♂John Dillahunty

John Dillahunty (died before 17 September 1830) was a settler of the Natchez District^W of Mississippi Territory^W who moved down the Mississippi River to Louisiana and died in Avoyelles Parish. He was the great-great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Samuel Dillahunt (1815–1860), grandson Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and great-grandson Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Natchez

He is thought to have been a son of John Dillahunty of Davidson County, Tennessee. He was at Natchez by the summer of 1806, when the post office there held three letters for “Dillahunty John”; his name appeared again among the uncollected letters of 1 April and 1 October 1809. In June 1807, between the 1806 and 1809 lists, John Dillahunt, described in a federal court record at Nashville as a citizen of the Mississippi Territory, sued William Billings of Davidson County over the unpaid balance of an 1806 sale, and won judgment that November. The Adams County tax roll for 1810 lists “John Dillahunt” with no land and no town lot, two white men of taxable age in his household and one enslaved person.

He married Elizabeth Martin, but where and when is not known; neither the Adams County marriage book nor the Catholic registers of Natchez record the marriage. Their eldest daughter, Emily, was born in Mississippi in about 1806, when John was living in the Natchez District, so the couple had presumably married by then.

Louisiana

The 1810 roll is the last Mississippi record of him. According to the family history, whose author worked from the court papers, in the winter of 1813–14 a John Dillahunt went down the Mississippi on his own raft with William and Francis Thomas, who had rented it from him, and then sued them at Pointe Coupee for what they owed him, reckoned down to a quarter of a cent. In the suit, filed in February 1814, he charged them for boarding themselves and “two Negro fellows” from 25 October 1813 to 13 February 1814, for the use of two yoke of his oxen, for “being a hand lacking in going down on the raft”, and for four hogs and a pair of shoes: $112.31¼ in all. He won a judgment in 1815, recorded in Avoyelles Parish.

By 1815 the family was in Louisiana, where their son Samuel was born in about that year. A daughter, Elizabeth, followed in about 1818, and a younger son, Lewis, in the 1820s. In the federal census of 7 August 1820 he probably headed a household at Raccourci Bend in Pointe Coupee Parish, recorded there as “Jno Delahurst”. The family settled in Avoyelles Parish.

Death

John Dillahunty died in Avoyelles Parish before 17 September 1830, most likely in the first half of that year. At the census taken as of 1 June 1830 his wife, recorded as Elizabeth Dillahunty, headed the household, which had no adult man in it, and on 17 September, when a marriage bond was issued for an Emilie Hunt, presumably their daughter Emily, and Thomas Rhodes, she was entered as a daughter of the “late John Dailey Hunt”. In October 1833 his widow, named in the act as “Elizabeth Martin widow Dillahunt”, sold part of her land on the Prairie of Bayou Rouge.

Notes

Birthplace and parentage

Nothing certain is known of John Dillahunty’s birth or parents. A birthplace in Maryland has been given for him without any source, and a compiled tree gives about 1780 at Natchez; no record supports either place. The family history reasons that he was born about 1780 to 1785, which fits the ages of his children, and mentions Maryland only as the early home of other Dillahunt families, drawing no line from him to them. If he was a son of John Dillahunty (1750–1797), a Maryland birth sits awkwardly with the Dillahunty family’s long residence in eastern North Carolina, from the 1760s until it moved to Tennessee in the 1790s.

He is taken here to be the son of John Dillahunty (1750–1797) of Davidson County, Tennessee. That man’s will of 25 December 1797 names a son John and puts off the division of the estate between John and his brother Silas until Silas, born in October 1780, came of age, which implies that John was the elder of the two. A man of the same name drew the largest share, 210 acres on the South Harpeth River, when the Davidson County court divided the land among four brothers in October 1802. On 14 May 1805 General James Robertson^W sold the same 210 acres, by the same boundaries, to Alexander Allison, in a deed that names no Dillahunty, so the share had left the heir by then; the Davidson County deed books for 1796–1807 hold no deed by which he gave it up. He is also placed on the county’s tax list of 1805, but that list’s entry is given as “John Dillahunty Senior”, the style of the elder John Silas Dillahunty (1728–1816). A “John Dillahunt” with three letters waiting at the Nashville post office on 1 October 1803 could be either man. Whether the heir is the man later found at Natchez is not known; the family history, the fullest account of this generation, makes no link between him and the Dillahunty families of Tennessee and Maryland.

The will and the 1802 division make the parentage probable, but do not prove it. A DNA test by a descendant points the same way: it matches people whom family trees place among the descendants of three other children of John Dillahunty (1750–1797), Hannah, Silas and William. The lines above those matches come from other people’s trees, so the pattern is a pointer rather than proof.

His mother’s surname, Baker (also written Baber), comes only from compiled sources: a lineage book of the Daughters of the American Revolution gives the first wife of John Dillahunty (1750–1797) as “—— Baker”, with no given name, and family trees call her Rachel. No North Carolina marriage, will or estate record of the time names her, and most early records of Dobbs County, where Dillahunty households lived in the 1780s, were lost when the Lenoir County courthouse burned in 1878 and 1880.

The surname

His surname was written many ways: Dillahunty, Dillahunt, Delahunt, Dellehunt and Delihunt among them. Most of his children are given as Delahunt, though records spell his son Samuel both ways, and Samuel’s son Augustin was recorded as Delahunt. “John Dailey Hunt” in the 1830 marriage abstract is most plausibly the abstractor’s division of the name; the same book files Emily once under Hunt and, at her second marriage in 1838, under Delihunt, as “Amelia (wid. Thomas Rhodes)”.

Emily’s birth

The 1850 census of St. Landry Parish gives her as Emelia Dunn, aged 44 and born in Mississippi, which agrees with the family history’s 1806. A transcription of the 1860 census gives her age as 56, which would put her birth in about 1804.

The family history’s account

The voyage, the itemized account and the 1815 judgment rest on the family history, whose author worked from the court papers. The same history says he stayed on the Natchez District tax rolls, under changing spellings, through 1811. The suit’s wording suggests that the two enslaved men were traveling with the Thomases rather than belonging to Dillahunty.

The 1820 census

The 1820 federal census of Pointe Coupee Parish, enumerated 7 August 1820, page 117, has as its first household, under the margin note “Racoursee Bend” (Raccourci Bend), a head written “Jno Delahurst”. That household has three free white males under ten, one aged 10 to 16 and one aged 26 to 45, and one free white female aged 26 to 45; it held no slaves. The identification with John Dillahunt rests on Henry Delahunt’s compiled family history (2002), which gives the name as “Jno. Delah–t” at the same bend; the record itself carries only the name as written. The household has no girls. The eldest daughter, Emily, born about 1806, would have been a girl aged 10 to 16 in it, and Elizabeth, born about 1818, would have been a girl under ten. Either the girls were elsewhere in 1820 or the head is another man, so the identification stays probable.

Death

His death year rests on two records of 1830: the census of 1 June, at which Elizabeth heads the household with no adult man, and the marriage bond of 17 September, which a printed abstract of the parish’s marriages, LaCour’s Brides Book of Avoyelles Parish, gives as that of Emilie Hunt, daughter of the “late John Dailey Hunt”. The family history quotes the 1833 land record as naming his widow “Elizabeth Martin, widow of John Dillahunt”. The parish’s probate records, which skip the years 1819 to 1854, hold no succession for him.

The 1807 suit at Nashville

The case is in the final record book of the United States District Court at Nashville, under the June Rules of 1807 and the November Term of 1807. The court papers spell the plaintiff’s name several ways, Dillahunt and Dillehart among them, and describe him as a citizen of the Mississippi Territory (the clerks spell it “Missisippi”). The bond on which he sued was made at Nashville on 4 October 1806 for $250 in horses, the balance of a sale to Billings in the Mississippi Territory; the chancery bill shows that what he had sold Billings was an enslaved girl, “a negro girl” in its words, and does not name her. He recovered $264 at the November Term 1807, and on 25 November 1811 the same court gave him judgment for $264.50, with interest from November 1807, against Billings and two others on their bond of 1810. The name and the Mississippi Territory description fit him in the years he was at Natchez, but the record gives no parents and no residence beyond that description.