♂Augustin Delahunt

Augustin Delahunt (21 July 1845 – 3 December 1915) was an Avoyelles Parish farmer and Confederate veteran who spent the last twelve years of his life in the Louisiana Confederate Soldiers’ Home at Camp Nicholls, New Orleans, and died there. He was the grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Early life

Delahunt was born on 21 July 1845 at Mansura, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, the son of Samuel Dillahunt (1815–1860) and Delphine Marcotte (1824–1900), and was with them in the parish in 1850. His father is said to have died in 1860, when Augustin was fifteen. That December the only Dillahunt household in the parish was headed by “Mrs. S. Dillahunt”, presumably his mother, and Augustin was not in it. In April 1862 his mother married Pascal Maillet.

The war

His widow’s pension application of 1916 states that he enlisted at Mansura in April 1864, at eighteen, as a private in Company D of the 18th Louisiana Infantry, and served until 13 May 1865. That spring the Red River campaign^W brought both armies through Avoyelles Parish, and on 16 May 1864 they fought the Battle of Mansura^W at his birthplace. The War Department told the state pension board that it held no record of him, though its rolls of the regiment ended seven months before his stated enlistment. The board rejected the claim in January 1917 and indicated that it would reject a second application, filed that April, on the same grounds.

Marriage and family

On 21 December 1865 Delahunt married Mary Christoffel (1850–1924), the Louisiana-born daughter of German immigrants, at St. Paul’s church in Mansura. The couple farmed in Avoyelles Parish and had eight children between 1867 and 1886, among them twin daughters born in 1878. The census of 1870 found them at Marksville with their first daughter and a sixteen-year-old Martin Delehant, perhaps Augustin’s younger brother, and in 1880 he was still farming.

A second family

According to a family history posted online by a descendant of his first marriage, about 1894 Delahunt left his wife and children and went to Butte La Rose in St. Martin Parish, where he married a widow, Marie Virginia Cottrelle (1858–1937), in July 1894 while his first wife was still living and the first marriage had never been dissolved. A transcribed parish index records the wedding on 14 July 1894. Rumors about a first wife soon followed, the account goes on, and he left St. Martin Parish.

At the census of June 1900 both of his wives were recorded as widows. Mary headed her own household in Avoyelles Parish with four of the children; in St. Martin Parish Marie Virginia, entered as “Mrs. Justin Dillion”, had her Talley children by her first marriage and a son, Jeffrey, entered as two. Jeffrey Delahorne was born in 1899; his death record of 1929 names his father as Augustin Delahon, and it was his children who came to spell the surname Delahorne. The pension papers of 1916 and 1917 name Mary as his widow and do not mention the second marriage.

The Soldiers’ Home

On 23 June 1903, aged fifty-seven, Delahunt was taken into the Soldiers’ Home of Louisiana by its superintendent as a temporary inmate, registered as a veteran of Company D, 18th Louisiana, for “heart trouble & partial blindness”. He had no service papers, so on 1 August 1903 four Avoyelles Parish men who had known him in the war swore statements before a parish notary, and in September he was admitted permanently. He drew no pension of his own; as the superintendent later wrote, “No one gets a pension while in the Home.” He had taken up contact with his first family again, by the family history’s account, and visited them at Marshall, Texas, where they had moved, while on leave.

He died at the Home on 3 December 1915 and was buried in New Orleans, in the Soldiers’ Home tomb at Greenwood Cemetery, the family history says, forty numbered vaults that carry no names. His widow, then living at Alexandria, stated in her 1917 application that she did not know how he had died, because the family was not notified of his death until after the burial. The New Orleans paper La Guêpe listed him among its deaths of 5 December 1915 as “Augustin Delahante, 70 ans, Soldiers’ Home”.

Notes

His service

No record of his service from the war itself has been found, and the unit rests on what Delahunt and the men who vouched for him told the Soldiers’ Home in 1903. The superintendent’s letters of 1916 say he was admitted on the sworn statements, not on any War Department record, and his widow’s lawyer wrote in 1916 that she had learned the company from the Home. Because the War Department’s rolls of the regiment ended on 31 August 1863, its search could not have found him either way. The family history calls his company “Lee’s Tigers”. That name belonged to the Louisiana brigades in the Army of Northern Virginia, and the 18th Louisiana did not serve there.

His family of birth

The year of his father’s death comes from a family history written by a descendant; the December 1860 household is identified as his mother’s by the husband’s initial, her age and the absence of any other Dillahunt household in the parish. The parish index of his 1865 marriage, where the groom is written “Augustin Delchrist”, names his parents as Sam and Delphine Marcotte. His mother’s remarriage in 1862 is indexed under the name “Delphine Marcotte Dillehunt”, which places Samuel’s death before that April. The 1870 census states no relationship for Martin Delehant. In 1880 Martin had a ten-year-old niece named Delphine in his own household, and a compiled tree names a Martin Delahunt, born in 1852, as a son of Samuel and Delphine; no Martin is listed in the 1860 household.

The second marriage and Jeffrey

The account of the second marriage was written by a descendant of the first marriage, not by anyone of the Delahorne line; if it is right, the second marriage was bigamous. The St. Martin Parish marriage record itself has not been examined; the index gives 14 July 1894, with the surnames indexed as Delion and Deleon, and the family history 17 July 1894; the index date is the one used here. The family history says Jeffrey was born a few months after his father left, but his recorded birth in 1899 is about four and a half years after the marriage, and the records do not explain the gap; the 1900 census gives his age as two. That Augustin was Jeffrey’s father rests on the surname his mother used in 1900 and on the father’s name in the index of Jeffrey’s death record; the certificate itself has not been seen.

His death

His widow’s pension applications gave his death as November 1915; the state death index gives 3 December, and an index of Orleans Parish death certificates lists him under certificate number 79.