♂Balthazar Martin

Balthazar Martin was a Canary Islander, an Isleño, of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, whose only known child settled among the Acadians of the Baton Rouge area. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son André Martin.

Origins

Balthazar Martin and his wife, Rosa Jacon, are named in Spanish colonial church records of the Baton Rouge district as being “of St. Cruz, Canary Islands” and, later, as “natives of Tenerife” — the wording used when their son André married in 1794 and when their granddaughter was baptized in 1807. No record of their own birth, marriage, arrival in Louisiana, or death has been found; nothing places them in Louisiana before their son’s marriage. Spanish Canary Islanders, called Isleños^W, were brought to Louisiana in the late 1770s at the direction of Governor Bernardo de Gálvez^W, who founded several settlements for them, including Galveztown, Louisiana^W, on the Amite River, not far from where Balthazar and Rosa’s own family later lived. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana says only that their son André “probably was from the nearby Isleños community of Galveztown”; that the parents reached the colony by that route is an inference, and no record has been found that shows it or names them among a particular convoy.

Family

The couple had one known son, André Martin, who married Marie Anne Landry, a daughter of Acadian exiles, at St. Gabriel in 1794, and settled north of Bayou Manchac in what became East Baton Rouge Parish. Cormier’s compilation notes that most of André’s own children married into Acadian families of the district, and that his descendants became thoroughly Gallicized during the antebellum period. No record of Balthazar or Rosa themselves surviving into their son’s Louisiana household, or of either of their deaths, has been found.

Notes

A list of Canary Islander recruits who embarked at Santa Cruz de Tenerife on the packet boat Santísimo Sacramento on 10 July 1778, printed in Gilbert C. Din’s The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (1988), names a Baltasar Martín, his wife Rosalía Pérez and five children, among them a son Andrés aged nine. The name, the port and a son Andrés of about the right age all fit, but the wife’s name differs from Rosa Jacon, and an Andrés of nine in 1778 would have been born about 1769, some five years before the about 1774 that André Martin’s recorded age at death implies. Whether this Baltasar is the same man is not settled, and the records of the Baton Rouge district do not connect the two.