♂Germain Landry

Germain Landry was an Acadian settler of the Minas district of Nova Scotia, a son of René Landry le jeune. He was a brother of Abraham Landry (born 1678), the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), and a son of René Landry and Marie Bernard, his eighth great-grandparents. His son Germain Landry married Anne LeBlanc at Grand-Pré in 1729.

Early life and marriage

He was a son of René Landry and Marie Bernard of Port-Royal. No record names his parents outright; the connection rests on the censuses, which follow the family closely. In 1698 the census listed him, aged twenty-five, with his wife Marie Mellanson, also twenty-five, in the household entered directly after his widowed mother’s. In 1700 the widowed Marie Bernard, aged fifty-five, had Germain, twenty-six, living with her, together with his brothers Abraham and Pierre. In 1707 the three brothers and their mother were listed one after another at Les Mines^W, and in 1714 the three brothers headed neighboring households on the river of Pigiguit^W. The brothers also stood as witnesses at the weddings of one another’s sons at Grand-Pré, in 1726 and 1729.

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Germain was born about 1674 and married Marie Melanson, a daughter of Pierre Melanson dit La Verdure and Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, at Port-Royal about 1694. The couple settled at Minas, where they raised eleven children, including six sons who married into the Blanchard, Babin, LeBlanc and Bourg families, and three daughters who married into the Babin and Comeau families.

By 4 July 1729, when their son Germain married Anne LeBlanc at Grand-Pré, the parish register records the couple as living “of the parish of la Ste Famille” — Pigiguit, within the wider Minas district.

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, in 1714, with permission from the French king, he was one of the Acadians who went with Father Gaulin to look over land on Île Royale^W — an option some Acadians weighed after the 1713 Peace of Utrecht^W put peninsular Nova Scotia under British rule while Île Royale, today Cape Breton, remained French — though he remained at Minas.

Notes

The couple’s son, also named Germain Landry, married Anne LeBlanc at Grand-Pré in 1729. Their daughter Marie Josephe, baptized in 1730, was once carried in this line as an ancestor, as the wife of Joseph Braux. The wife of Joseph Braux was buried at Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, in 1807 as a widow aged 70, which gives a birth about 1737, so the 1730 baptism is another girl’s and this couple’s descendants are no longer counted as ancestors. A second Marie Josephe Landry was born at Grand-Pré in 1737 to a different Germain Landry and his wife Cécile Forest, but no record ties her to Joseph Braux. Germain Landry and Marie Melanson, treated here, should not be confused with that other, later Germain Landry and Cécile Forest.

The birth year, the Port-Royal marriage and the account of the 1714 Île Royale expedition rest on Cormier’s compilation rather than on a register that has been checked.