♂André Martin

André Martin (died 5 November 1814) was an emigrant from the Canary Islands who settled in the Baton Rouge district and married into a family of Acadian exiles. The two peoples had reached Louisiana by different roads: the Isleños^W were Spanish subjects recruited from the Canaries, the Acadians French-speaking refugees driven from Acadia. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Adelaide Martin (born 1796).

Origins and marriage

André, written Andrés and sometimes Martínez in the Spanish colonial registers, was a son of Balthazar Martin and Rosa Jacon, natives of the Canary Islands (“of St. Cruz” in the register of his marriage; the baptisms of two of his sons give Tenerife). Spain shipped Canary Island families to Louisiana between 1778 and 1783, and André most likely grew up at one of their settlements, Galveztown^W, on the Amite River near Manchac.

On 19 May 1794, at St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish, he married Marie Anne Landry, daughter of the Acadian exiles Pierre Paul Landry and Anne Josèphe Thériot, before the witnesses Joseph LeBlanc and Maturin Landry. The couple had their children baptized at St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge. In the federal census of 6 August 1810 his household was likely the one counted at Baton Rouge on the west bank of the Mississippi, where his estate was later settled; the east bank was still Spanish West Florida.

Family

Six daughters and four sons were born between 1795 and 1808; the youngest, Euphrosine, died in 1810 at nineteen months. André was not Acadian, but most of his children are said to have married Acadians, the daughters into the Daigre, Dupuis, Frederick, Lejeune and Raffray families, and his descendants to have become thoroughly Gallicized during the antebellum period.

Death

André died on 5 November 1814, and was probably the “Andres, age 40 yrs., married” buried at Baton Rouge the next day. In December 1816 his widow went before the probate judge of West Baton Rouge to ask for an inventory of their common property “in order to ascertain the rights of her children, nine in number”. On 31 December she married Jean Baptiste Dupuis. In time the family divided: the two older sons are thought to have stayed at Manchac, while the two younger ones went west with their mother to the prairies.

Notes

His burial

The burial entry names neither his wife nor his parents. It is matched to him by its place in the register’s Martin section, by the parish, where every act of this family was recorded, by the word “married”, and by his wife’s remarriage as a widow two years later. The identification is well supported but not certain; his date of death comes from his widow’s 1816 petition.

His age and origin

Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives his birth as about 1774, worked out from the age at his burial, not from a register; another compiled tree gives about 1768. A 1778 passenger list of recruits sailing from Santa Cruz de Tenerife names a Baltasar Martín with a son Andrés aged nine, but gives the wife as Rosalía Pérez, not Rosa Jacon; whether this is the same family is not settled. Galveztown as his home is Cormier’s suggestion (“probably was from the nearby Isleños community of Galveztown”); no record shows how or when his parents reached Louisiana, or when they died.

The 1810 household

The federal census entry for 6 August 1810 is headed “Andres Martin”, at Baton Rouge. It lists one man and one woman aged 26 to 44, and seven children under sixteen: one boy under ten, one boy and four girls aged ten to fifteen, and one girl under ten. Nine of the couple’s children were living that summer. The four girls aged ten to fifteen, the girl under ten and the boy aged ten to fifteen match Henriette, Adelaide, Merite, Elizabeth, Cleonise and Armand exactly, but the family had three boys under ten, Joseph, Pierre and Lucien, where the census counts one, so the identification with André is probable, not certain.

The children

Cormier counts at least nine children. The baptisms show ten, and the 1816 petition names the nine still living. Where the couple settled, the daughters’ marriages, the later move west and the Gallicization of the family are Cormier’s account.