♂Jean Baptiste Rabalais

Jean Baptiste Rabalais is known only from the marriage entry of his son, Jean Baptiste Rabalais, at New Orleans on 12 January 1733. A published abstract of the New Orleans parish register calls the groom a resident of Pointe Coupée and a native of “Rochefoucant in Poitou”, and names him the son of “Jean Baptiste Rabalay and Marie Magdelaine”, giving the mother no surname. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Baptiste Rabalais (died 1759).

His parents are not known, and no record of his baptism, marriage or death has been found; the abstract does not say whether he was still living in 1733, or whether he ever came to Louisiana. “Rochefoucant” has been read as La Rochefoucauld, in the modern department of Charente, and also as the naval port of Rochefort; neither town lay in Poitou proper. A descendant’s family history gives the son’s birth as 1692 and his by-name as “Matelot”, meaning sailor. The baptisms of La Rochefoucauld’s three parishes have been read for the early 1690s without finding the surname. At Rochefort, the baptisms of the parish of Saint-Louis from 1687 to 1698, and of Notre-Dame for most of 1692 to 1699, hold no Jean-Baptiste of the name. Two Raballan households did live in Rochefort in those years: Nicolas Raballan, who married Marthe Durand there in 1687, and Andrée Raballand, who married there in 1698 as the orphaned daughter of Étienne Raballand and Anne Imbert. Her family has been traced to Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, on the coast of Lower Poitou, where her parents married in 1659, and no Jean-Baptiste son was found there. No record connects Jean Baptiste Rabalais to either household.