♂Jean Pitre

Jean Pitre (about 1636 – about 1689) was a taillandier, a maker of edge tools, at Port-Royal in Acadia, and in 1671 the only metalworker on the census of Port-Royal, which lists no blacksmith. In 1767 his grandson Claude Pitre, one of the Acadian exiles on Belle Île, off the coast of Brittany, declared that he was “flamand d’origine”, Flemish by origin; hardly any of the exiles’ declarations name the country a family came from. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Pitre (about 1683–1747).

Origins

His age of 35 at the census of 1671 places his birth about 1636. He is said to have reached Port-Royal around 1660, in the years of English rule that followed the capture of the settlement in 1654. His trade was the making and mending of edge tools, the axes, scythes, saws and plowshares on which a farming settlement depended.

Port-Royal

Jean Pitre and Marie Pesselet probably married about 1664. Marie was a daughter of Barbe Bajolet.

At the census of 1671 Jean, aged 35, and Marie, aged 26, had three children: Marie, aged 5, Catherine, 3, and Claude, nine months. They had one cow, no sheep and no plowland. Their neighbors on the roll were Pierre Comeau, a cooper of seventy-five, and his son Étienne Comeau, whose wife was Marie’s half-sister Marie Lefebvre. With no land of their own, the two younger couples most likely worked Pierre’s six arpents alongside him.

Jean and Marie had nine children, born between about 1666 and 1686. At the census of 1686 seven of them were still at home: Claude, Marc, Pierre, Jean, François, a daughter of two and a daughter born that month.

Death

Jean is said to have died about 1689. By the census of 1693 Marie had married François Robin, then aged 50, and the household held her sons Claude, Marc, Pierre and François and her daughters Marguerite and Jeanne. When Marie was buried at Port-Royal in December 1707, the register called her the widow of “feu Pitre”, the late Pitre, and of François Robin.

Notes

Birth and age

The 1671 roll, as Placide Gaudet printed it in 1905, enters him as “Tailliandier — Jehan Pitre aagé de 35 ans, sa femme Marie Peselet aagée de 26 ans”. The roll of 1686 gives “Jean Pitre 61”, out of line with the age of 1671; Bona Arsenault’s L’Acadie des ancêtres prints the same entry as 60. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives his birth as 1636 and adds the name “dit Beneque”.

Origin

The declaration of Claude Pitre, the son of Marc, was made at Sauzon on Belle Île on 28 February 1767 and is printed in Casgrain and Rameau’s Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique: “Marc Pitre né de Jean Pitre flamand d’origine et de Marie Pincelet de la ville de Paris”. The editors call it one of the very rare declarations that name a place of origin, and note that the name Pitre is a form of Peter. Arsenault also calls him “d’origine flamande” and gives his arrival in Acadia as about 1659. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes calls him “Hollandais”, lists him among the arrivals of 1661 to 1664, and on another page places him, as “Jan Pietr”, aboard the ship of Sir Thomas Temple that brought English, Scottish and Dutch settlers to Port-Royal in 1664. The historian John Mack Faragher, in A Great and Noble Scheme, writes that Marie Pesseley married “John Peters, a blacksmith from the Channel Islands”, and that he renounced Protestantism to marry her. These accounts cannot all be right, and no record of his birth or baptism is known.

His trade

The historian Naomi Griffiths, in From Migrant to Acadian, writes of the 1671 roll that “there was no blacksmith but one tool maker in metal, capable of producing and caring for saw, scythes, axes, and ploughshares”, and names him; on another page she calls him a gunsmith. The roll’s own word is “Tailliandier”.

The neighbors of 1671

The roll lists the households of Pierre Comeau, Jean Pitre and Étienne Comeau one after another. Lanctôt takes them to be immediate neighbors who were probably settled on Pierre Comeau’s land and farmed it together, “comme cela se pratiquait souvent en Acadie à cette époque”.

Marriage and children

Arsenault gives the marriage as “vers 1664”, and L’Acadie des ancêtres as about 1668; the eldest child was five in 1671. Arsenault lists nine children: Marie 1666, Catherine 1668, Claude 1670, Marc 1674, Pierre 1677, Jean 1680, François 1682, Marguerite 1684 and Jeanne 1686. The 1686 roll lists the household as “Jean Pitre 61 / Marie Peseler 45 / Enfans: Claude 16, Marc 12, Pierre 9, Jean 6, françois 4, une fille de 2, une fille de 0.1 mois”.

The date of his death

Arsenault writes “Il est décédé vers 1689”; no burial record for him is known. He was alive at the census of 1686, and the 1693 roll lists his widow as “Marie Pesseler sa f[em]me 48” in the household of “francois Robin 50”, with “Claude leurs fils 22 / Marc 18 / Pierre 13 / françois 11 / Marguerite 10 / Jeanne 7”; a later hand wrote “Pitre” in the margin. Casgrain and Rameau wrote that he was already dead in 1686, which the roll of that year contradicts. Marie’s burial of 27 December 1707 names her “veuve de feu Pitre et françois Robin”.