♀Marie Melanson

Marie Melanson was an Acadian settler’s wife of the Minas district of Nova Scotia, a daughter of Pierre Melanson dit La Verdure and Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, whose son married a niece of her own sister’s husband: her sister Elisabeth had married Rene LeBlanc in 1709, and in 1729 her son Germain Landry married Anne LeBlanc, the daughter of Rene’s brother Francois. She was a sister of Elisabeth Melancon (died 1734) and Pierre Melancon (born 1671), both seventh great-grandparents of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Marie grew up at Les Mines^W in a household of nine children. The census of 1686 lists her, aged thirteen, in the household of Pierre Melançon dit la Verdure, 54, and his wife Marie Mius d’Autremont, 36, among nine children: Philippe, Cecile, Pierre, Marie, Marguerite, Isabelle, Jean, Magdeleine and a child one day old. In the census of 1693 she is eighteen, still at home among nine children. No baptism survives for her: the registers of Port-Royal before 1702 are lost. Her parentage therefore rests on these two census households, which match her name and age, and on the family circle that surrounded her later life; a published genealogy of the Acadians reaches the same conclusion.

Marriage and family

According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, Marie married Germain Landry, a son of René Landry le jeune, at Port-Royal about 1694. The census of 1698 at Port-Royal lists the couple, both aged twenty-five, as “Germain Landry” and “Marie Mellanson”, in the household entered directly after his widowed mother’s. Cormier’s compilation adds that the couple later settled at Minas, where they raised eleven children, including six sons who married into the Blanchard, Babin, LeBlanc and Bourg families, and three daughters who married into the Babin and Comeau families. In 1714, Cormier’s compilation says, her husband received the French king’s permission to travel with Father Gaulin to look over land on Île Royale^W, an option some Acadians weighed after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht^W placed peninsular Nova Scotia under British rule; the family did not resettle there and remained at Minas.

Her brothers stayed close. At a Grand-Pré wedding on 6 July 1716 a Germain Landry signed the register beside Philippe, Pierre and Jean Melanson, and when her son Germain married Anne LeBlanc at Grand-Pré on 4 July 1729 a Pierre Melanson was among the witnesses. The register of that marriage records Marie and her husband as “of the parish of la Ste Famille”, that is, of Pigiguit^W, within the wider Minas district.

Notes

The couple’s son, also named Germain Landry, married Anne LeBlanc at Grand-Pré in 1729. Their daughter Marie Josephe, baptized in 1730, was once carried in this line as an ancestor, as the wife of Joseph Braux. The wife of Joseph Braux was buried at Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, in 1807 as a widow aged 70, which gives a birth about 1737, so the 1730 baptism is another girl’s and this family is not on the line. Marie Melanson and her husband Germain Landry, treated here, should not be confused with the other, later Germain Landry and Cécile Forest, whose daughter Marie Josephe was born in 1737.

The account of her marriage rests on Cormier’s compilation rather than on a register that has been checked; no record of her death has been found.