♂John Baptist Serrette

John Baptist Serrette (22 March 1889 – 30 July 1965) was a carpenter and construction worker, the son of a St. Martin Parish fisherman, who left the swamp country of south Louisiana for Lake Charles and Beaumont, Texas, before settling at Baton Rouge. He was an elder brother of Ida Serrette (1903–1990), the mother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

John was born on 22 March 1889 in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, a son of Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906), and one of the older of their eight children; his sister Ida, the youngest, was born fourteen years after him. The birthplace is the one he gave himself, on his draft registration of 1942. Some eighteen months before his birth, on 5 September 1887, one of his father’s brothers, Emile, had killed another, Alphonse, at Butte-a-la-Rose in the swamps of St. Martin Parish; a grand jury declined to indict Emile later that month. The census of 1900 lists John, aged eleven and single, as a son in his father’s household in Police Jury Ward 2 of St. Martin Parish, where his father worked as a fisherman; the same occupation, fisherman, is written against John’s own name. A Find a Grave memorial gives his mother’s death in 1906, when he would have been seventeen.

Marriage and family

He married Beatrice Carr (1896–1979), some seven years his junior; the date and place of the marriage have not been found. Their eldest son, Raymond Serret (1913–1990), was born about 1913, and a second son, Cleveland Serret (1916–1996), followed. By 1920 John had moved west to Lake Charles, in Calcasieu Parish, where the census taken that January records him as a married man and head of his household in Ward 1, working as a carpenter, with Beatrice and four children. Another daughter, Lillian Serret (1920–2006), was born the following month, on 8 February 1920; she later worked as a nurse’s aide and died at Baton Rouge. Lillian’s obituary shows that the family was larger than the tree records: at least nine children, sons and daughters, some of whom were still living in 2006.

Texas and Baton Rouge

A census index finds him in 1930, as John Serrett, across the state line at Beaumont, in Jefferson County, Texas, with Beatrice and four of their children in the household. The same index has him living at Baton Rouge by 1935 and, in 1940, as John B. Serrett, in Police Jury Ward 3 of East Baton Rouge Parish. In 1942, aged fifty-three, he registered for the draft under the registration of older men^W, giving his name as John Baptist Serrette and his address as Route 1, Victory Drive, Baton Rouge; he was then working for the Horace-Williams Construction Company of North Baton Rouge, and he signed the card “John B. Serrett”.

Death

A FamilySearch index and a Find a Grave memorial give John’s death as 30 July 1965 and his burial at Greenoaks Memorial Park in Baton Rouge, in the Garden of Faith section, under the name John B. Serrett. Beatrice survived him by fourteen years; a Find a Grave memorial gives her death as 15 March 1979 and her burial in the same section of the same cemetery.

Notes

The records name him variously as John Serrette, John Serrett and John B. Serrett; his wife and children appear as Serret or Serrett. His draft card names his wife only as “Mrs J.B. Serrette”, using his own initials; her maiden name, Carr, comes from her grave and from her daughter Lillian’s obituary. The Social Security death index gives Tennessee as his last residence; it does not record where he died, and his place of death is not known.