♂Philippe Melancon

Philippe Melancon (about 1666 – 24 June 1744) was an Acadian settler of Les Mines^W, the eldest son of Pierre Melancon dit La Verdure, and a man of the parish of Saint-Charles at Grand-Pré, where he signed the register as a witness at no fewer than seven family weddings between 1709 and 1730. He wrote his own name at a time when most of the brides at those weddings could only make their mark. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughters Marie Melançon (1699–1756) and Madeleine Melançon.

Early life

Philippe grew up in one of the leading households of Les Mines, the farming district on the Minas Basin. In the census of 1686 he was “Philippes”, aged twenty, the first of nine children listed under Pierre Melançon dit la Verdure and Marie Mius d’Autremont, a household that held twelve of the settlement’s twenty guns. Seven years later, in 1693, he was twenty-six and still living in his father’s house, the eldest of nine children at home. His descendants, setting out their families’ history in exile in 1767, remembered his father as a man “who had come from England” and had married at Port-Royal after converting.

Marriage and family

Philippe Melancon married Marie Dugas some time after 1693; Bona Arsenault’s genealogy of the Acadians dates the marriage about 1695. They made their home at Les Mines, where the registers of Saint-Charles-des-Mines record the baptisms of their children Anne Marie in 1710, Philippe in 1712 and Marguerite Josèphe in 1718. Their daughter Marie married Antoine Landry in 1717, and Marguerite married René Trahan in 1725. The Les Mines censuses of 1701, 1703, 1707 and 1714 list the household as “Philippe Melanson, his wife”, without naming her.

Anne Marie married Charles Babin in 1729 and then Charles Thibaudaux in 1735, Marguerite Josèphe married Paul Hébert in 1736, and their son Pierre married Marie Magdeleine LeBlanc in 1745. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy also gives a son Joseph, born about 1698, and a daughter Madeleine, born about 1700. The exiles’ declarations of 1767 name Joseph among Philippe’s children, and they place two more daughters in their marriages: Madeleine, the wife of Jean Landry, whose children were baptized at Grand-Pré from 1720, and Angélique, the wife of François Trahan of Pisiguit, whose son Louis-Athanase was born there in 1734. Pierre, the son, died in exile on Belle-Île-en-Mer on 9 October 1766.

Their son Philippe, born on 10 December 1712, was baptized privately the same day by a missionary entered as “Mr Paulin, missionary to the savages”, and the church ceremonies followed on 7 January 1713. When Marie married Antoine Landry at Grand-Pré on 13 November 1717, her father signed as a witness, and the next August he stood godfather to the couple’s first child, Joseph.

Later life and death

Philippe’s signature runs through the Grand-Pré register for two decades. He signed at the 1709 wedding of his sister Elisabeth to Rene LeBlanc, at the double wedding in 1712 at which his brother Paul and his niece Marie Magdeleine were both married, and in 1728 at the wedding of Elisabeth’s son Louis Amand Bugeaud. In August 1730, at the wedding of Marie Joseph Bourg, daughter of the notary Alexandre Bourg and Marguerite Melançon, the priest entered him as the bride’s uncle.

His wife Marie died on 20 September 1733 and was buried the next day in the parish cemetery. Philippe outlived her by eleven years. He died on 24 June 1744, about eighty years old, and was buried the next day in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Charles. He did not live to see the deportation of 1755, in which his daughter Marie and her husband were carried to England; both died at Southampton in 1756.

Lines of descent

The couple reaches Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through their daughters. The first runs through Marie Melançon (1699–1756), who married Antoine Landry, and probably through her daughter Judith Landry (born 1728), the mother of Joseph Leblanc (born about 1756). It continues through Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc (1794–1837) and her descendants to Ida Serrette (1903–1990), Floyd’s mother. The second, one generation longer, runs through their daughter Madeleine Melançon. The two lines meet again in Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc, whose parents Joseph Leblanc and Julie Trahan (born 1765) both descend from this couple.

Notes

Age and parentage

His ages in the censuses, twenty in 1686 and twenty-six in 1693, put his birth about 1666 or 1667; his burial entry, which gives his age as about eighty, would put it nearer 1664. He appears in both census households of Pierre Melancon and Marie Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, and several of the declarations made on Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1767 by his grandchildren’s families name him as the son of Pierre Melançon and “Anne Marie Mius”. One declaration, made for the LeBlanc dit Dessapins family, runs two generations together: it says that Philippe himself “came from Scotland” and married “Anne Wins” at Port-Royal.

His wife’s name

The Grand-Pré register calls his wife Marie Dugas at their daughter Marie’s marriage in 1717 and at her burial in 1733. The 1767 declarations mostly call her Marie Dugast; one calls her Catherine and another Marguerite.

The marriage

No marriage act survives: the Grand-Pré register begins only in 1707. The date about 1695 comes from compiled genealogies. Bona Arsenault gives about 1695, Steven Cormier gives c1695 as probable, and Lanctot gives about 1696. The 1693 census shows her unmarried, and their daughter Marie was born at Les Mines in 1699.

The Les Mines households

The four censuses of Les Mines name the household “Philippe Melanson, his wife” and give the children in it: one boy and one girl in 1701, one boy and four girls in 1703, one boy under fourteen and eight girls in 1707, and two sons and five daughters in 1714.

The Judith Landry line

A baptism at Grand-Pré on 29 May 1728, entered in the 1895 copy of the register, names a girl born 12 March 1728, the daughter of Antoine Landry and Marie Melançon. Whether she is the Judith Landry counted in the 1767 lists cannot be settled from the records: the only other Judith Landry of her generation in the Grand-Pré registers married Claude Boudrot in 1747, but the registers of Pisiquid, Cobequid and Beaubassin are lost, so another Judith of the same age cannot be ruled out.