3. Jean-Baptiste Arsenault

have stayed on the Island, as his brother Joseph (Joe League) seems to have done and who was only 14 years old in 1758. Whatever the case, Jean-Baptiste was living on the Island in 1773, the year he married. He travelled to Miscou Island in northern New Brunswick to be married by Father Mathurin Bourg on 17 September to Madeleine Gallant, daughter of Jacques Gallant and Josephe Boudrot. On the marriage certificate, it is stated that Jean-Baptiste is a "résidant a l'ile St. Jean".

The young married couple settled on the shores of Malpeque Bay in the Acadian settlement called Riviére Platte (which means shallow river) in Lot 17. They had a family of at least ten children.

After the Island officially became a British possession, by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the Island was divided into 67 lots which were allocated to influential British citizens, most of whom became absentee landlords. Like other pioneers who chose to settle on the Island under British rule, Jean-Baptiste had to rent his land from a landowner. His farm was located in approximately the same area where Slemon Park now stands, on the same tract of land which housed the former military base, CFB Summerside. In 1804, Colonel Harry Compton became the new landlord of Lot 17 and he required all those living on his property to sign leases. In the beginning it would appear that the Acadians got along well with Compton, but tensions soon appeared and grew to the point where many of the tenant farmers decided to leave the Malpeque settlement hoping to find a better life in the vacant Lot 15. They started moving there in 1812 where they founded the settlements of "La Roche" (Egmont Bay) and "Grand Ruisseau" (Mont Carmel).

Jean-Baptiste Arsenault and his children, several of whom were married, did not linger in Riviére Platte. They settled closely together in a part of Lot 15 which was to be called "Village des Abrams" (Abram's Village). A map of Lot 15, probably drawn around 1815, indicates that 15 families were already settled there. Six of these belonged to the Abraham clan: Jean-Baptiste (son of "le petit" Abraham) and five of his children, namely Jean (junior), Abraham, Eustache, Hilaire and Théotiste, who was married to Cyprien Arsenault.

Jean-Baptiste Arsenault died sometime between 1818 and 1822.