New The Cottrell Wall (Delahorne line)

For a long time the Delahorne side of the tree stopped at Marie Virginia Cottrelle, who died at Cecilia, Louisiana in 1937 and left almost nothing behind her: no birthplace, no parents, and a surname that no two clerks in her lifetime spelled the same way.

She is Floyd Amatus Delahorne’s grandmother, three generations back on the direct line. This is what we found about her, about her son Jeffrey and her husband Augustin, and an account of the theories we had to give up on the way.

The three of them

Jeffrey Delahorne (19 January 1899 – 29 November 1929) is the reason any of this matters: the line runs from him to his son Floyd, and from Floyd down to us. He died at thirty, at Cecilia, on his twin sons’ seventh birthday. He and his mother share a single flat granite marker inscribed with nothing but their two names.

His record is full of contradictions. His birth is given three different ways: the family gives 19 January 1899, his own draft card says 15 August 1888 while its age column implies 1898, and the age on his death record points to January 1897. His death was registered in Avoyelles Parish, not St. Martin where he lived and is buried, and a state index gives it as 19 October 1929 rather than 29 November. The death record calls him divorced, though the family understood his wife Ida to be his widow, remarried within four months. None of this is resolved.

Marie Virginia Cottrelle (about 1859 – 3 March 1937) was the wall itself. Everything we knew about her came from documents about other people. Her name appears on her son’s draft card, on his death record and on that shared headstone, and almost nowhere else. Even the name was unstable: across the documents that mention her she is Kotrelle, Contrelle and Cottrel, and the spelling the family had always used, Cotrelle, matched none of them.

Augustin Delahunt (21 July 1845 – 3 December 1915) was Jeffrey’s father, better documented and harder to explain. He ended his life blind in the Confederate Soldiers’ Home at Camp Nicholls in New Orleans, where the 1910 census lists him as an inmate. He had a first family with Mary Christoffel, including twin daughters, Angela and Angeline, born at Bordelonville in 1878, most of whom moved to Marshall, Texas around 1901. His surname is recorded at least eight ways, from Delahunt and Delahorne to Delahoussaye and De Lahunt, and his own daughter’s 1975 death certificate calls him Charles Augustine, a first name we had never seen and which may explain why he cannot be found in the 1900 census at all.

Augustin, as his first family tells it

The fullest account of Augustin comes from a descendant of that first family, Jerry Bordelon, who compiled a family history from the Avoyelles records and from what his relatives remembered, and who worked on it with a descendant of ours. It is a compiled account, not a record, and we set it out as such.

In his telling, Augustin was a boy soldier of the 18th Louisiana Infantry, in a company its men called “Lee’s Tigers”, and served until 13 May 1865. He came home from the war at nineteen to Avoyelles Parish, to his widowed mother Delphine Marcotte and his younger brother Martin; his elder sister Virginie was already married. He farmed there for nearly thirty years, married Mary Christoffel and raised a family with her. Then, around 1894, he left them and turned up the same year at Butte La Rose, in St. Martin Parish, where he met a widow named Mary Cottrell and married her on 17 July 1894 without troubling over the fact that he was married already. Talk of bigamy followed soon after, and he left St. Martin Parish for good. Some months after he had gone, Mary Cottrell bore a son, Jeffrey, whose surname was mis-spelled by clerks from the start; Jeffrey married Ida Serrette and had several children before dying at about thirty, and the family “became known by the name Delahorne”.

Augustin, the account continues, eventually made contact with his first wife and children again and was, more or less, forgiven, though the family remembered that his wife did not take it lightly. In failing health, he was admitted to the Soldiers’ Home at Camp Nicholls in 1903, with heart disease and failing eyesight. On leave from the home he visited the family at Marshall, Texas, old and frail, travelling on railway passes from his son Terry, a railroad man. He died at the home on 3 December 1915 and was buried in the home’s tomb at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans, one of forty numbered, unnamed vaults. Afterwards, the account says, Mary Christoffel received a Confederate widow’s pension, with her daughter Angelina handling the paperwork, and died at Marshall in 1925.

Most of this the records bear out: the Soldiers’ Home, the blindness, the death on 3 December 1915, the Christoffel family at Marshall, and Delphine Marcotte and Samuel Dillehunt as his parents, which the descendant reconstructed independently and which matches our own line exactly. Two things they do not. The War Department’s surviving rolls of the 18th Louisiana end in August 1863 and hold no record of him, so his service rests on the family’s word and on the home’s having admitted him as a veteran. And the pension was not received: the correspondence between the Louisiana pension board and the War Department in 1917 shows Mary Christoffel’s application refused for want of a service record. The story of the bigamy, which is the part that matters to us, has not yet been checked against the St. Martin Parish marriage book, and the chronology has a gap in it: Jeffrey’s recorded birth is four and a half years after the 1894 wedding, not a few months after it.

The searches that came back empty

The scale of the failure is part of the story. None of these were casual looks.

• Her 1937 death record. Nine spellings in one state index, every spelling again in a second, and finally all twenty-one deaths registered in St. Martin Parish in March 1937 read one by one. She is not among them.
• Six consecutive censuses, 1870 to 1930. Augustin, Virginia and Jeffrey were each searched under every spelling. All three are missing.
• The 1870 and 1880 censuses of St. Martin Parish. There is no Cottrell household there at all, under any spelling.
• Avoyelles Parish for the same two years, including every Virginia in the parish read by hand: nineteen in 1870, twenty-six in 1880.
• Confederate pension applications, where a widow’s claim would have had to prove a marriage. Nothing for her.
• The Soldiers’ Home register, which would have recorded who admitted Augustin and his next of kin. Twenty-one pages are missing from the microfilm, and the gap falls across December 1915.
• Her cemetery. The whole of Saint Joseph at Cecilia holds exactly one Cottrell and one Delahorne: her and Jeffrey.

Six theories we had to abandon

A research record that reports only its successes is not worth much, so these stay in.

1. Augustin and Virginia never married; his first wife outlived him. The first half was wrong. The family record had long carried a marriage of 21 December 1865 for the two of them, a date that made Virginia six years old at her wedding. That date belongs to Augustin’s first marriage, to Mary Christoffel, at Mansura. The second marriage, on the first family’s account above, was on 17 July 1894 in St. Martin Parish, and Augustin was still married when he made it. So the theory was right for the wrong reason: both marriages were real, and only the first was valid. The 1894 record itself has not been read; the date rests on the descendant’s account.
2. The Mary Virginia Cottrell who died at New Orleans in 1933 is our Virginia. She is Mary Virginia Cottrell Moon, born in West Virginia, with a different mother, a different husband and a different burial parish. Disproved twice.
3. Virginia may have been a woman of colour, which would explain her absence from every index. A reasonable idea. One document ended it: Jeffrey’s own draft card, which names her, records the family as white.
4. Clerine Cottrel, who married a Serrette in 1884, is Virginia’s sister. The 1900 census gives Clerine’s father’s birthplace as Louisiana. Virginia’s father was born in Virginia. Not her sister.
5. Emily, the woman in the household, is too young to be her mother and must be a stepmother. An earlier census makes Emily three years older than we had assumed. She is Virginia’s mother, and had been in plain sight the whole time.
6. These are Anglo Protestants from Virginia, so the Catholic registers are the wrong place to look. They were married in a Catholic church. That one wrong assumption nearly cost us the answer, because the answer was in those registers all along.

What broke it open

What finally worked was giving up on her surname. Every search that failed had been a search by name, and the name was the one thing about this family that was never stable. Nobody in the household could write, so their name was set down by other people, differently, every time.

So we searched without it: a girl named Virginia, of the right age, in the right region, whatever the surname. That turned up a household in Iberville Parish, one parish over, headed by a John Contrell born in Virginia, with a wife Emily and a daughter Virginia of exactly the right age.

From there a marriage index searched from the bride’s side gave a wedding at Saint Gabriel Catholic Church in 1851, and once we knew the church we knew which published registers to search: the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s abstracts of the original books. The entry was there, indexed twice, once under each family’s name.

On the photograph of the register page the right-hand third of every line disappears into the binding, and the words that make Eliza Steed the groom’s mother rather than a former wife are exactly the ones swallowed by the gutter. What settled it was a diocesan archivist who, decades ago, sat with the original book and typed out what it said:

“John, native of Mill County, Virginia (John Cotreall and Eliza Steed) m. 15 May 1851 Emilie Croker (Joseph Croker and Cidalise Lambremont) wit. Etienne Bujol; Thomas C. Brown; Thomas L. Billings; Adolphe Housieu.” — Saint Gabriel, register 19, page 162, as abstracted in Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, volume 7, page 143.

One line named four grandparents.

The line behind Virginia

Virginia Cottrelle was the third daughter of John Cotreall, a labourer from Virginia who could not write, worked as an engineer at Plaquemine before the war and as a swamp labourer after it, and Emilie Croker, from a St. Gabriel family. Her sisters have names and dates: Marie Melinga, the Malinda of the census, born 21 December 1851, and Mary Ida, born 9 April 1856 and baptised at Plaquemine with a Crocker aunt as godmother. A brother, Clarence, arrived about 1869.

Her mother’s line goes further than we expected. Emilie’s father, Joseph Croquer, was born in 1811 and died at Plaquemine in 1862. In 1834 he married Marie Cidalise Lambremont, a widow, at St. Gabriel; her own baptism, found in the same diocesan series under the spelling “Francisca Cilari”, gives her birth as 20 December 1799 and names her parents as Michel Lambremont and Marguerite Pelagie Braux. Joseph’s parents, Raphael Croquer and Ozita Barbara Mollere, married in 1803; Raphael was a captain of grenadiers in the Regiment of Louisiana in the Spanish service and later commandant of the Baton Rouge post, and the 1803 register records him as “Rafael, of Guatemala”, the son of Estanislas Croquer and Maria Ana Munoz. That Estanislao Croquer, born about 1722 at Puerto Real near Cádiz, reached Guatemala about 1748 as an officer of militia and served as a provincial governor there; a Central American biographical dictionary confirms the identification and names his parents in turn. Ozita’s parents were Joseph Mollere and Ozita Barbara Blanchard of Iberville.

So the woman who had no parents at all now has a documented line behind her that runs out of south Louisiana, through the Spanish colonial army in Guatemala, to Andalusia.

What is still open

• Virginia’s own baptism. Not in the volume it should be in, nor anywhere in the series. Her sisters were both baptised late and her father was a Protestant Virginian; she may never have been baptised.
• “Mill County, Virginia.” Printed exactly so in the register, and no Virginia county of that name exists. It stands uncorrected rather than guessed at as Mercer or Middlesex.
• The 1894 marriage record. The date and the account of the bigamy come from a descendant of Augustin’s first family. The original, in St. Martin Parish, has not been read, and St. Martin falls under the Diocese of Lafayette, whose registers are not among the published series we hold.
• Jeffrey’s birth date, and the word “divorced”. Three dates, two death dates, one death record and a family memory that does not match it, recorded as a conflict rather than resolved either way.

Every claim here rests on a record we have read, with the volume and register cited in the working files, except the 1894 marriage and the account of the bigamy, which rest on a descendant's narrative and are marked so above. Nothing rests on another family's tree.