Jean Baptiste Marie Moreau * 1707 ? 1711 † 15 februari 1770

Van Rodovid NL

Gebeurtenissen

1707 ? 1711 geboorte: Dijon, Frankrijk

geboorte van kind: ♂ John Isaac LeBlanc Moreau [Moreau]

Huwelijk: ♀ Elisabeth de La Bertauche [La Bertauche] doop 11 januari 1732 † maart 1791?

1749 beroep: missionary of the Church of England

15 februari 1770 overlijden: Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

[bewerk] Bronnen

1. ↑ Arthur Wentworth Eaton, The Church of England in Nova Scotia and the Tory Clergy of the Revolution, New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1891, Chapter V. Four Early Missions - http://anglicanhistory.org/canada/ns/eaton/05.html In the spring of 1753, it was decided to remove the German settlers from Halifax to Merliguesh, about sixty miles south-westward of Halifax, on the Atlantic sea-board. Block houses, materials and frames for magazines, storehouses, and private dwellings, were got together, and some Boston transports engaged to carry the people and their effects thither. The first settlers arrived early in June, and soon a new town was laid out to which the name of Lunenburg was given. With these settlers, whose number was soon swelled to sixteen hundred, was sent the Reverend Jean Baptiste Moreau, who had been a Roman Catholic priest and prior of the Abbey of St. Matthew, at Brest, but in 1749 had been received into the communion of the Church of England, and at once had been sent out to Halifax as the Society's missionary to the French and Swiss, to whom he first preached, September 9, 1749. Early in his ministry at Lunenburg, Mr. Moreau, writing to Halifax, says that fifty-six families of Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, and Anabaptists, had become worthy members of the Church. The mention of the two latter denominations is to be accounted for by the fact that even before the removal of the Germans to Lunenburg, a considerable number of New England fishermen and traders had settled there, some of whom undoubtedly belonged to each of these two religious sects. Mr. Moreau at first held service in the open air, administering the Holy Communion to two hundred at a time under the blue sky. [Desbrisay's "History of Lunenburg."] In his mixed parish he ministered in three languages, acting also as missionary to the Indians, several of whose children he baptized. Soon, with the aid of the government, he made preparations for building a church, for the frame of which, as of St. Paul's, an order was sent to Boston, in the remote colony of Massachusetts Bay. Soon he writes the Society that there are more than two hundred regular communicants of French and Germans, who are entirely reconciled to the Church of England, and in a letter dated October r, 1755, he says that his French congregation increases every day, that they attend divine service regularly, and that there are seldom less than eighty or ninety communicants. In the preceding six months he had baptized thirty-nine children, married sixteen couples, and buried three grown persons and a few children. The Society's schoolmaster, working under his direction, was named Bailly. The same year the Reverend Thomas Wood, in his summer itinerancy, came to Lun-eriburg and performed the service in English, and with the assistance of Mr. Moreau, administered the Holy Communion to twenty-four Germans. At that time, it is said, in addition to the regular inhabitants, there were about a hundred and twenty English soldiers in the garrison at Lunenburg. Mr. Moreau's work there continued until early in 1770, when he died. His son, Cornwallis Moreau, was the first male child born in Halifax, and was named in the Lunenburg grant.
2. ↑ Dictionary of Canada Biography Online - http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=35669&query=moreau MOREAU, JEAN-BAPTISTE, missionary of the Church of England; b. Dijon, France, probably between 1707 and 1711; d. at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 25 Feb. 1770. According to William Tutty, the Anglican missionary at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Jean-Baptiste Moreau was a French priest and prior of the abbey of Saint-Mathieu near Brest before he left the Catholic Church and emigrated to England. By 1749, when Moreau and his wife embarked for Nova Scotia with the settlers of Edward Cornwallis*, he had become an adherent of the Church of England. Moreau’s motive for settling in Nova Scotia, says Tutty, was to pursue “honest undertakings in a mercantile way,” and he was described in the list of settlers as a gentleman and schoolmaster. Soon after his arrival in Halifax, however, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel adopted him as an Anglican missionary on Tutty’s recommendation. From 1749 to 1753 Moreau resided in Halifax and served chiefly as missionary to the French-speaking Protestants amongst the new settlers, most of whom had come from Montbéliard and were among the group known as the “foreign Protestants.” Moreau visited New Jersey in the summer of 1752 with an eye to an alternative mission, but unlike so many settlers who left Nova Scotia for the American colonies in these years he returned to Halifax. In June 1753 he accompanied a group of about 1,600 German- and French-speaking individuals to their new settlement at Lunenburg; about 30 per cent of the settlers spoke French. Moreau likely enjoyed more comfortable living conditions than most of the settlers; he at least had the advantage of his annual missionary stipend and a government allowance for his rent. He supervised the construction of St John’s Church, which was being used in good weather by the mid-1750s. Because of a shortage of funds, however, the building remained in an incomplete state until the early 1760s. It was cold and leaky, and winter services often had to be cancelled. Moreau found such conditions a severe strain on his health. About 1761 he reported “mine eyes have grown weak and my constitution entirely broke by the great cold.” He does not seem to have been a particularly prominent or talented clergyman, though the fact that he persisted in the pioneering conditions of Lunenburg indicates his tenacity and probable success as a community leader. His claim to have reconciled the foreign settlers – mostly Lutherans – to the Church of England does not emerge as a significant achievement at a time when no services other than Anglican were available. His primary ambition was to proselytize amongst the Catholic and French-speaking Indians, and he frequently remarked on the “pains he [had] taken to bring over the Savages to embrace our holy Religion.” But he received little encouragement in this task from the government, the SPG, or his own flock. His major drawback as a clergyman at Lunenburg was his inability to speak fluent German. Though he claimed to have ministered to his multilingual congregation principally in English and French, even his facility in the English language was apparently deficient. His English reports to the SPG were in the hand of another, and by the mid-1760s he had resumed his earlier habit of writing his own correspondence in French. Moreau was the only clergyman of any persuasion in Lunenburg until 1761. His sole assistance during that period came from Georges-Frédéric Bailly, a Montbéliard settler who was the SPG schoolmaster in Lunenburg. In 1761 Moreau’s burden appeared to be lightened when a second Anglican clergyman, Robert Vincent, who spoke only English, was appointed missionary to the German inhabitants. A personal antagonism developed between the two men, however, and it was not until 1767, when Paulus Bryzelius, a German-speaking replacement for Vincent, arrived, that a fruitful partnership was established. Little is known of the last years of Moreau’s life. He was survived by at least two sons and one daughter.

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