♀Delphine Marcotte

Delphine Marcotte (January 1824 – 1900) was a woman of Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, a daughter of the Marcotte and Joffrion families, who married Samuel Dillahunt in 1840; sixteen days after her wedding, Sallust Marcotte, very likely her brother, married her husband’s sister, Elizabeth Delahunt, so that the two families were joined twice over within the same month. She was the great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and his son Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Early life

Delphine Marcotte was born in Louisiana in January 1824, the month and year given by the census of 1900. Her parents were most likely Augustin Marcotte (1796–about 1839) and Celeste Aimee Joffrion, who had married in a civil ceremony in Avoyelles Parish on 19 September 1816. A family history written by a descendant says her father died about 1839, the year before her marriage; no record of his death has been found, but he does not head a household in the 1840 census, and in 1850 his widow does. A 1978 transcription of the register of St. Paul the Apostle at Mansura names Sallust as a son of the same parents. No record yet names Delphine’s own parents: the link rests on the family history and on the two marriages of March 1840.

Marriage and family

On 3 March 1840, aged sixteen, Delphine married Samuel Dillahunt in Avoyelles Parish; the date and parish come from two compiled Louisiana marriage indexes, not from the original act. A member’s tree citing a printed abstract of the parish’s marriage records names the witnesses as Felix Marcotte, Augustus Moreau and Louis Mayeux. On 19 March 1840 her brother Sallust married Samuel’s sister Elizabeth in a civil ceremony, with Samuel as a witness. Because a brother and sister of one family had married a sister and brother of the other, the children of the two couples were double first cousins, sharing all four grandparents.

In 1850 the couple were living in Avoyelles Parish, where Samuel was enumerated as a carpenter, with their children Virginie, then 7, and Augustin, 5. Two children of the marriage are known: Virginie Delahunt (about 1843–1912) and Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915). A younger son, Martin, may have been a third child. A family history written by a descendant places the couple at Mansura, not far from Marksville, the parish seat.

Widowhood and later life

A family history written by a descendant says that Samuel died in 1860, and the census that year points the same way. When the census taker reached Marksville on 10 December 1860, the only Dillahunt household in the parish was headed by “Mrs. S. Dillahunt”, 35, taken to be Delphine, listed as a widow under her husband’s initial, with real and personal estate of $300 each and five children in the house. The census recorded her as illiterate. The household appears on no 1860 slave schedule.

On 11 April 1862 she married Pascal Maillet in Avoyelles Parish. The records do not say what became of him. In 1870 she was again enumerated in Avoyelles Parish as “Wid. S. Dillahunt”, 44, keeping house, owning real estate worth $400, illiterate, and sharing the house with a woman recorded only as Rachel, aged 24.

In June 1900 Delphine, then 76 and widowed, was living in Ward 9 of Avoyelles Parish, recorded under her maiden name, Marcotte, in the household of her granddaughter’s husband, where her daughter Virginie also lived. No record of her death has been found; the family record gives 1900 as the year, which would place it after the June census, in Avoyelles Parish.

Notes

The 1860 and 1870 households are identified as hers from the husband’s initial, her age, the parish and the absence of any other Dillahunt household there; neither census states a relationship. The five children in the 1860 household are recorded as Marie, 17, Lucia, 12, John, 10, Samuel, 8, and Cora, 6. Marie’s age matches Virginie’s, but the name does not, and Augustin, then 15, is not in the house; the other four are unidentified. The 1900 census recorded her as the mother of four children, one of them living, though Virginie was in the same house and Augustin was alive until 1915; the records do not agree on how many children she had.

A possible third child

A family history written by a descendant calls Martin Delahunt Augustin’s “younger brother”, a family account rather than an original record. The 1870 census lists a sixteen-year-old “Delehant” Martin in Augustin’s household at Marksville, with no relationship stated, and in 1880 a Martin aged 27 is enumerated in Avoyelles Parish. No Martin is named among the 1860 household’s children. His 1877 marriage gives no parents, and no baptism naming Samuel and Delphine as his parents is known. The link to Delphine is therefore circumstantial, and Martin is not counted among her children here.