♂Simon Pelletret

Simon Pelletret was most likely the first husband of Perrine Bourg, an early settler of Port-Royal in Acadia, and the father of her daughter Henriette. He is known only through that daughter: when the census of 1671 listed the married children of René Landry and his wife Perrine Bourg, one of them still bore another surname, Henriette Pelletret, aged thirty. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughter Henriette Pelletret.

The first husband

The census does not explain the name, and no record of his own life is known. He is said to have come out to Acadia in 1632 among the men brought by Isaac de Razilly^W, to have married Perrine Bourg at Port-Royal about 1640, and to have died about 1644, when Henriette was a small child, leaving a young widow who soon married René Landry.

Lines of descent

His two lines of descent both run down through his daughter Henriette Pelletret. They come together again in Céleste Dupuis (born 1801), a third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne, whose parents Pierre Dupuis (died 1833) and Rosalie Theriot (born about 1778) both descend from Simon Pelletret. One line enters through Céleste’s father and the other through her mother, and both come down to Floyd on his mother’s side, through Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Notes

How he is known

The census of 1671 gives René Landry, a farmer, and Perrine Bourg seven children, four of them married; Henriette Pelletret, thirty, is the only one given a surname, and the census does not say whose daughter she was. Bona Arsenault and Léopold Lanctôt make her Perrine’s daughter by an earlier marriage, and Lanctôt names the first husband Simon Pelletret. No record naming him as Perrine Bourg’s husband is known. The first name rests on later documents: Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families takes it from a Port-Royal list of 1705 on which a Simon Pelletret held a lot near the old fort, and Lanctôt mentions a Simon Pelletret named in a document of 1670, whom he took for a son of the couple, since no Pelletret man appears on the census of 1671.

Dates and origin

The arrival, marriage and death are Lanctôt’s reckoning. He writes that Simon Pelletret must have come to Acadia in 1632 with Razilly’s men, has him marry Perrine Bourg at Port-Royal in 1639, when she was fourteen (1640 in his notice on the Landry family), and has him die in 1644, with Henriette born in 1640. Steven A. Cormier calls him a colonist and, in his account of the Martin family, “Simon Pelletret of Paris”; a genealogy printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1989 has his daughter Jeanne born in Paris in 1644.

Other children

Lanctôt and Cormier give the couple a second daughter, Jeanne, later the wife of Barnabé Martin; the census of 1671 lists a married Jeanne, twenty-eight, among the Landry children without a surname. Lanctôt also suggests a son, Simon, who left no descendants in Acadia.