♀Marie Françoise Martine

Marie Françoise Martine was a woman from Languedoc, in the south of France, who settled in French Louisiana and was widowed when her husband Pierre Lambremont was killed in the Natchez massacre^W of 1729. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Lambremont.

Marriage and the Natchez

She was the daughter of Sébastien Martin and a woman surnamed Demeron. In the colony she married Pierre Lambremont, a blacksmith from Maubeuge who had signed on in 1719 to work the Sainte-Catherine concession; where and when they married is not known. Their son Pierre was born in the 1720s. She had probably been married once before, to a man named Prouen, and had a daughter by him, Marie Prouen.

The family was living at the Post of the Natchez, on the Mississippi, when the Natchez people attacked the French settlement there at the end of November 1729. The Capuchin Father Philibert’s list of those killed at the post includes “Pierre Lambremont and his child”; the child is not named. The news reached New Orleans on 2 December.

Widowhood

Seven months later, on 6 July 1730, she married Étienne Matée at the St. Louis church in New Orleans; the register calls her a native of Languedoc and the widow of Pierre Lambremon, “dec. at Natchez”. She had died by June 1737, when the younger Pierre, then about twelve, was apprenticed for four years to a New Orleans tailor named Menard. When he married Francoise Eloi at Fort de Chartres, in the Illinois Country^W, in 1764 or 1765, the register named his parents as Pierre Lambremont and Marie Françoise Martine.

Notes

Her name

The New Orleans records call her Marie Martin or Marie Martine; the name Marie Françoise Martine is the one in her son’s marriage entry at Fort de Chartres. Her 1730 marriage entry, in the printed abstract of the New Orleans sacramental registers (Woods and Nolan, vol. 1, p. 181), runs: “Marie (Sebastien and [given name left blank] DEMERON), native of Languedoc, widow of Pierre LAMBREMON, dec. at Natchez, m. Etienne [@Estienne] MATEE, July 6, 1730”. The abstract leaves her mother’s given name blank.

A first marriage

The abstract of the inventory of her estate, in the Superior Council records printed in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly (1923), is damaged at its head, where it seems to name her as the widow of Sebastien Prouen by a first marriage and of Pierre Lambremont by a second, and at her death the wife of Estienne Mathe. It lists her two minor children as Marie Prouen, about fourteen, and Pierre Lambremont, “aged nine”. The 1737 apprenticeship contract instead calls the boy “aged about 12 years” and gives her marriages in another order, so the order rests on two imperfect abstracts.

Her son

The link to the younger Pierre rests on three records. The Superior Council’s apprenticeship contract of 25 June 1737 names the boy as a son of the late Marie Martine and of Pierre Lambremont. The inventory of her estate names him as her minor son. And his marriage entry at Ste. Anne, Fort de Chartres, calls him “fils de pierre Lambremon[t] et de Marie francoise Martine”, natives of “la paroisse Ste Catherine de” a place whose name is lost. The head of that leaf is torn away with its date; the entry stands between an act of August 1764 and one of 27 May 1765, and a later hand has written “M. 1765” beside it.