♂Jeffrey Delahorne

Jeffrey Delahorne (19 January 1899 – 19 October 1929) was a fish buyer from St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, whose children carried the family surname into the spelling still used today. He was the father of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Parentage and the family name

Delahorne was born in St. Martin Parish to Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and Marie Virginia Cottrelle (1858–1937). A family history compiled by a descendant states that Augustin, a native of Avoyelles Parish, had left an earlier wife and family around 1894 and settled at Butte La Rose, where he married Cottrelle, a widow, that July without the earlier marriage ever having been dissolved; if that account is right, the second marriage was bigamous, a marriage contracted while the first still stood. According to the family history, rumors soon reached the community and Augustin left St. Martin Parish, and Jeffrey was born some months after his departure; Jeffrey’s recorded birth in 1899, about four and a half years after the marriage, does not fit that account, and the records do not explain the gap. The same account, tracing the surname to the Irish Delahunt, credits this couple’s children with the spellings that followed — Delahond, Delahon, and eventually Delahorne and Delhorne. Through his mother he had five elder half-siblings, the children of her first marriage to Denis Gédéon Talley: Isabelle, Taylor, Thomas, Jefferson and Zack Talley, with whom he was living, aged two, in the 1900 census. His mother told that census she had borne eleven children, six of them then living, so five more had died before 1900; their names are not known, and any born after the 1894 marriage would have been his full brothers or sisters rather than half-siblings. Through his father he had eight half-siblings, the children of Augustin’s first marriage to Mary Christoffel, born in Avoyelles Parish between 1867 and 1886. In 1910 a twelve-year-old “Jeffrey Tally”, recorded as a cousin in the household of Frank Leblanc in the second ward of St. Martin Parish, is very likely him, under his half-brothers’ surname.

Marriage and death

Delahorne married Ida Serrette (1903–1990) in St. Martin Parish. A record of the marriage places it on 26 September 1918, when Ida was fourteen, or only just fifteen by her own Social Security application. They had four sons who lived to adulthood — Roosevelt Joseph, Shefton Anthony, and the twins Lloyd John and Floyd Amatus, born 29 November 1922 — and a daughter.

In 1929 he was a fish buyer at Simmesport, Avoyelles Parish, for the Simmesport Fish Company, and his employer was Murphy Lacour. He had an operation on 11 September 1929, and the cause of his death was carcinoma of the abdominal viscera, a cancer of the abdominal organs. Delahorne died on 19 October 1929 at Simmesport, Avoyelles Parish, according to the state death index and a death notice in The Marksville Weekly News of 26 October 1929. The notice gives his age as 30 and says that the funeral arrangements were made by Joseph L. Escude, undertaker of Mansura, that interment was made in Cecilia, St. Martin Parish, and that he was survived by five children, a mother, three brothers and one sister. A Find a Grave memorial places the burial at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Cecilia. The death index entry, which rests on an informant’s statements, gives his marital status as “Divorced” and his age as 32 years, 1 month and 23 days; no other record found mentions a divorce, and the 1930 census lists Ida as the wife of another man. Within about four months of his death Floyd and Lloyd were placed at St. Mary’s Home in Lafayette, where the 1930 census found them; that census lists his widow as the wife of Reauld Billeaud, though no record of their marriage has been found.

Notes

Delahorne’s birth date is unresolved. The date used here, 19 January 1899, is cut on the stone he shares with his mother, which was put up after her death in 1937 and also gives his death a month late; the death notice’s age of 30 agrees with it. Against it, the 1900 census (aged two), the 1910 census (twelve), his draft card (twenty in September 1918, with a written birth date of 15 August) and the death index (32 years, 1 month and 23 days, so about August 1897) all point to 1897 or 1898.

His parents are named, as Augustus Dellahand and Virginia Cartrell, in the index to his 1918 marriage, and as Augustin Delahon and Virginia Kotrelle in the 1929 death index; their own marriage is indexed at St. Martin on 14 July 1894, as Augustin Delion and Virginie Cottrel. That this Augustin was Augustin Delahunt of Avoyelles Parish rests on the descendant’s family history, with support from Jeffrey’s death at Simmesport, in Avoyelles, and his funeral by a Mansura undertaker; no record yet names the Avoyelles man as his father. Find a Grave gives his death as 29 November 1929, the twin sons’ seventh birthday; the death index and the contemporary newspaper notice both give 19 October 1929, which is used here. A descendant’s family history is the source for the account of his parents’ marriage and the origin of the surname spelling; it rests on that account alone.

The Louisiana State Board of Health death certificate, no. 13533 (registered 9 January 1930), is the source for his occupation, his employer and the cause of death; it agrees with the 19 October 1929 date of death.