New The Silence at Bayou Rouge (Delahorne line)

The Delahorne side of the tree stops with Elizabeth Martin, who married John Dillahunt in the first years of the nineteenth century, buried him before 1830, farmed land on Bayou Prairie Rouge in Avoyelles Parish as a widow, and died there in 1844. We know her name and her four children. We do not know who her mother and father were, or where she was born.

Henry Delahunt, who worked on this family before us, was honest about the limit. He wrote that it was reasonable to guess she was born around 1780 to 1785, and then added the words that matter: but where and to whom is yet to be discovered. Every later family tree that confidently gives her a birthplace is repeating a guess he declined to make.

Where the answer ought to have been

There was good reason to be hopeful. In the Catholic parishes of south Louisiana a baptism record is not a bare line. The priest recorded the child, the parents and both sets of grandparents, often with the parish they lived in. A single entry can reach back two generations. Here is one from the register at Mansura, a few miles from where the family lived:

Sainte Geme Lemoine, born 28 February 1814, lawful son of Jean Baptiste Lemoine II and Marie Louise Ducote of Avoyelles, baptised 4 October 1814. Paternal grandparents: Jean Baptiste Lemoine I and Catherine Joffrion of Pointe Coupée; maternal grandparents: Pierre Ducote and Henriette Rabalais of Pointe Coupée. — St. Paul the Apostle, Mansura, Baptism Book 2, page 69

If any child of John Dillahunt and Elizabeth Martin had been baptised in that parish, the entry would have named her parents outright. Two of their children were born inside the years that book covers, so we read the published index to it, every name in the register from 1796 to 1824.

No Dillahunt in the register

No Dillahunt, under that spelling or any of the half-dozen ways a French-speaking priest might have heard an Irish-American surname. We checked the alphabetical position directly, where the entries run from De Jean through de Larch and Dellamer, and then every one of the 1,165 surname headings for anything of the right shape. One detail was worth keeping: the index lists mothers under their maiden names, and it holds exactly one Elizabeth Martin, a single appearance on page 19 of the register as either a mother or a godmother. We cannot yet tell which.

Were they even Catholic?

This is the question that reframes the search, and it should have come first. The register is a Catholic sacramental book, and a Protestant family would be absent from it whether they lived next door to the church or a hundred miles away.

There is a strong sign that they were Protestant. When the census taker came through in 1830 and wrote down the widow Elizabeth Dillahunty, the households on either side of her were Barker, Beard, Snoden, Botts, Morrow, Hamilton, Fentress, Hargrove, Brown, Murdock, Wilson, Reid, Simmons, Bell, Blackman, Hearn, Stephens, Fisher and Frith: an Anglo-American block inside a French Creole parish. Set that against the parish’s own founding. When the Bishop of Louisiana confirmed a class of 109 people at Avoyelles in November 1796, the families were Joffrion, Couvillon, Tassin, Mayeux, Bordelon, Lemoine, Gauthier, Roy, Ducote, St. Romain, Gaspard, Rabalais, Laborde, Juneau, Chatelain and Grand-Pré. Not one Anglo-American name among them.

Not the far edge, but the gap in the middle

It is tempting to picture Avoyelles as a last outpost with wilderness beyond. It was the opposite. It sat in the middle of a ring of older, larger posts, every one of which had a church before it did: Natchitoches to the north-west, Rapides upriver, Pointe Coupée on the Mississippi, Opelousas to the south. The 1794 census shows the problem. Opelousas had 2,454 people, Pointe Coupée 2,150, Natchitoches 1,631, Rapides 753, and Avoyelles 432. It was on the edge of every neighbour’s territory and at the centre of nobody’s, so it went unserved. Every priest who ministered there arrived from somewhere else and left again. One of them, in the 1770s, had all of central and north Louisiana at once, three churches more than 230 miles apart, on horseback.

The church in Avoyelles, year by year

A parish history written for the centenary of the church at Moreauville in 1961 sets out, priest by priest, what the Catholic church in Avoyelles consisted of. For most of the years the family lived there it barely existed.

• 1797 The Bishop erects Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the first parish in Avoyelles, near Cocoville. A church is built the next year at Hydropolis.
• 1803 Father Brady leaves after four and a half years. Father Lonergan stays eleven months and goes.
• 1804–1813 “Between the years 1804 and 1806, no priest visited the Avoyelles. In fact, there was not one priest within the present confines of the Diocese of Alexandria. This situation continued until 1813.” Nine years of annual visits from Opelousas at best.
• to 1817 “After several years of neglect, a bogus priest, named ‘Father Clement’, began performing the ecclesiastical functions at the Avoyelles. He remained until 1817.” Samuel was born in 1815.
• 1818 Father Maynes takes on the mission and finds that “the original Church of Neustra Senora del Carmen had disappeared.” He gives up within the year. Elizabeth was born in 1818.
• 1819–1824 Supplied at a distance, by a priest riding in from the Attakapas country and then one from Opelousas.
• 1824 Father Jean E. Martin arrives, the first resident pastor in twenty years. A new church at Hydropolis in 1825, furnished with an altar of boards on carpenter’s horses, a bone crucifix six inches high and two small brass candlesticks. Lewis was born in 1826, in the one good stretch.
• 1832–1834 The church wardens lock the pastor out, seal the doors and take the parish to court. The Bishop places the whole parish under interdict.
• 1844 Elizabeth Martin dies at Bayou Prairie Rouge.

Set the children’s birth years against that chronology and the absence of baptisms needs no further explanation.

A word about Amelia

The eldest child is the peg the Mississippi story hangs on, so it is worth saying exactly what holds her up. Henry Delahunt wrote that Martin Dunn appears on the 1850 St. Landry census as a planter from Virginia, and that “Amelia Dillahunt, his wife, was listed as being born in Mississippi in 1806”. That is a precise claim about a real page and is very probably right, but it is his reading and nobody has since opened that census. In our own records Amelia has no birth date, and the only independent evidence, her age bracket on the 1830 census, places her birth somewhere between 1800 and 1810 and says nothing about the state. So “1806, in Mississippi” should be read as a well-sourced family tradition awaiting confirmation. If she really was born in Mississippi in 1806, her parents married before then and somewhere else, which is the reason none of the Louisiana registers could ever have held the answer.

Mississippi

The Mississippi thread has one more strand. A mid-twentieth-century compilation of the early inhabitants of the Natchez District prints the 1810 tax list of Adams County, Mississippi, from a microfilm of the original roll, and “Dillahunt, John” is on it. A separate reading of the manuscript roll itself, made for this project, did not find him, and the two cannot both be right; either the reading missed one line among five or six hundred, or the compiler worked from a different roll, or she erred. Until the roll is read again against her other entries, John Dillahunt’s presence in Adams County in 1810 stays as a printed transcript, not a fact. What is settled is the other end: no Dillahunt appears in any Mississippi list of 1816, and by 1813 John was already party to a lawsuit in Pointe Coupée.

The same compilation lists the Martin households of the district: six Martin taxpayers in Adams County in 1810, among them a Nancy Martin heading her own line, which usually means a widow with property, and an Ann Martin in 1816. None of them is a father for Elizabeth; the lists are alphabetised, so nothing can be made of who lived beside whom. Their value is a named, dated, located Martin population in the one place outside Louisiana the family is known to have been.

The nearest church was not near

The family’s land was on Bayou Prairie Rouge, and in the parish’s own account that country was the edge of the mission. When the Bishop travelled through in 1825, falling in over his head at a bayou crossing on the way, the record notes his party reaching “the Petite-Prairie du Bayou Rouge, the outskirts of the Avoyelles mission”. Bayou Rouge was never a parish in those years. It was one of four mission stations attached to the church at Hydropolis, a place a priest visited rather than a place with a church. It got a church of its own, St. Stephen’s, in 1871, twenty-seven years after Elizabeth Martin died.

That also explains something we had noticed without understanding: baptisms in these registers run years late. A child born in March 1816 and one born in June 1817 were baptised on the same day in July 1818. People were not neglecting it. They were waiting for a priest to come.

What this settles

We set out to find a record and found none, twice over: not in the parish’s own baptism register, and not in the twenty-two published volumes covering every neighbouring parish along the rivers. The temptation at that point is to conclude something about the family. That would be a mistake. The silence has two sufficient explanations before you reach the family: they were almost certainly not Catholic, and for most of those years there was no functioning church within reach of their bayou. An absence of records is only evidence when records were being kept.

What it does settle is where to stop looking. The church route to Elizabeth Martin’s parents is closed, for a structural reason as well as an empirical one: even a Catholic marriage record for one of her children would name only their parents, whom we already know. Only her own marriage could name hers, and on the best reading of Amelia’s birth that happened before 1806 and outside Louisiana.

The courthouse has a gap too

The standard lists of American record losses carry Avoyelles with a loss in 1856, and the shape of what survives is consistent with something having gone. The probate series, the papers that divide a dead person’s property among named heirs, runs from 1808 to 1818 and picks up again in 1855. John Dillahunt died around 1830 and Elizabeth Martin in 1844. Both deaths fall inside the gap, and the succession that divided the Bayou Prairie Rouge land among the four children would have been the single most useful document in this search.

But the loss was partial. The marriage books survived: the compiler who abstracted the parish’s early marriages worked from Book A in the Marksville courthouse, well after 1856. Other descriptions of the courthouse put marriage, probate and conveyance records as running continuously from 1808 to 1920. How much was lost, and from which series, is unsettled, so no Avoyelles dead end should be treated as final until someone establishes what the 1856 loss actually took.

Where the search goes next

• A Baptist church on her own bayou. Bayou Rouge Baptist Church at Evergreen is the one Protestant congregation in the parish whose records overlap her life, beginning in 1841. It will not name her parents, since Baptists baptise adults, but a founding membership list shows who stood with whom, drawn from the same Anglo families the census puts around her door.
• A woman named Emily Martin. In 1815 an Emily Martin married Auguste Moreau, of the family Moreauville is named for. Four threads tie that household to ours: her husband witnessed the wedding of our Samuel in 1840; the Moreau household is the one enumerated immediately after our widow in 1830; the name Augustin then travels into our family and stays for generations; and Emily’s marriage record names her parents as Samuel Martin and Isabelle. If Emily was Elizabeth’s sister, that is the answer. It is not proved, and sister is only one of several relationships that fit, but it is the strongest thread there is.
• The Natchez District. A Samuel Martin bought land on Second Creek, near Natchez, in July 1790, and an Elizabeth Martin who signed with a mark gave evidence there in 1795 about long residence in the same neighbourhood. Whether either is ours is unknown; both belong to the same place and years as the 1810 tax list above.
• A neighbouring courthouse that lost nothing. The 1833 land transfer that names her as John Dillahunt’s widow was recorded not at Marksville but at Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, a courthouse with no recorded loss and a set of records not yet worked through on her account.

Sources: Blaise C. D'Antoni, One Hundred Years: A Parish History of Sacred Heart Church of Moreauville (1961), for the chronology of priests and mission stations; Vera Meek Wimberly, Index, Early Baptism Records, St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, 1796–1824, Avoyelles Parish (1981); Jeraldine DuFour LaCour, Bride's Book of Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, Volume I, 1808–1855, for the Martin–Moreau marriage of 12 October 1815; Serena Abbess Haymon, Early Inhabitants of the Natchez District of Mississippi, for the 1810 and 1816 lists; the 1830 United States census, Avoyelles Parish, page 205; and Henry Delahunt's family narrative.