♂Jean Baptiste Dupuis

Jean Baptiste Dupuis (about 1752 – before 3 May 1831) was an Acadian farmer of the lower Mississippi who married at Ascension in 1775, and who by 1820 held six enslaved people on his farm in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. His second wife, the widow Marie Anne Landry, was herself an ancestor of the same later family through another line, so his remarriage in 1816 joined two unrelated ancestral lines in one household. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Eloi Dupuis.

Early life

He was the son of Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot, whom the register of his first marriage calls Acadians. No record of his birth or baptism is known. According to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana he was born about 1752, probably at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia, and was deported with his family in 1755 to New York, at the age of three; family trees drawing on Cormier give 1750. The family later went to Le Mirebalais in Saint-Domingue, where his father died in 1765, and his uncle Joseph Dupuis then brought the surviving children to New Orleans, where they were counted in July 1767, and on to the Acadian settlement at St. Gabriel. The registers confirm only the end of that story: when his sister Marie Madeleine married Jean Baptiste Hébert at Pointe Coupée on 27 March 1769, both of their parents were recorded as dead.

Marriage and family

On 7 February 1775, at Ascension on the Mississippi, Jean Baptiste married Elizabeth Benois, daughter of Alexis Benoit and Marie Comeau, also Acadians. The register describes him as living at St. Gabriel at Manchac; the witnesses were Charles Melancon and Augustin Brusard. Their son Eloi was born on 17 June 1791 and baptized at St. Gabriel on 23 October. The baptisms of two grandsons at St. Gabriel, in 1801 and 1808, name Jean Baptiste and Elizabeth as the paternal grandparents of children of a Hypolite Dupuis and his wife, a Dousset.

The same compiled sources place him on the militia rolls of Iberville in 1771, as a fusilier aged 21, and again in 1783; record a contract for cattle he made at Opelousas in 1784 with the widow of Germain Trahan; and list him among the signers of an Iberville petition about the levee in 1788. None of these is confirmed by the original rolls or papers.

When Eloi married Henriette Hebert on 21 April 1817, Jean Baptiste was present and signed the register as “Jean Bte Dupuy”.

Second marriage and West Baton Rouge

Elizabeth died on 16 April 1816. On 31 December 1816, at St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge, Jean Baptiste married Marie Anne Landry, the widow of André Martin. She was born and baptized at Saint-Servan, near Saint-Malo in Brittany, on 30 May 1768, the daughter of Pierre Paul Landry and Anne Josèphe Thériot; the register of her 1794 marriage names her parents as “Paul & Anna Anterio [sic], of St. Malo, France”, and her 1785 crossing to Louisiana rests on a compiled list of the exiles. The register calls him “of Acadia” and again names his parents as Antoine Dupuis and Marguerite Boudrot, forty-one years after his first marriage; one of the witnesses was Isidore Labove. No children of this marriage are recorded. Through her daughter by her first husband, Adelaide Martin, Marie Anne was a direct ancestor of Ida Serrette (1903–1990) on her mother’s side, while Jean Baptiste was Ida’s ancestor on her father’s; the two lines met in Ida’s parents, Pierre Anatole Serrett and Amelia Pennison Daigle, though they shared no blood.

The census of 1820, taken on 7 August, lists “Jean Bte Dupuis” on the last line of the first page of West Baton Rouge Parish, four lines below Isidore Labove. His household held seven free people: a man over 45, a woman also over 45, and five young people between ten and twenty-five, whose relationship to him the census does not state. It also held six enslaved people: three boys and a girl under fourteen, and a man and a woman between fourteen and twenty-five. The census does not name them. Five members of the household were engaged in agriculture.

Death

He died before 3 May 1831. On that day David Rees, a justice of the peace for St. Martin Parish, sealed his effects at the late residence at the request of several of the heirs, including a large armoire in the widow’s bedroom, and gave them in charge to a guardian. The succession was opened on 27 May 1831; its cover names him as “Jean Baptiste Dupuis, husband of Marie Anne Landry”. A memorial page gives his death as 2 May 1831 and his burial at St. Martinville, but it names no source; compiled abstracts of the St. Martin church records give his age as 81. The records do not explain why he died in St. Martin Parish rather than in West Baton Rouge, where he had lived in 1820.

Notes

His widow, who petitioned the St. Martin probate court in May 1831 as “Marianne Landry, widow of Jean Baptiste Dupuis”, stated that he left several legal heirs by his first marriage and none by the second. The estate was divided into eleven shares, one for each heir or group of heirs, some of them the children of children who had died before him. On 27 May 1831 the parish judge, Paul Briant, took an inventory of the community property at the widow’s and heirs’ request. On 5 August 1831 a family meeting of the minor heirs, held before a justice of the peace, advised that the property be sold in three equal yearly payments, and on 10 August the court ordered the sale. The sale took place on 12 and 13 September 1831 at his last home at Grande Pointe, St. Martin Parish, where about eighty acres and the main house were bought by Charles Dupuis for $400 and $300; the livestock, tools and household goods went to heirs and others. On 30 January 1835 the court named Edward Simon administrator of the estate, and on 18 June 1836 the account was settled, the net sum divided into eleven equal shares.

The inventory of 27 May 1831 lists seven enslaved people on the property, four of them by name: François, Charlot, Négritte and Marceline. Three of the seven are children, and their names are not recorded. The sale of 12 and 13 September 1831 disposed of them. François, listed in May as thirty-nine years old and in September as about fifty-nine, was bought for $650 by “Mme Ve Jn Bte Dupuis”, his widow, Marie Anne Landry. Charlot, eighteen, was bought by Zéphirin Guidry for $865. Négritte, twenty, was sold with her children under ten to Zéphirin Guidry for $1,100; the inventory lists one child and the sale two. Marceline, nineteen, and her two children under ten were knocked down to Marin Joseph LaBauve for $990, who could not meet the terms, and on 13 September they were sold again to Victor Dupuis, one of the heirs, for $710.

His date of birth rests on the compiled militia age and burial age, which agree with each other, but no record confirms either. He is not the Jean Baptiste Dupuis who married Marie Josèphe Granger in Acadia in 1748 and died at Le Mirebalais in 1765, nor the Jean-Baptiste Dupuis who married at L’Islet, Québec, in 1775.