♀Jeanne Savoie

Jeanne Savoie (born about 1658) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, the wife of the settler Étienne Pellerin and the mother of a large family, four of whom married four children of Pierre Gaudet and Marie Blanchard. Between 1707 and 1716 two of her sons married two Gaudet daughters and two of her daughters married two Gaudet sons, so that the two households were joined four times over in a single generation. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Bernard Pellerin (born about 1691).

Early life and marriage

Jeanne was a daughter of François Savoie and Catherine LeJeune, and was probably born at Port-Royal about 1658. The census of 1671 found her there at thirteen, the third of the eight children still at home with their parents. About 1675, when she was about seventeen, she married Étienne Pellerin, a settler said to have come from Normandy.

Their children came over more than twenty years. By the census of 1686 Jeanne was twenty-eight and the mother of five, Madeleine, Marie, Pierre, Anne and Jean-Baptiste, and the farm carried eight cattle and twelve sheep. By 1698 the eldest daughters had married and the eldest son, Pierre, was probably dead, but five younger children were at home: Jeanne, Charles, Bernard, Alexandre and a second Charles. A last daughter, Marguerite, followed about 1699, when her mother was past forty.

The Isle aux Cochons

About 1687 Étienne bought part of the Isle aux Cochons, a stretch of marshland at Port-Royal at the mouth of the river about a kilometre from the fort, from Jacob Bourgeois. With two neighbors he built aboiteaux^W to keep the tide off the marsh, at a cost of more than eleven hundred livres among the three of them, and on the reclaimed ground he grew hay and wheat. The family’s farm depended on that land.

In 1702 the new lieutenant governor, Jacques-François de Brouillan^W, wanted the island for a farm of his own, and by the account of memoirs sent to the court in France he forced Étienne to sell it. Étienne signed the deed, but Jeanne refused to sign it. Six months later Étienne was summoned either to pay for the works done on the land or to have his wife ratify the sale, on pain of the seizure of their furniture and cattle. The threat frightened “ces pauvres gens”, these poor people, so badly that they did all that Brouillan wanted, and in the end Jeanne, pressed by her husband and her grown sons, consented.

Later years

Between 1707 and 1716 six of her children married at Port-Royal, and in each act the priest named Jeanne as the mother. Four of those weddings joined her family to the Gaudets: Madeleine to Pierre Gaudet in 1707, Bernard to Marguerite Gaudet in 1713, and early in 1716 Alexandre to Jeanne Gaudet and Marguerite to Bernard Gaudet. Port-Royal fell to the British in 1710^W and became Annapolis Royal, but the family stayed on. The census of 1714 probably shows her and Étienne as “le Vieux Pellerin et femme”, the old Pellerin and his wife, with two sons and a daughter still at home. By then she had some twenty grandchildren.

Widowhood

Étienne died on 17 November 1722 and was buried that day at Annapolis Royal. Jeanne most likely outlived him. When their son Charles married Magdelaine Robichaux on 30 January 1725, the register marked his father as dead but not his mother, and her brother Germain Savoie stood witness as the groom’s uncle. That wedding is the last trace of her; when and where she died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines of descent run through her son Bernard Pellerin (born about 1691) and Bernard’s daughter Marguerite Pellerin (born 1718), on Floyd’s mother’s side through Ida Serrette (1903–1990). They meet again in Floyd’s grandmother, Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), whose parents, Jean Baptiste Daigle (born about 1847) and Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850), both descend from Étienne and Jeanne.

Notes

Birth and age

The census roll of 1671 enters her as “Jeanne 13” among the unmarried children of François Savoie and Catherine LeJeune. Bona Arsenault’s extracts of the 1686 census in L’Acadie des ancêtres (p. 107) give her as twenty-eight, and Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (vol. 2, pp. 186–187) gives twenty-eight in 1686 and forty in 1698; all three ages point to a birth about 1658. Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 2) also gives 1658. The birthplace Port-Royal comes from Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 186).

Marriage

No marriage act survives; the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal begins in 1702. Arsenault (vol. 2, p. 710) dates the marriage about 1675, and Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 186) to 1675 at Port-Royal, when she was seventeen. Étienne’s origin in Normandy rests on Lanctôt alone; see his page.

The children

The register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste names “Jeanne Savoye” (once “Jeanne Savoy”) as the mother in the marriage acts of seven of the children: Madeleine to Pierre Godet, 17 January 1707; Jeanne to Pierre Suret, 4 February 1709; Jean-Baptiste to Marie Martin, 11 February 1710; Bernard to Marguerite Godet, 27 November 1713; Alexandre to Jeanne Godet, 13 January 1716; Marguerite to Bernard Godet, 7 February 1716; and Charles to Magdelaine Robichaux, 30 January 1725. Arsenault (vol. 2, p. 710) lists ten children born between 1676 and 1696, with Marguerite in 1694; Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 189–190) lists eleven, with two sons named Charles, born in 1690 and 1696, and Marguerite in 1699. Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 187 and 190) has the eldest daughters married by 1698 and the eldest son, Pierre, dead before that census.

The forced sale

Lanctôt (vol. 2, pp. 187–189) quotes an anonymous Mémoire important sur l’Acadie of 1702 and a memoir of Mathieu Desgoutins, the lieutenant général of justice in Acadie, dated 29 November 1703. Neither names Jeanne. The 1702 memoir says that her husband sold “malgré sa femme qui ne voulut point signer”, against the will of his wife, who would not sign, and that the summons “épouvanta si fort ces pauvres gens” that they did all Brouillan wanted. Desgoutins writes that “sa femme ne voulut pas consentir”, and that pressure was then put on her husband and on “grands garçons qu’elle a et qui la déterminèrent à consentir”, the grown sons she had, who brought her to consent. The 1702 memoir calls the seller “ce malheureux Pèlerin”, and Desgoutins says the island had been bought from Bourgeois, which identifies the household; see Étienne’s page for the rest of the affair.

The census of 1714 and her last years

The census of 1714 gives no first names for this household; Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 189) identifies “le Vieux Pellerin et femme” as Étienne and Jeanne, and counts eleven grandsons and ten granddaughters for them at that census. Étienne’s burial is in the register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Annapolis Royal (RG 1, vol. 26, p. 364). The act of Charles’s marriage in 1725 (p. 205) calls the groom’s father “Etienne Pellerin deceased” and names the mother “Jeanne Savoye” without that word; its witnesses are “Baptiste Pellerin brother of the groom” and “Germain Savoye his maternal uncle”. The census roll of 1671 gives Jeanne a brother Germain, then seventeen. Lanctôt (vol. 2, p. 189) gives the date of her death as unknown.