Father uncertain, but shown as Robert Martin.

MARTIN, Barnabé, came from France and married at Port-Royal Jeanne Pelletret, according to Louis Courtin, husband of his great-granddaughter Marie-Josèphe Martin (Doc. inéd., Vol. III, p. 27). Here again there are errors concerning the names of the first forebears in Acadia. Louis Courtin calls his wife’s great-grandfather René Martin, and René’s wife Marguerite Landry. It is particularly easy in this instance to understand how the deponent came to be so misinformed. In the first place, Louis Courtin was not an Acadian, but a surgeon from the diocese of Blois, who had married his Acadian wife at Cork, in Ireland. Secondly, as this writer explained in an article published in 1984 (SHA, Vol. XV, p. 119), Marie-Josèphe Martin was only fourteen years old at the time of the Deportation in 1755, and she had lost her father eight years before that, when she was only six. By 1767, with her mother also dead, the only persons on Belle-Île upon whom Marie-Josèphe could have called for help with her genealogy were her two younger sisters, who were certainly not likely to know more than she did. So it is not surprising that there should have been some confusion in Louis Courtin’s information about his wife’s ancestors. The substitution of the given name René for Barnabé probably came about because Marie-Josèphe’s grandfather Étienne Martin had an older brother by that name. Meanwhile, the confusion of the family names Pelletret and Landry likely occurred because Jeanne Pelletret’s mother Perrine Bourg was married twice, and her second husband was René Landry l’aîné. Perrine Bourg had no male offspring from her Pelletret marriage, but she had two Landry sons who had a considerable number of descendants (see DGFA-1, pp.915-916, 1283-1284).