♂Pierre Paul Landry

Pierre Paul Landry (born about 1744 – died 5 November 1770) was an Acadian exile who spent the years of his family’s deportation in England before being repatriated to France, where he married and had a daughter. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Anne Landry (born 1768).

Exile in England and return to France

Pierre was a son of Joseph Landry and Marie Josèphe Comeau, an Acadian couple married at Grand-Pré in 1727. An elder sister, Marie Blanche Landry, was born at Grand-Pré on 21 June 1730 and baptized there on 16 July 1730; the register names her parents as Joseph Landry and Marie Joseph Caumau (Comeau). When the British expelled the family from Acadia in 1755, they were carried not to the northern colonies where many exiles landed, but to Southampton, England. A list of the crossing to Saint-Malo in May 1763, aboard the frigate La Dorothée, as quoted on a Geneanet family tree from Milton and Norma Rieder’s The Acadians in France, names Joseph Landry, his wife, Marie, Marguerite and Pierre Landry, together with two nieces; Pierre would then have been about nineteen. The family settled at Saint-Servan, near Saint-Malo.

His father’s death, and his own marriage

Joseph Landry died at Saint-Servan on 6 June 1764 and was buried the next day, aged fifty-seven; the burial register names “pierre Landry,” almost certainly his son, among those present, and notes that those present could not sign. Three years later, as a minor whose father was dead, Pierre needed the ecclesiastical authority of the chapter of Saint-Malo to marry without a father’s consent. He married Anne Josèphe Thériot, herself a minor whose father was dead, at Saint-Servan on 1 June 1767; the register calls the two fathers “late”, naming his parents as Joseph Landry and Marie Josèphe Comeau and hers as François Thériot and Françoise Guérin, and calls both bride and groom natives of Acadia.

Death and family

The couple’s daughter Marie Anne was born and baptized at Saint-Servan on 30 May 1768. Pierre died at Saint-Servan on 5 November 1770, aged about twenty-six, and was buried in the churchyard there the next day, 6 November. The burial act calls him the husband of Anne Thériot (written “anne triot”); the curé, F. M. Navet, signed it, and Charles Henry and Pierre Huart were among those present. On 15 September 1772 a roll of Acadian families at Saint-Malo listed Anne, aged twenty-three, as the widow of Pierre Landry. His mother, Marie Josèphe Comeau, appears on the same roll, listed alone as a widow who earned her living by weaving. His daughter reached Louisiana in 1785 with her mother’s household and married there in 1794.

Notes

Pierre’s birth year is not recorded; about 1744 is inferred from his being a minor at his 1767 marriage, which puts his birth after 1 June 1742. Family compilations quoting Robichaux’s published Saint-Malo registers give him the added name “Paul,” which does not appear on either French act read for this page; Louisiana church clerks later called him Paul or Pedro. Robichaux’s printed compilation (The Acadian Exiles in Saint-Malo 1758-1785, vol. II, p. 540, family #609) gives the same death and burial dates; a compilation quoting Robichaux also lists a second daughter who lived only from 1769 to 1770, and no register of her is known. The baptism register of 1768 records that a Pierre Landry signed, probably the father, which would make him able to write; but the Saint-Servan registers of the 1760s name at least three other men called Pierre Landry in the same parish, one of them the late husband of an older Anne Thériot with grown children, and one a Pierre Landry who signed a January 1767 marriage act, so that signature is not certain to be his. None of those men’s records has been used here.