♂Pierre Melancon

Pierre Melancon (born about 1671) was an Acadian settler of the Minas Basin, a son of Pierre Melancon dit La Verdure, head of one of the largest families of Les Mines, and the father of Francoise Melancon, who married into the Theriot family of Cobequid. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Francoise Melancon (1709–before 1777).

Family

Pierre was a son of Pierre Melancon dit La Verdure and Marie Marguerite Mius d’Entremont. The census of Les Mines in 1686 lists the household with nine children, among them Pierre, sixteen; in 1693 he was twenty-two. No baptism or marriage entry naming his parents has been found, and the rolls of the Minas settlements list more than one Pierre Melanson in these years. The strongest evidence is who stood beside his own family: at his children’s baptisms and weddings the godparents and witnesses were his La Verdure brothers and sister, Marguerite as godmother in 1709, Paul as godfather in 1712 and witness in 1712 and 1715, Philippe in 1715, and Jean at his daughter Francoise’s wedding in 1724. Acadian families chose godparents and witnesses from their closest kin, so the pattern points clearly to the La Verdure household.

Pierre married Marie Blanchard; a compiled online family tree dates the marriage to about 1693 at Cobequid.

The couple had a large family, most of them daughters. The Grand-Pré registers record the marriages of Marie Magdeleine to Rene Landry in November 1712 and of Marguerite to Francois Pichot in March 1715, the baptism of Francoise on 28 February 1709 and of Pierre on 8 January 1712, and two marriages of their son Joseph. A compiled online tree credits them with ten children born between 1694 and 1716.

Francoise’s godfather at her baptism in 1709 was the French officer commanding at Les Mines, recorded as “Deteinville, lieutenant of a company of the naval detachment and commandant aux Mines”. Acadian godparents were almost always relatives or neighbours, so an officer of the garrison standing for a farmer’s daughter was unusual; it points to the standing of the Melanson family in the district.

Their son Joseph married twice, in 1738 and 1748, and each time the priest recorded that the couple were related by blood, in the fourth degree and then the third. The Church required a dispensation for such marriages. In the small and closely intermarried Acadian settlements they were frequent, but the note shows how few families the Minas parishes drew on by the 1740s.

Notes

Another couple named Pierre Melanson and Rosalie Blanchard baptised children at Grand-Pré between 1735 and 1747. They were a younger family, not this one.