♀Henriette Pelletret

Henriette Pelletret (born about 1640; died before 1693) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of the mason Pierre Doucet and the mother of a large family. The census of 1671 counts her twice: in her husband’s household and, under her own surname, among the married children of René Landry and his wife Perrine Bourg. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through two of her daughters, Madeleine Doucet and Anne Doucet.

Marriage and family

She was most likely Perrine Bourg’s daughter by an earlier marriage, though the census never explains the name. She is thought to have married Pierre Doucet at Port-Royal in 1660, for their eldest child, Anne, was ten in 1671. That year Henriette was thirty-one and her husband, a mason, fifty, with five children at home: Anne, Toussaint, Jehan, Pierre and a daughter of three months, presumably Madeleine.

By 1678 the household held five sons and two daughters, and in 1686, aged forty, she was still in it. The compilers give the couple ten or eleven children, born between about 1661 and 1685.

Death

She died between the censuses of 1686 and 1693, when Pierre Doucet was entered as a widower. When their youngest son, Mathieu, married at Port-Royal on 15 June 1712, the register named her as his mother, by then deceased.

Lines of descent

Two of the couple’s daughters, Madeleine Doucet (died 1740) and Anne Doucet (born about 1661), each carry a line from the parents down to Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014). Both lines come to him on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990), Floyd’s mother.

The line through Madeleine runs through her daughter Marie Bernard (born 1693), and so down the mother’s side to Ida Serrette. The line through Anne runs, probably, through her son Joseph Hébert and on to the same Ida Serrette.

The two lines meet again in Céleste Dupuis (born 1801), whose parents, Pierre Dupuis (died 1833) and Rosalie Theriot (born 1778), both descend from the couple. That marriage is where the Madeleine line and the Anne line come together, so the same family reaches Floyd by two routes.

Notes

Age and name

Her ages, thirty-one and thirty in the two entries of 1671 and forty in 1686, put her birth about 1640. Lanctôt has her born at Port-Royal in 1640, Arsenault gives 1641, and Lanctôt reads the 1686 age as an understatement for forty-six. The surname is written Peltret in her husband’s 1671 entry, Pelletrot in the Landry entry as read on the census film, and Pelletret in the transcriptions of 1678 and 1686.

Marriage and children

The year 1660 is the reckoning of the compiled genealogies of Bona Arsenault and Léopold Lanctôt. The census of 1686 lists nine children at home, among them Magdelaine, sixteen, the daughter of three months in 1671; a published transcription leaves out four of the nine, Madeleine among them. Arsenault, Lanctôt and Steven A. Cormier also make Madeleine Doucet the couple’s daughter.

Death

No record of her death or burial has been found; the parish registers of Port-Royal survive only from 1702. Lanctôt places her death about 1692. Mathieu’s marriage is known from indexes of the register.

Family of origin

The census of 1671 gives René Landry, a farmer, and Perrine Bourg seven children, four married: Henriette Pelletret, thirty, then Jeanne, twenty-eight, and two daughters named Marie. Hers is the only surname given. Arsenault and Lanctôt make her Perrine’s daughter by an earlier marriage; Lanctôt names the first husband Simon Pelletret, dead by his account in 1644, and makes Jeanne, later the wife of Barnabé Martin, her sister. No record of that marriage has been found.

The Anne line

The compiled genealogies of Arsenault and Cormier both make Joseph Hébert the son of Anne Doucet, though they date his birth to 1685 or 1686. No act names the Beaubassin Joseph Hébert’s parents, so that link is probable, not proved.