♂Antoine Serrette

Antoine Serrette (December 1789 – April 1848) was a farmer of West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, who held five enslaved people after his first wife’s death in 1837 and sold five enslaved people with his land in 1839. When he died nine years later, almost nothing was left of his estate. He was the great-great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Firmin Serrette (born 1818), Firmin’s son Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Pierre’s daughter Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Early life

Antoine was christened at St. Louis Cathedral^W in New Orleans on 19 September 1791, when he was twenty-one months old, so he was probably born in December 1789. The entry gives no birthplace; it describes his parents as residents of New Orleans. An online family tree places his birth at St. Gabriel, in Iberville, but no record of the birth has been found. His father, Jean Serrette, was recorded at his marriage as “of Bordeaux” and as the widower of an Anna Laroque. His mother, Anne Sigur, was described at her burial as “of Nantes, France”; her parents, Laurent Sigur and Anne Roche, were recorded as “of San Christoval, Province of Lorrena”, that is, Lorraine. Jean Serrette and Anne Sigur had married on 17 September 1782. Antoine’s mother was buried on 14 November 1797, when he was seven, and his father on 26 November 1803, aged 55, when Antoine was thirteen. His brothers and sisters included Rosalie, born in 1787; Henriette, who married Magloire Dupuis in 1801; and Celestin.

First marriage

On 5 September 1814, at St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge, Antoine, then described as “of New Orleans”, married Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc of Iberville, a daughter of Joseph Leblanc and Julie Trahan. His brother Celestin was a witness. Less than two years later, on 19 May 1816, Celestin married Eulalie’s sister Reine Sophie Leblanc, so that two Serrette brothers were married to two Leblanc sisters. Antoine and Eulalie had five children: Firmin, Valentin, Emma, Arcade and Aurore.

By 1837 the family was living in West Baton Rouge Parish. Eulalie died there on 9 September 1837. The inventory of the couple’s property, taken at Antoine’s house on 25 September 1837, listed a tract of two arpents^W front by forty deep, lying forty arpents back from the Mississippi, with its buildings, valued at $2,000; sixteen arpents of cotton and nine of corn; horses, oxen, cows, sheep and hogs; and a gig. It also listed five enslaved people: “Eliza a negro Woman of about 27 years with her three children, Joseph of 6 years, Francois of 4 years & Merite a sucking child, appraised together at fourteen hundred dollars”, and “Betty of about 60 years, appraised at One hundred Dollars”. Eliza, Joseph, Francois, Merite and Betty made up $1,500 of the $4,242.45 inventory, more than a third of its value and more than the land and buildings together.

On the same day Antoine swore as legal tutor of his five children, all then minors, and signed his own name; Celestin was sworn as under-tutor. A family meeting of the children’s “relations & friends”, met on 5 October 1837 and agreed unanimously to his request that the whole community property be set over to him at its appraised value, and the parish judge confirmed it the next day. Nothing was sold at auction. The children’s half of the estate became a sum their father owed them, and in April 1840 Firmin gave him a receipt for 200 piastres on account of his share.

Second marriage and the sales of land

On 9 September 1838, at Baton Rouge, Antoine married Drusilla Denham of West Baton Rouge. On 20 June 1839, by an act before the parish judge, he sold his tract to his neighbor F. A. Woods “together with five slaves”, keeping a mortgage to secure the $5,500 still owed on the price. The sale is known from Antoine’s own petition of 1843, which gives the number of people sold but not their names. The number matches the 1837 inventory. What became of Eliza, her children and Betty after the sale is not known.

In 1843 he sold a smaller tract, one and a quarter arpents front by two deep, to Oramas Hebert for $600 in cash. Because the four children still under age held a claim on his property for their inheritance, a second family meeting was needed. On 13 March 1843 it was made up of Labauve and Dupuy men, described this time simply as the children’s “relations”, and it authorized Celestin to release their claim on the land sold.

Antoine and Drusilla had three children: Jean Cirille, born in 1842, who died at the age of seven in 1849; Arthur, born in 1846; and Marie Philomane, born on 25 May 1848, seven weeks after her father’s burial.

Death

Antoine Serrette died in April 1848 at Brusly, in West Baton Rouge Parish, and was buried there on 6 April 1848. Before his death he had also sold a further tract, three quarters of an arpent front on the Mississippi by twenty-six arpents deep, to Eugene Leblanc, to be paid in installments. The last installment, $300, fell due in January 1848. By December 1850 Drusilla had remarried, to Loretto Rodriguez, and was living in East Baton Rouge Parish. In August 1851 she opened Antoine’s succession in the West Baton Rouge court. She was a creditor of the estate for money of her own that he had received, and she served as its administratrix. Her petition stated that he had left two minor children, but the file never names them. When the parish recorder took the inventory in September 1851, the whole estate was that unpaid instalment, with “no other property to be inventoried”. The final account paid the widow’s claim, the court officers and the attorney. No distribution to heirs appears in the file, which closes in 1853.

Notes

His burial record gives his age as 63, which would place his birth about 1785. The date of December 1789 is worked back from the age of twenty-one months given in the 1791 entry, and no register of his birth is known. The birthplace of St. Gabriel comes from an online family tree that cites no source for it.

A marriage record of 1864 names a Rosalie Rodriguez of Baton Rouge as a daughter of Antoine Serrette and Drusilla Denham. She would make a third minor child in 1851, where the succession names two. Her own baptism has not been found, and the records do not settle whose daughter she was.

The 1791 baptism

The entry is in the baptism register of St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, book 11, page 160, and is printed in Earl C. Woods and Charles E. Nolan, Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, volume 5, page 94. It gives the child’s age as twenty-one months, describes his parents as residents of New Orleans, and gives no birthplace.