♀Marie Josèphe Comeau

Marie Josèphe Comeau (born about 1705) was an Acadian woman deported from the Minas district^W of Nova Scotia in 1755, who spent her last years an exile in France, a widow earning her living as a weaver. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Paul Landry.

Marriage

She was probably the daughter of Jean Comeau and Catherine Babin. No register names her as their child; the link rests on Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy, which lists her as their daughter and as the wife of Joseph Landry, son of Claude Landry and Catherine Thibodeau, and on the witnesses to her wedding. Her sister Marguerite had married Joseph’s brother Jean Baptiste Landry in 1718, so the two families were already joined before her own wedding.

On 10 November 1727 she married Joseph Landry at Grand-Pré; the marriage record names no parents for either of them, listing instead as witnesses her kinsmen Jean and Étienne Comeau and his kinsmen Claude and Jean-Baptiste Landry. The witnesses point to her family: the Jean Comeau who signed his name appears to be the same man who witnessed the weddings of Jean Comeau and Catherine Babin’s other children from 1718 to 1729, and Étienne is probably her brother. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana dates the marriage of Joseph’s sister Claire Landry to Claude Comeau, son of Jean Comeau and Catherine Babin, to that same day and place, but the published abstract of the Grand-Pré register gives Claire’s marriage as 11 November 1721, so the two weddings may not have been held together. The same compilation lists the couple, with a question mark, as being “of Minas.”

Exile

The deportation of 1755 scattered the family. According to Milton and Norma Rieder’s The Acadians in France, as quoted on a Geneanet family tree, Marie Josèphe and Joseph spent the following years among the Acadians held in England, at Southampton, before being repatriated to France aboard the frigate La Dorothée, reaching Saint-Malo in May 1763 with three of their children. She was widowed the following year, when Joseph died and was buried at Saint-Servan on 6 and 7 June 1764; the burial register misrecords her name there as “Marie Marguerite” rather than Marie Josèphe.

Widowhood at Saint-Malo

Her son Pierre married at Saint-Servan on 1 June 1767; the register names her as his mother but, unlike his father, does not call her late. Five years later, on 15 September 1772, a roll of the Acadian families at Saint-Malo listed her alone, aged sixty-seven, a widow who made her living by weaving. By then Pierre was dead as well: the same roll lists his widow Anne, who sewed and spun, with Marie Anne, their four-year-old daughter. Pierre Le Blanc, whom the 1767 register calls Pierre’s brother-in-law and who had stood at Joseph’s burial in 1764, was presumably the husband of one of her daughters.

Death

The parish register of Saint-Similien, Nantes, records that Marie Josèphe died on 28 December 1779, “à la Bastille,” and was buried there the next day, aged about seventy-eight. The burial act describes her as “an Acadian, widow of Joseph Landry, also an Acadian,” and names Pierre Le Blanc, an Acadian, among those present. The place named in it, “la Bastille,” is not further identified.

Notes

No record names her parents; the identification of Jean Comeau and Catherine Babin as her parents is probable, resting on Arsenault’s compiled genealogy and on the 1727 witnesses. Her name appears variously as Marie Josèphe, Marie Joseph, Commeau in her son’s marriage register, Coumeau on the 1772 roll, and once, in the 1764 Saint-Servan burial register, as “Marie Marguerite” — the parish clerk’s slip, not a second name. The 1772 roll gives her age as sixty-seven, which puts her birth about 1705; the Nantes entry of 1779 gives seventy-eight, which would put it about 1701. This page follows the 1772 roll, which is the record of her own lifetime.