Some tangled genealogy and a few narrative gaps are involved, but the true story of the Prejean sisters who were separated during the Acadian exile is every bit as tragic and compelling as Longfellow’s imaginary tale of Evangeline, and it has a happier ending.
The girls were the daughters of Charles Prejean (1706-1768), who married three times. The eldest girl, Cecile (b. 1730) was the daughter of Charles’s first wife, Catherine Josephe Broussard, who died in 1732. Marguerite (b. 1733) was the daughter of his second wife, Francoise Boudrot, who died in 1737. Twin girls Rosalie and Nathalie (b. 1741) were the children of his third wife, Marguerite Simon, who died twenty years after the exile.
Cecile and her husband Gregoire Pellerin were married in 1752, three years before the dispersion. They and their one-yearold daughter Marguerite were put aboard the transport Pembroke, destined for North Carolina. But a storm separated the Pembroke from the other transports soon after they left port. The exiles overwhelmed the crew, seized the ship, and sailed it back to Nova Scotia.
They hid for nearly a month before they were discovered by a British patrol. The exiles once again escaped, burned the ship, and made their way to today’s Fredericton, New Brunswick, but the odds were against them. They were eventually captured, and the Pellerin family and their fellow Pembroke refugees were imprisoned at Halifax until the conflict between France and England ended in 1763.
Bradshaw
Bradshaw
They were freed, but they could not return to their old homes. Acadians choosing to stay in Acadie could live only in small groups in less desirable areas or work as virtual slaves on lands now owned by New Englanders.
Cecile, Gregoire, and Marguerite came to Louisiana in February 1765 with a party led by Joseph (Beausoleil) Broussard and were part of the expedition he led to settle the Teche country. The census of 1769 shows Gregoire working for Jean-Jacques Sorrel, and the family lived on Sorrel’s sprawling plantation on Bayou Teche for at least a while. Some histories say the Pellerins eventually had their own plantation next to Sorrel’s.
At any rate, the families remained close. Two of Cecile and Gregoire’s granddaughters married into the Sorrel family and church records show that the widowed Cecile died “at the home of Joseph Sorel” in January 1808. Gregoire died before 1777, when a census lists Cecile as a widowed head of a family that included a young son, Frederick, and daughters Emelie and Marie Josephe.
The second Prejean sister, Marguerite, married Francois Dupuis two years before the dispersion. They appear to have fled to Quebec to avoid exile.
Rosalie and her husband Charles Dupuis (1739-1764) were among a group of exiles who ended up in Haiti. Charles died there in 1764, and Rosalie married Francois Pecot, a planter of some substance. During the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791, Francois and two sons, Luc and Jacques, fought on the losing French side. They were captured and condemned to death but managed to escape with the rest of the family to Jamaica.
Francois died in Jamaica in 1795, and the rest of the Pecot family was exiled again when the British banned all French speakers from the island. That was when the twice-widowed Rosalie and her twin sister, Nathalie Racca, also widowed in Haiti, sailed for New Orleans.
And that is when the happy ending began to unfold.
A teacher named Eulin came with the Pecot family to New Orleans. Some histories say he took one of the sons to St. John the Baptist Parish to further his education, but I suspect they went to the prestigious Jesuit-run Jefferson College in Convent, St. James Parish. Wherever they went, Eulin met Alexandre Frere, who taught the Pellerin children in St. Mary Parish. When they began comparing notes, they began to suspect that Cecile Pellerin and the twins, Rosalie Pecot and Nathalie Racca, were longseparated sisters.
The story of the reunion was recounted by New Orleans newspaperman Meigs O. Frost many years later, after he was given a yellowed scrap of paper on which one of the sisters told the story. The old account is not clear about how Marguerite was found in Quebec and joined her sisters for a grand reunion on the Teche, but it appears that once the sisters in Louisiana discovered each other they were somehow able to contact her.
As the story on the yellowed paper put it, “The four sisters, who had been separated for fifty years, who had suffered all kinds of misery and hardships, once more beheld one another on the shores of the beautiful Teche. What a touching spectacle ─ these aged sisters with wrinkled foreheads and hair of silvery gray embracing each other and shedding tears of joy.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589. You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail. com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
