♂Jean Préjean dit LeBreton

Jean Préjean dit LeBreton (born about 1651) was a farmer of Port-Royal in Acadia and the father of twelve children with his wife, Andrée Savoie. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Préjean (born 1696). The census of 1698 counted sixty fruit trees on his land.

Settler at Port-Royal

Jean was probably a native of Brittany, as his by-name LeBreton, “the Breton”, suggests, and he is said to have come to Acadia about 1671. He married Andrée Savoie, a daughter of François Savoie and Catherine LeJeune of Port-Royal, about 1683. By 1686 the young couple, he thirty-five and she twenty-one, had a daughter, Marie, two years old, and were making a start with one arpent^W of land, one hog and two guns.

The farm grew with the family. In 1693 Jean and Andrée had four children, six cattle, eight sheep, five hogs and fourteen arpents. Five years later there were six children at home, seventeen cattle, nineteen sheep and five hogs, and the sixty fruit trees, in the census that a later historian of the Nova Scotia apple industry named as the first official record of its orchards that he found. Thirty-four settlers of Port-Royal had fruit trees that year, 1,375 in all, and only six of them had more than Jean. In 1701 the household numbered seven children, with sixteen cattle, ten sheep and twelve hogs.

Later years

In the autumn of 1710 a British and New England force captured Port-Royal^W, which became Annapolis Royal. Jean stayed on under British rule. In 1714 the census of Port-Royal named him only by his by-name, “Le BRETON and his wife, 8 sons, 2 daughters”. He is said to have died suddenly at Port-Royal on 6 June 1733.

The family

Jean Préjean dit LeBreton and Andrée Savoie had twelve children, eight sons and four daughters, born between 1684 and 1711. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians gives their son François, born in 1693, as settled in the region of L’Islet, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, about 1742.

Notes

Dates and sources

His ages on the census rolls, thirty-five in 1686, forty-two in 1693, forty-seven in 1698, forty-nine in 1700 and fifty-two in 1701, point to a birth about 1651, the year Bona Arsenault’s compiled Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives. Arsenault is the source for his arrival in Acadia about 1671, the marriage about 1683 and his sudden death at Port-Royal on 6 June 1733 (“décédé subitement”); a Prejean family compilation at the Pascagoula Public Library gives the death as 6 January 1733. Arsenault’s entry for François has him settled near L’Islet about 1742, while his history’s list of Acadian refugee families in Canada after the deportation also places François’s family at L’Islet. The census entries come from published transcriptions of the rolls. The clerks wrote the surname Prijean in 1686, Brigeau in 1693 and 1700, Prejan in 1698 and 1701, and Prijan in 1703.

Origin

Edward Prejean’s account of the family in the Attakapas Gazette (1990) gives Brittany as Jean’s likely birthplace and recalls his own father saying the family came from “Reims”, which he took to mean Rennes. The same account says a census of 1700 recorded Jean as a fisherman; the transcription of that roll gives his age, his family and his stock, but no trade.

The orchard

The 1698 roll of Port-Royal gives Jean “60 fruit trees”. Dudley J. LeBlanc’s The True Story of the Acadians (1932) quotes the list of fruit trees in that census from Comeau’s “The Apple Industry in Nova Scotia”, where Comeau wrote that the first official record of the apple orchards that he found was the census of 1698. The count of thirty-four settlers and the total of 1,375 trees come from that list.

Joseph in the rolls

Joseph, through whom the line to Floyd runs, is not in the household on the roll of 1698, which names Marie, Anne, Pierre, Jean, François and Madeleine. The roll of 1701 gives him as five years old, which fits the birth year of 1696 that Arsenault gives.