♀Madeleine Melançon

Madeleine Melançon was an Acadian woman of the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré, in the district of Les Mines^W, the wife of Jean Landry and the mother of at least twelve children, who was deported with her husband in 1755 and carried to Boston, while their daughter Magdeleine and her family were carried across the Atlantic to England. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Magdeleine Landry (about 1722 – 1756).

Family at Grand-Pré

Madeleine was a daughter of Philippe Melancon and Marie Dugas, who made their home at Les Mines, and she was likely born there about 1700. Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon were married by 1720: their first son, Antoine, was born on 26 October 1720 and baptized at Grand-Pré on 24 November. Over the next twenty-one years the parish register recorded the baptisms of nine more of their children, from Marguerite, born in January 1724, to Anselme, born on 19 October 1741. Two daughters have no baptism in it: Magdeleine, thought to have been born about 1722, and Osite, born about 1730, whose marriage it records in July 1747. Magdeleine married Jean Baptiste Granger and lived in the neighboring parish of Saint-Joseph, at Rivière-aux-Canards, where her children were born from 1741.

Her own kin stood godparents to her children. Antoine’s godmother in 1720 was a Marie Dugas, most likely Madeleine’s mother, and in December 1726 Madeleine’s sister Anne, entered as Philippe’s daughter, was godmother to the couple’s daughter Marie. In November 1740 her husband was at Beaubassin^W, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, as a witness at the marriage of their eldest son, Antoine, to Anne Cormier.

Exile

In the autumn of 1755 the British deported the Acadians of Les Mines to scattered destinations, and families were often divided between them. Jean and Madeleine were carried to Boston. Their daughter Magdeleine, with her husband and children, was held among the exiles at Falmouth, in England, where she and her husband both died in 1756. In February 1767, on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, where many of the exiles from England had been resettled, the husbands of two of Magdeleine’s daughters declared their wives’ descent, and both recorded that Jean Landry and Magdeleine Mélançon were “tous deux transportés à Boston”, both carried to Boston. The declarations record where the couple’s own parents had died, in the parish of Saint-Charles; of Jean and Madeleine they give no death, only the deportation.

Jean and Madeleine most likely spent the rest of the exile in Massachusetts, close to their married sons Paul, Joseph and Charles: a Jean Landry, his wife Magdelaine and one boy appear beside those sons’ households on the list of Acadian families in the province that was certified at Boston on 14 August 1763 and sent to the French ambassador in London, with a plea to be taken to France. In June 1766 the same Jean Landry and his sons were on the list of families who asked the governor of Massachusetts for help to go and settle in Canada, where James Murray^W, the governor at Québec, had agreed to receive them. Jean probably died soon afterwards, in Massachusetts: when Madeleine sailed from Boston for Québec in June 1767, she went as his widow.

Québec

Madeleine was about sixty-eight when she left Boston, most likely with the family of her son Paul, on one of three schooners that reached Québec on 23 July 1767 carrying exiles who had taken up Murray’s offer. Her sons Paul, Joseph and Charles settled at Yamachiche, near Trois-Rivières, and she seems to have made her home there with them. Where and when she died is not known.

Notes

The 1767 declarations

The deportation to Boston rests on two declarations made on Belle-Île-en-Mer in February 1767 and printed in the Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique published by Le Canada-Français: that of Jean Baptiste Thériot, the husband of their granddaughter Marie Marguerite Granger, on 15 February, and that of the brothers Joseph, Simon-Pierre and Chrysostome Trahant, the last the husband of their granddaughter Anne Granger, on 26 February. Both name Jean’s parents as Antoine Landry and Marie Thibodault, and Madeleine’s as Philippe Mélançon and Marie Dugast. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens likewise places the couple at Saint-Charles-des-Mines and has Jean deported to Boston. A third declaration of 1767, made by Jean-Baptiste LeBlanc, the husband of their daughter Marie, and printed in English translation in the Attakapas Gazette, names the same parents for Jean and calls Madeleine’s mother Catherine Dugast. It gives Marie’s birth as 29 November 1726 and her marriage as 3 November 1746; the Grand-Pré register has her born on 2 December 1726 and married on 8 November 1745.

Birth and marriage

Bona Arsenault gives Madeleine’s birth as 1700 and the marriage as about 1720; André-Carl Vachon’s roll of the 1767 voyage gives her age as sixty-eight, which would put her birth about 1699. The Grand-Pré register, which begins in 1707, holds no act of either; the baptism of their son Antoine in November 1720 is the first record of the couple.

The godmother of 1720

The entry names Antoine’s godmother only as Marie Dugas. More than one woman of that name lived in the parish, among them the wives of Abraham Bourg and of André Leblanc, so the identification with Madeleine’s mother rests on the name and on the kin chosen for the couple’s later children, among them Madeleine’s sister Anne in 1726.

Their daughter Magdeleine

The Grand-Pré register holds no baptism of Magdeleine. The gap between Antoine’s birth in October 1720 and Marguerite’s in January 1724 leaves room for one child, and her birth about 1722 rests on Arsenault alone. The 1767 declarations name Jean Landry and Magdeleine Mélançon as her parents, and Arsenault gives her as their daughter and the wife of Jean-Baptiste Granger.

Massachusetts and Québec

Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes (vol. II) prints the general list of the Acadian families in Massachusetts certified at Boston on 14 August 1763, on which a Jean Landry, his wife Magdelaine and one boy are followed by the households of Paul, René, Joseph and Charles Landry; Lanctôt identifies the first as Jean, the brother of François Landry, and the four as his sons. The list of 2 June 1766, printed by Placide Gaudet in the report of the Canadian Archives for 1905, enters a Jean Landry with a family of three between René Landry, six, and Charles Landry, four, and Lanctôt again identifies him with Jean, the brother of François. André-Carl Vachon’s reconstructed roll of the Acadians who went from New England to Québec counts “Magdeleine Melanson, veuve de Jean Landry”, aged sixty-eight, among the passengers of the schooners Grampus, Garrick and Two Brothers, which left Boston in June 1767 and reached Québec on 23 July, and gives her as traveling with the family of her son Paul and his wife Rosalie Benoit. The same book lists “Magdeleine Melanson, veuve de Jean Landry” among the Acadian families who came to Yamachiche in 1767, with those of Charles Landry and Marie Hébert and of Joseph Landry and Magdeleine Doiron; Bona Arsenault also has Paul and Joseph settling at Yamachiche after their deportation to Massachusetts. No record of Jean’s death is known; on these lists it falls between June 1766 and June 1767.