there on 14 September 1769, which would fit, but that date rests on that compilation alone.