♂Jean Baptiste Rabalais

Jean Baptiste Rabalais (died 3 February 1759) was a French colonist of Pointe Coupée, in French Louisiana, whose marriage record calls him a native of “Rochefoucant in Poitou”. In January 1733, at New Orleans, he married a widow whose first husband had died at Natchez. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marie Jeanne Rabalais (1733–1772).

Origins

He was the son of Jean Baptiste Rabalais and Marie Magdelaine, as his marriage record names them, giving his mother no surname. The same record calls him a native of “Rochefoucant in Poitou”. The word could stand for La Rochefoucauld, in the modern department of Charente, or for the naval port of Rochefort; neither town lay in Poitou proper, so the abstract’s province is loose either way and the town is not settled. No record of his baptism has been found, and the records do not say when he came to Louisiana. By the start of 1733 he was already settled at Pointe Coupée, a French post on the Mississippi above New Orleans.

Marriage and family

On 12 January 1733 he married Marguerite Belanger at New Orleans. A published abstract of the New Orleans parish register describes her as a native of Sèvres, in the archdiocese of Paris, and the widow of Joseph Ducro, “who died at Natchez”. The register gives no cause of his death; a lineage compilation places it in the Natchez uprising of November 1729, which destroyed the French settlement at Fort Rosalie and killed more than two hundred colonists. The compilation adds that she had come to Louisiana in 1721 on the ship La Baleine, which carried young women from the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris to be married in the colony.

The couple’s daughter, Marie Jeanne, was born at Pointe Coupée in 1733. The compilation records the household in the Pointe Coupée census of 1745 with six enslaved people and 28 arpents of cultivated land; the people are not named in its account. In 1753, after Marie Jeanne’s second marriage, to Joseph Joffrion, he and his wife stood as godparents to the couple’s first son, Joseph, in the Pointe Coupée register.

Death

He died at Pointe Coupée on 3 February 1759, three weeks before the birth of his grandson Joseph Jason Joffrion, through whom the family line runs. The parish register records his burial there the same day, under the name “Jean Baptiste Rabalet, dit Matelot”; the entry gives no age. A grandson of the same name, the son of his son Joseph and Barbe Boff, had been born on 15 January 1759, and he and Marguerite stood as godparents to that infant on 18 January. The grandson lived on: in 1785 he and his sister Henriette stood as godparents to a daughter of their brother Joseph, so the 1759 burial must be the grandfather’s. Marguerite was buried at Pointe Coupée on 30 June 1761, entered in the register as his widow.

Notes

The clerks spelled his surname “Rabalay” at his marriage and “Raballe” at his grandson’s baptism. A descendant’s family history gives his birth as 1692, at “Rochefourant, Poitou”, another form of the same word. It also calls him “Matelot”, meaning sailor, and the Pointe Coupée register uses the same by-name, at his burial and for his son Joseph. It names a second child, Joseph, born in 1736; no record of either has been found. That history and some online trees number him “Jean Baptiste Rabalais II”, after his father of the same name.