♀Céleste Dupuis

Céleste Dupuis, also called Silésie (15 January 1801 – after 1871), was a woman of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, who in old age administered her own orphaned grandchildren’s estate for several years. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (1827–1867).

Early life

Céleste Dupuis was born in St. James Parish on 15 January 1801 and christened there on 24 May 1801, the daughter of Pierre Dupuis and Rosalie Theriot; her godparents were Joseph Dupuis and Agnes Daigle, and the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s abstract of the christening also names her four grandparents, Joseph Dupuis and Maria Poirier on her father’s side and Thomas Theriot and Agnes Daigle on her mother’s.

An abstract of the St. Martinville church register, as Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records gives it, places her marriage on 8 July 1816 at Saint Martinville, St. Martin Parish, to Michel Cormier, a minor son of Michel Cormier and the late Ludivine (the abstract writes her surname Broussard; the groom’s own 1799 baptism gives Guillebaut). The abstract also names her parents as Pierre and Oscalie Theriot, where her christening and the tree give Rosalie Theriot as her mother. By her own recorded birth and marriage dates she was fifteen years old when she married; no surviving record explains why the marriage came so early.

Marriage, widowhood and later life

The couple settled at Grand Pointe and had sixteen known children over some thirty years, the first an unnamed son who was born and died in December 1817 and the youngest, Corinne, born about 1847. Their daughter Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (1827–1867) married Léonard Thibodeaux and is the family’s line to this branch; four other daughters married between 1838 and 1850, and a son, Michel Treville, in 1838. The twins Emelie and Emile were born in 1833. Emelie married Pierre Dolze Melancon in 1851 and was dead by December 1854, leaving a young son, Alfred. A 1967 genealogy of the family by Earl E. Vallot in the Attakapas Gazette, the index of baptisms at St. Martin church and the 1850 census household supply the names, and Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana adds that Sosthène, born in 1829, died at five in 1834.

Céleste Dupuis was widowed sometime before 28 December 1854, when she petitioned the St. Martin court and was sworn natural tutrix of her minor children, Sylvain, Césaire, Euzeide and Corinne among them, and of her grandson Alfred Melancon, Emelie’s son; she signed that petition, and every later document in the family’s court records, by her mark.

Céleste Dupuis outlived her husband by many years. After her daughter Madeleine Ordalie Cormier died in 1867, Céleste Dupuis was chosen, on 17 January 1868, as tutrix of Ordalie’s own orphaned children, in preference to their paternal grandmother — both women were “the nearest ascendants of said minors, in the same degree,” and the court had to choose between them. Céleste Dupuis then administered her grandchildren’s inheritance in her own name for several years: she petitioned for the estate’s inventory and sale, stood as the file’s principal party through 1868, and filed the final account as administratrix on 1 August 1871, the last date on which she is known to have been living.

Notes

A Geneanet family tree gives her a death on 4 November 1850, which the court record disproves outright — she was her husband’s living wife that year, and was still active in court, by mark, twenty-one years later. That compiled date has not been used. Her parentage, Pierre Dupuis and Rosalie Theriot, rests on the Diocese of Baton Rouge’s abstract of her own christening at St. James in 1801, which names all four of her grandparents; it rules out an earlier, untested family guess that made her a daughter of a different Dupuis couple in the same parish.