♂Pierre Lambremont

Pierre Lambremont (died before 2 December 1729) was a blacksmith from Maubeuge, in the north of France, who signed on in 1719 to work a concession in Louisiana and was killed with his child in the Natchez massacre^W of 1729. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Lambremont.

From Maubeuge to Louisiana

On 24 September 1719 Pierre Lambremont, a blacksmith of Maubeuge, was engaged for six years to work the Sainte-Catherine concession in Louisiana. He was one of 138 engagés^W whose contracts the Maubeuge notary Jacques Brochery set down together on 17 January 1720. His terms were 120 livres for signing on, fifteen francs a month with his food, and fifteen sols a day until he embarked. He could not write his name, and made his mark instead. He is said to have sailed from Lorient on the ship La Loire in August 1720.

Marriage and the Natchez

In the colony he married Marie Françoise Martine, a native of Languedoc; where and when they married is not known. Their son Pierre was born in the 1720s.

The family was living at the Post of the Natchez, on the Mississippi, when the Natchez people attacked the French settlement there at the end of November 1729. The Capuchin Father Philibert’s list of those killed at the post includes “Pierre Lambremont and his child”; the child is not named. The news reached New Orleans on 2 December.

His widow and son

Seven months later, on 6 July 1730, his widow married Étienne Matée at the St. Louis church in New Orleans; the register calls her a native of Languedoc and the widow of Pierre Lambremon, “dec. at Natchez”. She had died by June 1737, when the younger Pierre, then about twelve, was apprenticed for four years to a New Orleans tailor named Menard. When he married Francoise Eloi at Fort de Chartres, in the Illinois Country^W, in 1764 or 1765, the register named his parents as Pierre Lambremont and Marie Françoise Martine.

Notes

The engagement at Maubeuge

The 1720 deed is in the notarial records of the Archives départementales du Nord, and the Association Racines et Patrimoine has published a full transcription of it. Its seventh entry runs: “Pierre François Lambremont de Maubeuge forgeron engagé le vingt quatre septembre dernier a raison de cents vingt livres dengagement quinze frans par mois et sa nourriture, et quinze sols par jours jusques a lembarquement et a fait sa marque pour six ans”. The entry names no wife. His birthplace is taken from the words “de Maubeuge”. The same publication’s account of the group, drawn from a compiled history, has the engagés leave Lorient on La Loire on 11 August 1720 for the Île aux Vaisseaux and New Biloxi, and names Pierre Lambremont among at least five of them killed at the Natchez. A compiled list of emigrants from Hainaut gives him a birth at Maubeuge in 1693 and calls him a nail-maker, and a WikiTree profile gives 18 July 1693; neither cites a baptism.

The date of his death

His death is dated before 2 December 1729, the day the news of the massacre reached New Orleans (Le Petit, The Natchez Massacre, 1950, p. 16). Father Philibert’s list, printed in the same book (p. 41) as “Pierre Lambremont [Lautremont?] and his child”, is headed in Dunbar Rowland’s History of Mississippi (1925, p. 230) as a list of the persons massacred on 28 November 1729. Another printing of the list, in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly (1918), has “Lambremont-Pierre, and a child from concession of Mr. Ceard”.

His son

The link to the younger Pierre rests on three records. The Superior Council’s apprenticeship contract of 25 June 1737 names the boy as a son of the late Marie Martine and of Pierre Lambremont. An abstract of the inventory of her estate lists her two minor children as Marie Prouen, about fourteen, and Pierre Lambremont, “aged nine”, which does not agree with the “about 12 years” of the apprenticeship. And the younger Pierre’s marriage entry at Ste. Anne, Fort de Chartres, calls him “fils de pierre Lambremon[t] et de Marie francoise Martine”, natives of “la paroisse Ste Catherine de” a place whose name is lost. The head of that leaf is torn away with its date; the entry stands between an act of August 1764 and one of 27 May 1765, and a later hand has written “M. 1765” beside it.