♀Marie Melançon

Marie Melançon was an Acadian woman of Les Mines^W who married Antoine Landry at Grand-Pré in 1717 and raised a family of at least seven children with him at Rivière-aux-Canards^W before the deportation of 1755. She was most likely the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Judith Landry (born 1728). She did not outlive the exile: a genealogy that her son-in-law’s family declared in France in 1767 records that she and her husband both died at Southampton, in England, in 1756.

Family at Rivière-aux-Canards

The 1767 genealogy gives her birth at Les Mines, in the parish of Saint-Charles, in 1699. She was a daughter of Philippe Melançon and Marie Dugas. Antoine Landry and Marie Melançon were married at Grand-Pré on 13 November 1717. Six of their children were baptized at Grand-Pré between 1718 and 1732 — Joseph, Marie Josèphe, Jean, Judith, René and Antoine — and the exiles’ declarations of 1767 name a seventh, Marguerite, born at Rivière-aux-Canards in 1721. When their son Antoine was baptized in 1732, the couple were living at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph.

Exile and death

In the autumn of 1755 the British deported the Acadians of Les Mines, and the family was scattered. Their daughter Judith, born on 12 March 1728, was most likely the Judith Landry who was counted with her husband, Charles Leblanc, among the Acadian exiles at Baltimore, Maryland, in 1763. Few Acadians were carried to England: those who were had first been sent to Virginia, which refused to receive them and in 1756 shipped them on to English ports, where they were held until the peace of 1763. Marie and Antoine were most likely among them, and both died at Southampton in 1756.

Their daughter Marguerite, by then a widow, was also in England, and married Honoré Daigre at Falmouth on 10 September 1757. By 1767 Honoré and his brothers Olivier and Paul were living at Chubiguer, in the parish of Le Palais on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany. There, on 10 February 1767, the three brothers declared their families’ descent, and in setting out Marguerite’s parentage they recorded where and when her parents had died.

Notes

Identification of her daughter Judith

Judith Landry, the wife of Charles Leblanc, is identified with the Judith born to Antoine Landry and Marie Melançon on 12 March 1728 and baptized at Grand-Pré on 29 May 1728 by her age and by the register, not by any record naming her parents when she was grown. The Spanish report on the settlers of St. Gabriel in July 1767 gives her age as forty, which fits a birth in March 1728, and the Grand-Pré register holds only one other Judith Landry of her generation, a daughter of Claude Landry and Magdelaine Doucet baptized in 1722, who married Claude Boudrot in 1747. No record of Judith’s own marriage has been found, so the link is probable but not proved.

The 1767 declarations

Marie’s birth at Les Mines in 1699 and the deaths of Marie and Antoine at Southampton in 1756 rest on one source: the genealogy declared on 10 February 1767 by Honoré, Olivier and Paul Daigre, of Chubiguer in the parish of Le Palais, Belle-Île-en-Mer, printed in the Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique published by Le Canada-Français. It names her parents, as the 1717 marriage entry does, as Philippe Melançon and Marie Dugas; the declaration writes her mother’s surname as Dugast. A second declaration, made in the parish of Bangor on 27 February 1767 by Marie-Josèphe Dupuis for the Thériot family of Marguerite’s first husband, gives Marguerite’s birth at Rivière-aux-Canards in 1721 and names her parents in the same way. The 1717 marriage entry is damaged, and part of its text is known only from a transcription made in 1895; her surname is written Melansson there.