♂Denis Gédéon Talley

Denis Gédéon Talley (30 October 1850 – before July 1894) was a St. Martin Parish man, the first husband of Marie Virginia Cottrelle (1858–1937) and the father of her five Talley children who grew up. He was not an ancestor of the Delahorne line, but his children were the elder half-brothers and half-sister of Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), Virginia’s son by her second husband and the father of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

A Louisiana births-and-christenings index gives his birth as 30 October 1850, the son of William Denis Talley and Anais Guilbeau. The same index carries separate entries, with the same parents, for a sister, Marie Elodie (8 September 1852), and a brother, Jean (17 March 1854). His mother had died by September 1871, when her estate, entered as that of “Anais Guilbeau, wife of Denis Talley”, was opened in St. Martin Parish, according to a published abstract of the parish’s succession records. The index to the 1870 census lists him, as “Gedeon D Tally”, aged nineteen, in his father’s household in the first ward of St. Martin Parish. The 1910 census index shows his father married to a Mary, born about 1846, and a Find a Grave index gives the father’s death as 27 August 1911 and his burial at St. Martinville.

Marriage and family

On 30 September 1881, in St. Martin Parish, Denis Gédéon Talley married Virginia Cottrell; the parish marriage index also carries the couple under 13 October 1881. Their first child, Isabelle, registered as Lisabelle, is dated by the births index to Breaux Bridge on 15 September 1881, two weeks before the earlier of those dates. A son, registered as Denis Taylor Talley and known as Taylor, followed at Breaux Bridge on 2 February 1882, according to the same index. The 1900 census ages put Thomas at about 1884 and Jefferson at about 1886, and a gravestone index dates Zack to 1892, although his census age of ten points to about 1890. The 1900 census index records his widow as widowed, the mother of eleven children of whom six were living; the five Talley children above and her youngest son, Jeffrey, account for the six.

Notes

St. Martin Parish births after 1882 are not in the FamilySearch index, so the five of Virginia’s children who died young are not known by name, nor is it known how many of them were his.

Death

No record of his death or burial has been found. Zack, the youngest known child, was born between about 1890 and 1892, and his wife was a widow when she married Augustin Delahunt in St. Martin Parish on 17 July 1894, as a family history written by a descendant of Augustin’s first family records; the marriage record itself has not been found. On those two points he died between those dates. As a widow Virginia was recorded as Talley in 1920 and as Boudreaux in 1930, but her death certificate of 1937 still names her husband as J. D. Tally.