♀Ida Serrette

Ida Serrette (13 September 1903 – 18 October 1990) was a widow of Breaux Bridge and Crowley, Louisiana, who raised five children through the Depression and saw all four of her sons through the Second World War, one of them as a prisoner of the Japanese for more than three years. She was the mother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Ida was born at Breaux Bridge, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, on 13 September 1903, the date she gave on each of her three Social Security applications, in 1938, 1957 and 1972 (see Notes). She was the daughter of Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906). Her mother died when Ida was two. In the census of 1910 her widowed father was living alone in Police Jury Ward 2 of St. Martin Parish, and Ida, then seven, was in the same ward in the house of her father’s brother Emile, himself a widower; the enumerator listed her as his daughter. Her own grandfather had been a prisoner of war too: taken at Vicksburg in 1863 and paroled within days, eight decades before her son Lloyd would spend more than three years as a prisoner in the Pacific.

Marriage and family

Ida married Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929) on 26 September 1918 in St. Martin Parish, twelve days after her fifteenth birthday; her first son, Roosevelt, was born on 30 September 1919, a year later. The couple had five children, four sons and a daughter: Roosevelt Joseph Delhorne (1919–2012), Shefton Anthony Delahorne (1921–1999), and twins Lloyd John Delahorne and Floyd Amatus Delahorne, both born 29 November 1922 (1922–2007 and 1922–2014). A family history compilation on Jeffrey’s side records that he was born some months after his father’s hasty departure from a second marriage in St. Martin Parish, and that the surname Delahorne — also spelled Delhorne — descends from a misspelling of “Delahunt” that stuck to his children; the compilation’s own timeline, however, does not fit neatly with Jeffrey’s recorded birth year.

Jeffrey died 19 October 1929 at Simmesport, Avoyelles Parish, and was buried at Cecilia, St. Martin Parish; a notice in The Marksville Weekly News of 26 October 1929 lists five children among the survivors. He left Ida a widow with five children in her mid-twenties. The 1930 census lists her as the wife of Reauld Billeaud; no record of their marriage has been found. It finds the household in Lafayette Parish with her ten-year-old son Roosevelt recorded in it as a stepson, while her four younger children were at St. Mary’s Home, a Catholic children’s home in Lafayette staffed by Irish-born nuns: the census lists Mary, the younger twins Floyd and Lloyd, and, almost certainly, Shefton, all as “pupils”. Family accounts differ on why: one holds that after Jeffrey’s death she could not afford to keep them for a time; another, that she had a new partner. According to a family account written down by her son Floyd’s wife, Billeaud himself drove the children to the Home in January 1930, and in April the census found four of his own children in the household. By December 1934 she had moved to Crowley and was running a café on Parkerson Avenue there. In January 1937 she and her son Roosevelt were hurt when the car they were riding in was struck by a freight train at a Lafayette crossing and dragged some 85 feet; the car was destroyed, and their injuries were described as painful but not serious. That household had ended by 1940, when the census again finds her widowed and heading her own household at Crowley, Acadia Parish.

The Second World War

All four of Ida’s sons served. A Beaumont, Texas newspaper of 23 August 1943 placed all four on a single date, on four different fronts: Lloyd a prisoner of the Japanese (the paper said Tokyo, which was only the address his mail went through), Floyd a sergeant in North Africa, Shefton a sergeant in England, and Roosevelt a lieutenant at Pine Camp, New York. It gave Ida’s own address as 116 Dewey Street in “Navy Town,” the wartime housing built at Orange, Texas, for the shipyard workers of the boom, well away from the Crowley address the record had placed her at through the previous decade. Lloyd had been taken prisoner when Corregidor surrendered in May 1942, his record giving 7 May, and was held for more than three years, first in the Philippines and then in Japan, until Japan’s surrender in 1945; his mail as a prisoner of war was addressed to her care. She was back at Crowley by February 1946, when a Watertown, New York newspaper covering Roosevelt’s wedding listed “Mrs. Ida Delahorne of Crowley, mother of the bridegroom” among the out-of-town guests.

Later life and death

Ida married a third time, on 28 August 1946 in St. Martin Parish, to Howard Russell Dorr (1898–1964), who died at Crowley in December 1964; no children are recorded from that marriage. She died on 18 October 1990; her obituary places her death at her residence in Henderson and gives her age as 87. Her funeral was held at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, and she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Crowley. Her published obituary, under the name Ida S. Dorr, named her four sons as survivors along with ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren, and listed her as predeceased by her husband and by both of her parents.

Notes

Her birth date is given two ways. Her obituary index, the 1940 census and her grave record give 13 December 1903. She herself gave 13 September 1903 every time she applied for a Social Security number, in April 1938, July 1957 and July 1972, and her death record carries the same date; this entry follows her. A baptismal entry at Breaux Bridge would settle it. On the December date she was still fourteen at her wedding.

The 1940 census records an occupation for Ida that is illegible in the surviving image. The record does not establish exactly when she returned to Louisiana from Texas during the war. Jeffrey Delahorne’s death is recorded with two different 1929 dates: the state death index and a contemporary newspaper notice give 19 October at Simmesport, and Find a Grave gives 29 November; 19 October is used here. The death index entry gives his marital status as “Divorced”, an informant’s statement; no other record found mentions a divorce, and the 1940 census records Ida as widowed.