♂Emile Serrette

Emile Serrette (born about 1859) was a man of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, who shot and killed his elder brother Alfonse in the swamps at Butte-a-la-Rose in September 1887, and was released when the grand jury found that he had acted in self-defence. He was the younger brother of Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926), the grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), and in 1910 he had Anatole’s youngest daughter, Ida, the mother of Floyd, living in his house.

Early life

He was a son of Firmin Serrette and Euphemie Dupuis, born in Louisiana about 1859; the censuses give his birth anywhere from 1855 to 1861. In 1870 he was at home with his parents in West Baton Rouge Parish. By 1880 he had moved west to St. Martin Parish, where a FamilySearch index of the census, which writes the name Alphonse, places him with his brother Alfonse.

Marriage and the killing

On 19 January 1884, in St. Martin Parish, he married Clorine Cottrel, born in January 1870; she was fourteen. Their first child, Adelaide, was born in January 1887.

On Monday 5 September 1887, at Butte-a-la-Rose, Emile killed Alfonse. A New Orleans paper reported that the coroner went to the scene and that Emile surrendered to the sheriff. Later that month a St. Martinville paper reported that the grand jury had found no true bill against him, since “the killing appears to be in self defense”. The papers do not say what the quarrel was about.

Later life

A FamilySearch index of the 1900 census places Emile and Clorine in Police Jury Ward 2 of St. Martin Parish with five children: Adelaide, Adoliska, Annie, Josephine and Dewey, born between 1887 and 1899. Clorine died before 1910. By then Emile was a widower of fifty, still in Ward 2, and living with him was his seven-year-old niece Ida. Ida’s mother had died in 1906, and her father Anatole was living alone nearby. The enumerator entered Ida as Emile’s daughter. No record of Emile’s death has been found.