♀Marie Pesselet

Marie Pesselet (about 1645 – 26 December 1707) was an Acadian of Port-Royal, the daughter of Barbe Bajolet and the wife first of the toolmaker Jean Pitre and then of François Robin. In 1767 her grandson Claude Pitre, one of the Acadian exiles on Belle Île, off the coast of Brittany, declared that she was “de la ville de Paris”, from the city of Paris; hardly any of the exiles’ declarations name the place a family came from. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Pitre (about 1683–1747).

Early life

Her ages on the censuses place her birth about 1645. Her father, Isaac Pesseley, is said to have been the major of the garrison at Port-Royal and to have died in 1645, in the fighting between the rival governors of Acadia^W. Her mother married again at La Rochelle in January 1647, and Marie seems to have spent her childhood in France. She most likely came back to Port-Royal in the early 1660s with her mother and her stepfather, Savinien de Courpon. In 1671 her mother, by then his widow, was counted there with two of her eight children in the colony, both married daughters: Marie and her half-sister Marie Lefebvre.

Marriage to Jean Pitre

Jean Pitre and Marie Pesselet probably married about 1664. Jean was a taillandier, a maker of edge tools, and in 1671 the only metalworker on the census of Port-Royal.

At the census of 1671 Jean, aged 35, and Marie, aged 26, had three children: Marie, aged 5, Catherine, 3, and Claude, nine months. They had one cow, no sheep and no plowland. Their neighbors on the roll were Pierre Comeau, a cooper of seventy-five, and his son Étienne Comeau, whose wife was Marie’s half-sister Marie Lefebvre. With no land of their own, the two younger couples most likely worked Pierre’s six arpents alongside him.

Jean and Marie had nine children, born between about 1666 and 1686. At the census of 1686 seven of them were still at home: Claude, Marc, Pierre, Jean, François, a daughter of two and a daughter born that month.

Widowhood and second marriage

Jean is said to have died about 1689. By the census of 1693 Marie had married François Robin, then aged 50, and the household held her sons Claude, Marc, Pierre and François and her daughters Marguerite and Jeanne. She was still in his household in 1701, when her daughter Marguerite was 18. François Robin is said to have died in 1706.

Death

Marie died at Port-Royal on 26 December 1707 and was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The register names her as the widow of the late Pitre and of François Robin.

Notes

Birth and age

The census rolls give her age as 26 in 1671, 45 in 1686 and 48 in 1693, which place her birth about 1645. Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens gives 1641, and his L’Acadie des ancêtres prints her age as 33 in 1671 and 48 in 1686.

Her name

The rolls write her surname Peselet (1671), Peseler (1686) and Pesseler (1693), and her burial writes Pincelet; the compiled genealogies use Pesseley and Pesselet. Some older works, among them Dudley Le Blanc’s The True Story of the Acadians (1932), print her as “Marie Bayols”, her mother’s surname.

Parents

Her mother’s entry on the 1671 roll names her daughters in the colony as “Marie Peselet aagée de 26 ans, Mariane Le Febvre aagée de 21 ans”. Her father’s name comes from the compiled genealogies. Arsenault calls her “fille d’Isaac et de Barbe Bajolet” and describes Isaac Pesseley as “marchand à Piney”, who “aurait été tué” on 17 April 1645 (printed 1745) when Governor Charles d’Aulnay attacked the fort of Charles de Latour on the Saint John River. Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes calls Isaac “major de la garnison de Port-Royal”, who “avait probablement été tué au combat en 1645”, and writes that Barbe then went back to France with her children, Marie among them, aged one. Casgrain and Rameau thought it “probable” that Barbe’s first husband was the Isaac Peseley who appears in the colony’s affairs in 1640. Barbe herself was baptized at Piney in 1608.

Return to Acadia

Lanctôt writes that her half-sister Marie Lefebvre came to Acadia “dès 1664 ou plus tôt” with her mother, her stepfather Savinien de Courpon and Marie Pesseley. The marriage of Barbe Bajolet to Martin Lefebvre at La Rochelle on 10 January 1647 is entered in the register of Saint-Barthélemy.

The declaration of 1767

The declaration of Claude Pitre, the son of Marc, was made at Sauzon on Belle Île on 28 February 1767 and is printed in Casgrain and Rameau’s Collection de documents inédits sur le Canada et l’Amérique: “Marc Pitre né de Jean Pitre flamand d’origine et de Marie Pincelet de la ville de Paris”. The editors call it one of the very rare declarations that name a place of origin.

Marriages and children

Arsenault gives her marriage to Jean Pitre as “vers 1664”, and L’Acadie des ancêtres as about 1668. Arsenault lists nine children: Marie 1666, Catherine 1668, Claude 1670, Marc 1674, Pierre 1677, Jean 1680, François 1682, Marguerite 1684 and Jeanne 1686. The 1686 roll lists the household as “Jean Pitre 61 / Marie Peseler 45 / Enfans: Claude 16, Marc 12, Pierre 9, Jean 6, françois 4, une fille de 2, une fille de 0.1 mois”. Arsenault writes of Jean “Il est décédé vers 1689”. The 1693 roll lists “francois Robin 50 / Marie Pesseler sa f[em]me 48 / Claude leurs fils 22 / Marc 18 / Pierre 13 / françois 11 / Marguerite 10 / Jeanne 7”, with “Pitre” added in the margin in a later hand. The rolls of 1698 and 1701, in published transcriptions, keep her in Robin’s household, as “Marie Pincelet” in 1698. Arsenault gives the second marriage as about 1690, after Jean’s death, and records that François Robin, born in 1643, came to Acadia about 1671 and was buried at Port-Royal on 19 October 1706.

Burial

The register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal records her burial on 27 December 1707 as Marie Pincelet, “veuve de feu Pitre et françois Robin”, “morte d’hier”; the act was written by Father Justinien Durand.