♀Angela Willie Delahunt

Angela Willie Delahunt (5 March 1878 – 20 July 1944) was a Louisiana-born woman, one of twin daughters, who married in Harrison County, Texas, in 1905, lost her only recorded child before 1910, was widowed by 1920, and lived and died at Marshall, Texas. She was a daughter of Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and his first wife, Mary Christoffel (1850–1924), and so a half-sister of Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), the father of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Delahunt was born on 5 March 1878 at Bordelonville, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, the date her Texas death record gives. Her twin sister was Angeline. The census of 1880, whose enumerator entered the whole household by initials only, lists two daughters marked “A.”, both aged two, on the family’s Avoyelles farm. A family history posted online by a descendant of the first marriage names the twins as Angela and Angelina and calls Angela “Annie”. The same account states that about 1894, when the twins were sixteen, their father left his wife and children and went to St. Martin Parish, where he married again; Jeffrey was a son of that second marriage.

Angeline married in 1897 and kept her own house, but Angela was still single at the census of 1900, living with her mother, who was entered as a widow and head of the household, and her younger brothers and sister in Ward 8 of Avoyelles Parish. Her father was in fact still living; in 1903 he entered the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in New Orleans, where he died in 1915.

Marshall, Texas

After 1900 most of the family moved to Marshall, in Harrison County, Texas. On 11 October 1905, in Harrison County, Angela married Oscar D. Beach (1875–1917), an Indiana-born man. At the census of 1910 the couple were living in Ward 2 of Marshall, with her mother in the household. That census also records that Angela had borne one child and that the child was no longer living. No other record of the child has been found, and its name, sex and dates are not known.

A Find a Grave memorial gives Oscar Beach’s death as 17 July 1917. At the census of 1920 Angela was a widow and head of her own household at Marshall. Where she lived in the 1930s has not been established. A census entry of 1940 at Alexandria, Rapides Parish, was once taken to be hers, but it is her twin, Angelina Novo, a widow heading a household with her own son and daughter. Angela died at Marshall on 20 July 1944, at the age of sixty-six. Her death record names her parents as Augustine Delahunt and Mary Christoffel, the surname spelled there “Chrisertoffer”, and she was buried in St. Joseph Cemetery at Marshall.

Notes

Her husband’s name appears in the Texas marriage records with his initials as D. O. and P. O. Beach, and the family history calls him David O. Beach; the census of 1910 gives Oscar D. The family history also says that after Augustin Delahunt’s death her twin, whom it calls Angelina, helped their mother with the paperwork for a Confederate widow’s pension. No record read so far bears this out: the mother signed both applications of 1916 and 1917 by mark, and the state pension board rejected the first and indicated that it would reject the second.