♀Amelia Pennison Daigle

Amelia Pennison Daigle (6 February 1869 – 1906) was a Louisiana Acadian woman of Breaux Bridge, in St. Martin Parish, who married at fifteen and had eight children in all with her husband Pierre Anatole Serrett. She was the grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Early life

She was born at Breaux Bridge on 6 February 1869, the date cut on her gravestone, the eldest child of Jean Baptiste Daigle and Melia Thibodeaux, who had married at Breaux Bridge in April 1868. Her grandparents were Maximilien Daigle and Marcelite Ida Melancon on her father’s side, and Leonard Thibodeau and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier on her mother’s. The Thibodeau side lived in St. Martin Parish; the Daigle side had come from West Baton Rouge, where a St. Martin church entry of 1857 calls Maximilien Daigle “of W. Baton Rouge” and his first marriage, in 1837, was recorded at St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge. The 1870 census lists an infant “Emelie O’Aigle”, aged one, in a Daigle household in St. Martin Parish, very likely her. By 1880 the family lived in the parish’s fifth ward, where the census names her, aged eleven, with her younger sisters Ida and Marie and her father’s sixteen-year-old brother, Deslua.

The census gives her mother only as “Melia D’Aigle”. Her maiden name, Thibodeaux, comes from the couple’s 1868 marriage record, from the parish’s estate files, and from the 1943 death record of Amelia’s sister Marie, which names their parents as Jean Batiste Daigle and Amelia Thibodeaux. Where her own middle name, Pennison, came from is not known; no Pennison appears among her known forebears.

Marriage and family

She married Pierre Anatole Serrett at St. Martin Parish on 12 June 1884, aged fifteen. Their first child, Euphemie, is given in the 1900 census as born in March 1884, which would put her birth a few months before the wedding. The couple had eight children between 1884 and 1903, the youngest being Ida, and the 1900 census finds them in the parish’s second police-jury ward.

Death

She died in 1906, aged thirty-seven, when Ida was two; a Find a Grave index places her death at Breaux Bridge. The same source places her burial at Cecilia, under a later granite stone she shares with her husband, who outlived her by nearly twenty years and died in 1926.

Notes

The month of her death is uncertain. The cemetery index gives 24 August 1906; the stone, a modern replacement, reads 24 November 1906. Neither is a contemporary record, and a search of the 1906 newspapers of St. Martinville and Lafayette found no notice of her death in either month. Her baptism and burial would appear in the registers of the Diocese of Lafayette, which have not been consulted. Until her baptism is seen, the day of her birth rests on the same modern stone, and Euphemie’s birth month on a single census column. The middle name Pennison was carried in the family tree from its start and has no record behind it yet.