♀Elizabeth Martin

Elizabeth Martin (1785–before 3 May 1844) was the wife of John Dillahunty and, after his death about 1830, headed her own household in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Two of her children married a brother and sister of the Marcotte family within sixteen days of each other in March 1840. She was the great-great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Samuel Dillahunt (1815–1860), grandson Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and great-grandson Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Early life and marriage

Elizabeth Martin’s parents are not known. Online family trees give her birth as 1785 in Avoyelles, and the 1830 census, which counts her among the women of her household aged 40 to 50, agrees with the year.

She married John Dillahunty, but where and when is not known; neither the Adams County marriage book nor the Catholic registers of Natchez record the marriage. Their eldest daughter, Emily, was born in Mississippi in about 1806, when John was living in the Natchez District^W, so the couple had presumably married by then. By 1815 the family was in Louisiana, where their son Samuel was born in about that year. A daughter, Elizabeth, followed in about 1818, and a younger son, Lewis, in the 1820s.

Widowhood

John Dillahunty died before the census of 1830, at which Elizabeth, recorded as “Elizabeth Dillahunty”, headed an Avoyelles household of six white people, with no adult man among them. The sheet counts eleven people in the house in all; the other five were entered in the columns for enslaved people or free people of color, but the faint sheet does not show clearly which. Her neighbors on the page formed a block of English-speaking families in a largely French parish.

On 12 October 1833 Elizabeth Martin, “widow Dillahunt” in the act, appeared before a notary in Avoyelles Parish and sold Robert Morrow her preemption right to 80 acres in the Prairie of Bayou Rouge, entered in her name at the commissioners’ office at Opelousas. The price was 20 acres taken out of the 80, the tract “where she is now living”, and Morrow took the other 60. She “does not know how to write”, the act records, and she signed with her mark. The family history says that her son-in-law Thomas Rhodes, Emily’s first husband, had given her 80 acres on Bayou Prairie Rouge, that she kept enough to live on while she raised her youngest son, and that in 1839 Emily, by then his widow and the wife of Martin Dunn, bought the rest back; Elizabeth lived there until she died.

On 3 March 1840 her son Samuel married Delphine Marcotte. On 19 March her daughter Elizabeth married Delphine’s brother, Sallust Marcotte, with Samuel as a witness. The children of the two couples were double first cousins, sharing all four grandparents.

Death

Elizabeth Martin died in Avoyelles Parish before 3 May 1844. On that day, before the parish judge at Marksville, her children gave John Botts, the administrator of her estate, a receipt as “the only heirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Martin widow John Dillahunt deceased”, each “heir of one fourth in the succession of said deceased”: Emily, evidently the “Amelia Dillahunt” of the act, wife of Martin Dunn of St. Landry Parish; Elizabeth, wife of Sallust Marcotte; Samuel; and Lewis, a minor whose tutor was Botts. In October 1845 Sallust Marcotte acknowledged that he had used his wife’s share, “a portion of her inheritance from the Estate of her deceased mother Mrs Elizabeth Martin widow of John Dillahunt deceased”, and made land over to her in repayment.

Notes

Birth and parentage

Her birth year and place come from online family trees, not from a record; the census bracket of 1830 agrees with the year. No record names her parents. Several Martin families of Natchez and of Avoyelles Parish lived nearby at the right time, but none has been linked to her by a record. Ancestry’s DNA-match suggestions, which are built from other members’ trees, have pointed to two couples as her possible parents, and records rule out both: William “Billy” Martin and Elizabeth McCoy married in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, on 6 December 1802, too late to be the parents of a woman born about 1785; and in the family of John Martin and Sarah Jeffries, of Virginia and Kentucky, both daughters named Elizabeth married other men.

Her children

Her daughter Elizabeth’s church marriage names her as a mother: a copy of the register of St. Paul the Apostle at Mansura, made by a certified records searcher in 1978, calls the bride a daughter of John Dillahunt and Elisabeth Martin. The 1844 receipt and the 1845 act name her children as her heirs; the acts write the son-in-law’s name Salluste.

The receipt calls the eldest daughter Amelia, where online family trees name her Emily. The records join the two names without any one of them giving both: Emilie, daughter of the late John, married Thomas Rhodes in September 1830; Amelia, widow of Thomas Rhodes, married Martin Dunn in February 1838, with Samuel Dillahunt as a witness; and Amelia, wife of Martin Dunn, was one of the four heirs in 1844. The 1850 census gives her as Emelia Dunn, aged 44 and born in Mississippi, and the family history calls her Amelia, born in 1806; the 1830 census, taken before her first marriage, counts one young woman aged 20 to 30 in the household.

The family history gives Lewis’s birth as about 1826; the receipt calls him a minor in May 1844, which agrees with a birth in the 1820s. Online family trees also list a son, Denis, whom the receipt does not name. A son living in 1844, or one who had died leaving children, would have shared in her succession, so if Denis was her son he died before May 1844 without children.

The land

The family history’s account of Thomas Rhodes’s gift, of Emily’s purchase in 1839 and of Elizabeth’s living on the land until her death rests on that account alone; it quotes the land-office entry at Opelousas as naming her “Elizabeth Martin, widow of John Dillahunt”. The 1833 act was filed on 24 January 1835. The family history’s account of the land being divided equally among four children, Emily (Amelia), Samuel, Elizabeth and Lewis, agrees with the four equal shares in the 1844 receipt.

Her death and succession

The receipt of 3 May 1844, headed “Heirs of Mrs John Dillahunt”, is the only dated fixing of her death; the year 1844 in online trees agrees with it but is not independent proof. The 1845 act, of 7 October and filed on 25 October, refers to the heirs’ receipt. Her succession file is not among the parish’s probate records, which skip the years 1819 to 1854. Her daughter Elizabeth’s succession of 1875 is a different record.