Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/149

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OUR FIRST FAMILIES.
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the wife of Pierre Martin, must have been a French woman. Catherine Vigneau may, however, have been a second wife, for the oldest son of the family is Pierre, jr., who is put down as aged 45, while the next child is ten years younger. On the other hand, why should Catherine Vigneau, a French woman, go to live in Boston where there were no French people, while her sons were residing in Acadia. It must be confessed that there are some difficulties in the way of accepting the Martins as Scotch, yet the probabilities are that they were.

The Melansons, whom M. Richard mentions as Scotch, may have been the two men referred to by Cadillac. Charles Melanson, in 1671, was 28 years old, and was therefore born in 1642. He was married to Marie Dugast, by whom he had four daughters. Judging by the number of his cattle and the area of land he cultivated, he was the richest man in the Port Royal settlement. His brother, Pierre Melanson, who was a tailor, refused to answer the questions put to him by M. Molin. But in 1686, when the next census of Acadia was taken by M. de Meulles, he had to respond, and we know that in 1671 he was 38 years old, that in 1665 he had been married to Marie Mius d'Antremont, a daughter of Phillippe Mius of Pubnico, whose name appears in the census of 1671, and that Melanson and his wife had then three or four children; they had nine in 1686. Now neither of the parents of these men appears in the census of 1671, so that their father may then have been dead and their mother residing in Boston. The father of the Melansons, under the title of La Verdure, was a witness to the marriage contract made between LaTour and Madame d'Aulnay in 1653. He was also one of the parties to the capitulation of Port Royal to the English in 1654, signing that document "as well in his quality of Capt. Commandant in