♂Joseph Beloni Daigle

Joseph Beloni Daigle (15 November 1791 – 16 October 1822) was a Louisiana-born son of Acadian exiles, the child of two parents born in France during the Acadian exile, who married the daughter of a Canary Islander. He lived in the Baton Rouge country and died at about thirty, five years after his father. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Maximilien Daigle (1816).

Family

His parents, François Alexandre Daigle and Rose Adelaide Bourg, were born in exile, at Cherbourg in 1763 and at Le Havre in 1765. They married at Chantenay, by Nantes, in 1783, and by 1790 the family was at St. Gabriel in Louisiana. He was born on 15 November 1791 and baptized at St. James on 16 June 1792, where the clerk wrote his name as “Andres”.

He was one of at least eight children. The two eldest, Émilie Adélaïde and François Joseph, were born in France and crossed to Louisiana with their parents in 1785 aboard Le Beaumont; the rest, Jeanne Scholastique, Marie Christine, Daniel, Sara Dorothée, Marceline Eulalia and Joseph Beloni himself, were born in Louisiana between 1787 and about 1801. His mother was buried on 19 July 1804, when he was twelve.

His father’s succession

His father died without a will on 31 August 1817 in West Baton Rouge. On 15 September his brother François Joseph petitioned the parish court to open the succession and named ten children as heirs, three of them minors. Joseph Beloni, written “Belloney Daigle”, was among the adults. Two days later he and François Joseph, described as “major heirs”, signed a request that Jean Tullier be made administrator of the estate.

Marriage and household

On 27 May 1816, in the St. Gabriel church record, André Joseph Daigle, son of François Alexandre Daigle and Adelaide “Burk” (Bourg), married Adelaide Martin, a native of Baton Rouge and the daughter of André Martin and Marie Anne Landry. Her father had come to Louisiana from the Canary Islands, and her mother was an Acadian born in exile at Saint-Servan in France. One copy of the St. Gabriel record gives the year as 1827, which cannot be right: the couple’s son Lucien was baptized in 1818, with Adelaide’s brother Zéphirin Martin as godfather.

In the census of 1820 “Belloni Daigle” headed a household in West Baton Rouge made up of himself, a woman and two boys under ten, evidently Adelaide and their sons Maximilien and Lucien.

Death

Joseph Beloni Daigle and Adelaide Martin died two days apart, he on 16 October 1822 and she on 18 October, and a doctor’s receipt filed in their joint succession charges for nursing both of them during their last illness. The place of death is not stated.

His brother’s petition leaves the day blank, but the docket cover of the succession gives both dates. On 5 November François Joseph, signing himself “Fs Joseph Daigle”, petitioned the West Baton Rouge court that “A. Belony Daigle” had died that month, leaving one minor child, Maximilien, who needed a tutor, and asked for an inventory of the estate. A bill from a Dr Capdevielle, filed with the petition, charged for visits and medicine to Belony, his wife and their children in September and November of that year. Lucien is not named in the petition and was probably no longer living.

Notes

No record names him as Beloni at his baptism. The child baptized “Andres” in 1792 is taken to be him because, of the seven grown heirs in his father’s succession, every other son is accounted for, and because his brother’s petition of 1822 calls him “A. Belony”, which fits André. The 1820 census puts the head of the household in the bracket of ages sixteen to twenty-five, a few years young for a man of twenty-eight.

Names

The clerks recorded him four ways: André Joseph at his marriage, Joseph André (written “Audre”) at his son’s baptism in 1818, “Belloney” in his father’s succession in 1817, and Beloni (“Benony”) when a son married in 1837. The records show these to be one man, always with the same wife, Adelaide Martin.