♀Éléonore Prejean

Éléonore Prejean (baptized 7 October 1770) was a woman of the Acadian Coast^W of the Mississippi who married Nicolas Thibodeaux, a young man of the Attakapas District^W, in 1793. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Doralie Thibodeau (1799–1855).

Marriage and family

Éléonore was baptized at St. James on 7 October 1770, a daughter of Basile Prejean and Marie Josephe Godin, with Antoine Dupres and Marie Anne Godin as her godparents. Nicolas Thibodeaux and Éléonore Prejean were married at Ascension on 21 October 1793, with Pierre Carmouche and the groom’s brother Cyrille Thibodeaux as witnesses. The groom’s parents were written “Olivier & Ignes Brian, of Attakapas”, and the couple made their home in that district: Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana places them at Grand Prairie, near present-day downtown Lafayette, and at Grande Pointe on upper Bayou Teche.

Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians lists ten children born to the couple between 1795 and 1810, among them two pairs of twins. An index of Louisiana baptisms gives the birth of their daughter Anne Doralie Thibodeau, written Ana, on 8 April 1799; she married Anaclet Melancon at Saint Martinville in January 1820.

Widowhood

Éléonore was a widow by 5 December 1817, when the St. Martin Parish judge named a subrogé tuteur for five of her minor children, “enfants légitimes” of the late Nicholas Thibodeau and of Dame Éléonore Prejean, his wife; an inventory of their community property followed on 18 December at her request. Cormier, quoting the burial records, adds that one of the twin sons born in 1801 died at Grand Prairie in October 1818, aged 17, and that another son died in August 1825 “at his mother’s home at la grand pointe”. No record of her own death has been found.

Notes

Her name is written Leonore in the abstract of her baptism and Eleonor in that of her marriage. Arsenault gives her birth year as 1772 and places the marriage at Saint-Martinville about 1794 or 1795; the registers give her baptism at St. James on 7 October 1770 and the marriage at Ascension on 21 October 1793.

Anne Doralie’s birth date of 8 April 1799 comes from an index of Louisiana births, which gives Ana Thibodeaux as the daughter of Nicolas Thibodeaux and Éléonore Prejean. Anne Doralie’s place in this family rests on that index, on a baptism transcription of 1 November 1799 that names the same parents, on the 1820 marriage entry, on Cormier, who names Anne Doralise, the wife of Anaclet Melançon, as their daughter, and on Arsenault, who lists an Anne born in 1799 among their children. The parent link is on record rather than proven, because both church entries are known only from a published transcription. The 1820 entry calls Anne Doralie the minor daughter of the late Nicolas and Éléonore, with the father’s surname written Thibaudot. A different Anne Thibodeau, born on 27 April 1800 to Joseph Thibodeau and Pelagie Broussard, appears in a St. Martin family list printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1972; a burial entry of 12 May 1800 for that child rules out the identification.