♀Henriette Hebert

Henriette Hebert (about 1799 – after 1880) was a woman of the Acadian community of the lower Mississippi, who married in 1817 and lived out a long widowhood in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. She was the great-great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Euphemie Dupuis (born 1817), Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Family and marriage

Henriette was a daughter of Charles Hebert and Marguerite Godreau, both of Acadian families settled along the river at St. Gabriel and Baton Rouge. The Catholic registers of the district record thirteen brothers and sisters, those with known dates born between 1789 and 1807. No record of her own baptism is known. An entry for a “Henrieta” baptised at St. Gabriel in September 1796 belongs to a first cousin of the same name: two men named Charles Hebert married two Godreau sisters and baptised children at the same church, and that child was the daughter of the other couple.

On 21 April 1817 she married Eloi Dupuis, son of Jean Baptiste Dupuis and Elizabeth Benois. Both were then described as of the parish of the Virgin Mary at Baton Rouge, and the priest of St. Gabriel, acting in the parish functions at Baton Rouge, received their consent; the entry is in the St. Gabriel register. The register entry names both sets of parents and carries the signatures of the bride, the groom, and both of their fathers.

West Baton Rouge

The couple settled on the west bank of the river, in West Baton Rouge Parish, where Eloi appears as a head of household in the censuses of 1820 and 1830 among neighboring Hebert, Landry, Templet and Babin families. The 1830 household held the couple and five children. In all they had seven children, those with dated baptisms or births born between 1817 and 1826 and the youngest, Edouard, dated to 1830 only by a FamilySearch entry; two of the daughters are known only from their baptisms.

Eloi died before 1855, when the marriage of their son Ferreole names him as deceased and Henriette as living; the marriage of their son Edouard in April 1857 says the same. A probate sale notice of January 1844 describes a riverfront tract bounded by the land of a “Veuve Eloi Dupuis” — a widow of an Eloi Dupuis — which may be Henriette, though the notice gives no other name.

In June 1880 she was living in the household of her son Ferreole in the 2nd Ward of West Baton Rouge, entered under her husband’s name as “Eloi Dupuy”, a widow aged 81, the head’s mother, born in Louisiana. That age places her birth about 1799.

Notes

No record of her death or burial has been found; none appears in the published abstracts of the parish registers through 1885. An online family tree gives her a death in 1839, which the 1855, 1857 and 1880 records rule out.