♀Marie Claire Braud

Marie Claire Braud (born about 1765 – died before 11 January 1802) was an Acadian woman of St. James Parish on the Mississippi River, Louisiana, whose parents were recorded at her marriage as being “of New England”. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Anaclet Melancon (1792–1827).

Early life

Marie Claire was a daughter of Joseph Braux and Marie Josephe Landry. Her marriage record describes her parents as “of New England”, which places them among the Acadians whom the British expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 and scattered through the English colonies along the Atlantic coast, including New England. Many of those exiles later made their way to Louisiana, then a Spanish colony, and settled on the Mississippi above New Orleans. The St. James records do not say where she was born or when the family reached Louisiana, and her age at burial puts her birth about 1763 or 1764. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana says she was born about 1765 in Maryland, where the exiles were held, and came to Louisiana in 1768 at the age of three with her parents. It places the family first at the Spanish post of San Luis de Natchez and then at San Gabriel. The same history remarks that some in south Louisiana called Maryland “New England”, so on that reading the phrase in her marriage record refers to Maryland and not to New England proper.

Marriage and family

Her first marriage was on 10 January 1785 at St. Gabriel, to Pierre Como, son of Alexis Como and Marguerite Babin. Their daughter, Marie Constance Como, was born on 23 October 1785 and baptized at St. Gabriel on 4 December that year.

Her second marriage was on 25 January 1790, at the church of St. James, to Charles Melancon, son of Alexandre Melancon and Osite Hebert. Thomas Theriaut and Escolastica Braux were the witnesses. Louisiana was then under Spanish rule, and the register gives the couple’s names in their Spanish forms, Carlos and Clara. The St. James baptismal register records five children born to them between December 1790 and January 1799, among them Anaclet, born on 27 August 1792 and baptized Alexandre Anaclet. The family lived at St. James throughout her marriage to Charles.

She also appears as godmother in the baptism registers: at St. Gabriel in 1781, 1785, 1788 and 1789, and at St. James in 1791.

Death

Clara, wife of Carlos Melanson, was buried at St. James on 11 January 1802, aged 38. Charles married again in August 1803, to Scholastique Bourgeois, and later moved the family to the Pointe quarter of St. Martin Parish on Bayou Teche, probably the later Grande Pointe. After he died there in December 1818, the St. Martin Parish probate court spoke of “the children of the first marriage of Charles Melancon deceased with Marie Braux his first wife also deceased”. Her son Anaclet, by then an adult, was one of those heirs.

Notes

Her surname is written Braux in her marriage entry and in the 1819 probate order, and Breaux in her son’s baptism. Her own burial entry gives no surname. The spelling Braud is used here. On the page after her burial, the same burial register records an unnamed daughter of Carlos and Clara Braux, aged five weeks, buried on 29 March 1802. A child of that age would have been born about six weeks after her mother’s burial, so one of the two entries has been misread or misrecorded. Only the original register pages can settle which. A Carlos Melancon also married a Francisca Arseno at St. James in August 1787, but that entry names neither party’s parents and cannot be tied to Charles. The 1819 probate order calls Marie Claire his first wife. The St. Gabriel baptismal entry gives the daughter’s name as Maria Constancia. A different Marie Constance, a daughter of Jean Baptiste Como and Margueritte, was baptized at St. Gabriel on 24 April 1785 with Marie Claire as godmother, and was not her child.