Melançon or Mélançon

also Melanson, Mellanson

The progenitor of this family was a French sailor and Huguenot named Pierre LaVerdure - it is not even certain if this was his name, or a nickname, or his place of origin. he appears to have lived much of his adult life in England and New England before coming to Acadia in 1657 (on the ship Satisfaction, with the new English governor Thomas Temple). He was born about 1605 (we do not know where) and probably went into exile in England because of his religion; there about 1630 he married Priscilla Melanson (variously spelled). Genealogists have been able to find no such family name anywhere in seventeenth-century England (or in Scotland, where some have claimed she originated). Perhaps to obscure his French origins, Pierre adopted his wife's surname. There is some doubt about the birth-order of their three children.

The eldest child (probably) was Pierre Melanson, born in England about 1632 or 1633; he would have been in his early twenties when his parents decided to cross the Atlantic, but he was unmarried, and came with them. He seems to have been apprenticed to a stonecutter while in England, because on arrival in Acadia he immediately took that up as a profession. In Port-Royal he married Marguérite Mius (whose Norman father was known as sieur d'Entremont in the New World); they had ten children. Despite all the intermarriages of their children and grandchildren with names like Dugas, Thériault and Landry, I do not think we are descended from this couple.

Their second son Charles Melanson was evidently born in England, about 1642, and came with his parents to Acadia when he was about fifteen. He married Marie Dugas (daughter of Abraham; see Dugas) - the first of many Melançon-Dugas marriages - in or about 1663. They lived on a farm near Port-Royal, an area still called the "Melanson settlement."

When the treaty of Bréda handed Acadia over to France in 1667 (it had been held briefly by the English during the second Anglo-Dutch War), Pierre and Priscilla deemed it wise to move to Boston with their youngest child John. (John never returned to Acadia; he is thought to have married and worked as a sailor, but no descendants are known.) The two older children had already married and put down roots in Acadia, so they stayed (and had become Catholics). Pierre died in Boston about 1677, and his widow married Captain William Wright.

Charles Melançon (as the name was by now spelled) and his wife Marie Dugas were the parents of at least thirteen children; this family was "dit LaRamée." The children (birth order uncertain) were: Ambroise (married Françoise Bourg, niece of our ancestor Jean Bourg, and Madeleine Comeau); Anne (married 1685 to Jacques de St-Étienne de La Tour; 4 children, including Marie-Agathe, who married Edmund Bradstreet of the prominent New England family; Anne's second husband was Alexandre Robichaud); Cécile (married 1686 to Abraham Boudreau and in 1703 to Jean-Antoine Béliveau, our ancestor by his first wife Jeanne Bourg); Charles (1675-1757; married Anne Bourg); Claude (married Marguérite Babineau); Élisabeth (married 1689 Michel Bourg); Françoise (married 1698 Jean Cyr); Jean (married 1714 Jeanne Petitot); Marie-Madeleine (married Jean-Charles Béliveau; they were first cousins); Marguérite (c1694-1758, married 1714 to Jean-Baptiste Landry); Marie (who was raised in Boston by her grandmother and married David Bassett of Boston); another Marie (married Charles Béliveau); and Pierre (married Anne Granger in 1712). At the time of the 1671 census, Charles and Marie Melançon owned twenty arpents at Port-Royal, with 40 head of cattle and 6 sheep, though Charles was listed as a "laboreur" and not a farmer. The 1698 census finds three Melançon families with 21 children living together, with 35 arpents. In 1714 there were nine households at the "settlement." Charles died about 1700, and Marie in 1737, age 91. Many Melançons were deported to Louisiana after 1755, and the settlement was abamdoned. Some continued to live in what is now New Brunswick. The name is not uncommon today in Nova Scotia.

See Béliveau for Marie-Madeleine's descendants. Her brother Pierre Melançon was probably born about 1690, and married Anne, daughter of another English immigrant, Laurent Granger, and his wife Marie Landry (who was a daughter of René l'aîné Landry). They had three children: Marie-Josèphe (1712-1793, married Claude Dugas); Anne (born 1718, married Joseph Doucet); and Pierre (c1720-1791, married Isabelle Richard in 1751).

Claude Dugas and Marie-Josèphe Melançon were the parents of Marguérite Dugas, our ancestor through the Bourgeois family.

There are thousands of Melançon descendants, including a Louisiana congressman. The photo above is the reconstructed fort at Port-Royal.