♂Eloi Dupuis

Eloi Dupuis (17 June 1791 – before 7 June 1831) was a man of the Acadian community of the lower Mississippi who married in 1817 and headed a household in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, in the censuses of 1820 and 1830. Four months before his wedding, his father married Marie Anne Landry, the widow of André Martin, who was herself an ancestor of the same family through another line. He was the great-great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Euphemie Dupuis (born 1817), her son Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and his daughter Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Early life

Eloi was a son of Jean Baptiste Dupuis and Elizabeth Benois, both of Acadian families, who had married on 7 February 1775 at Ascension on the Mississippi. He was born on 17 June 1791 and baptized on 23 October 1791 at St. Gabriel, in Iberville Parish, in Spanish Louisiana. The published abstract of the St. Gabriel register (the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, vol. 2) records “Elois”, child of Juan Dupuis and Ysabel de Benois, with Joseph de Puis and Julia de Puis as godparents; Julia was his elder sister. An online index of the same entry records the child as a girl, but the abstract gives no sex, and he is the couple’s only child of the name. The census of 1830 places his birth between 1780 and 1790, a year early. The couple’s other children were baptized at St. Gabriel between 1778 and 1801 (Julia, Marine, Adelaide, Benito, Benoito, Isabel, Victor and Alexi), and a son Hipolite married there on 7 January 1800. Eloi first appears as an adult in 1808, when he and Anne Benoit stood as godparents at St. Gabriel to Hypolite, son of Hypolite Dupuis and Adelaide Dousset. The register names the child’s paternal grandparents as Jean Baptiste Dupuis and Elizabeth Benoit, so the boy was Eloi’s nephew.

Elizabeth Benois died in April 1816. In September of that year his father asked the probate judge of West Baton Rouge Parish, William Wikoff Junior, for an inventory of the property held in community between them, and the estate was divided into eleven equal shares among her children, Eloi among them. On 31 December 1816, at Baton Rouge, his father married Marie Anne Landry, the widow of André Martin. The Saint-Servan register records the baptism of a Marie Anne Landry on 30 May 1768 to exiled Acadians, and compiled genealogies identify her with the widow of André Martin; the register of her 1794 marriage calls her parents only “of St. Malo, France”, and her 1785 crossing to Louisiana rests on a compiled list of the exiles. Through her daughter by her first marriage, Adelaide Martin, she was a direct ancestor of Ida Serrette on her mother’s side, while Eloi was Ida’s ancestor on her father’s. The two lines met in Ida’s parents, Eloi’s grandson Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle, Marie Anne’s great-great-granddaughter. The 1820 census index lists six enslaved people in his father’s household in West Baton Rouge, and an estate file for his father was opened in St. Martin Parish in 1831.

Marriage and family

On 21 April 1817 Eloi married Henriette Hebert, daughter of Charles Hebert and Marguerite Godreau. The entry, in the register of St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish, describes both bride and groom as of the parish of the Virgin Mary at Baton Rouge, and records that the curé of St. Gabriel, then also serving the Baton Rouge parish, performed the marriage after the parish judge had certified that there was no impediment. Eloi, Henriette and both of their fathers signed it. Their first child, Euphemie, was born on 12 September 1817, about five months after the wedding.

The couple settled on the west bank of the river. The census of 1820 lists Eloi as head of a small household in West Baton Rouge Parish, on a page crowded with Dupuis, Hebert, Daigle, Landry, Templet and Babin households; the census of 1830 finds him there again, spelled “Eloi Dupuys”, as head of a household that also counts one woman aged 30 to 40, presumably Henriette, and five children. The couple had seven children in all: Euphemie, Urasia Maria, Rosalie, Eloi, Marguerite Henriette and Ferreole were born between 1817 and 1826 and baptized at St. Gabriel or at St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge, and a son, Edouard, is known from his marriage in 1857. Their son Eloi married Marie Edilia Hebert at Brusly in 1851, the register noting that the couple were related in the second degree, that is, first cousins.

Death

Eloi died between the census of 1830, which still lists him in West Baton Rouge Parish, and 7 June 1831. On that day, before Louis Favrot, judge of West Baton Rouge Parish, Henriette Hebert, described as “veuve de feu Eloi Dupuis” (widow of the late Eloi Dupuis), acting as guardian of their minor children, named Victor Dupuis her attorney for their share of his father’s succession. The children were Euphemie, Urasia (written “Eurasie”), Eloi, Marguerite and Ferreole (written “Feriol”). The place of his death is not recorded. Henriette outlived him by many years: the census of 1880 lists her, widowed and about 81, in the household of their son Ferreole in West Baton Rouge Parish.

Notes

A probate sale notice in the Baton-Rouge Gazette of January 1844 describes a riverfront tract in West Baton Rouge Parish bounded by the land of a “Veuve Eloi Dupuis”, the widow of an Eloi Dupuis. If she was Henriette, Eloi had died by early 1844, but the notice gives no other name. Online family trees give him a birth on 17 June 1791 in Iberville Parish, which matches the St. Gabriel register, and a death in 1857, which the 1831 estate record rules out. An index of War of 1812 service records lists an Eloi Dupuis as a corporal in the 8th Regiment (Meriam’s) of Louisiana Militia, with no age or residence; it has not been shown to be him.

He is easily confused with other men of the name: an Eloi Dupuis aged 38 in Assumption Parish in 1860, too young to be him; an “Elise Dupuis”, a planter who died in St. Martin Parish in 1849; and an Eloy Dupuy born in Vermilion Parish in 1861, whose online profile carries this Eloi’s name as an alternative. None of them is this man.