♂Joseph Joffrion

Joseph Joffrion (born 18 March 1708) was a French Canadian from Varennes, near Montréal, who settled at Pointe Coupée on the Mississippi in French Louisiana, where he married the widow Marie Jeanne Rabalais in 1752; three of their sons were given the name Joseph. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Joffrion (born 1770).

Early life in Canada

He was born and baptized at Varennes, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence below Montréal, on 18 March 1708, the fifth child of Jean Joffrion and Catherine Milot dit Laval. His grandfather Pierre Joffrion had come to New France from Poitou^W in the 1660s. His mother, who had been the widow of Jacques Mongeau before her marriage to Jean Joffrion, died on 10 October 1708, seven months after his birth, and his father married again at Varennes in March 1709. The standard genealogical dictionaries of Québec families, Tanguay^W and Jetté, both record his birth to the day.

On 6 April 1728, in the parish church of Varennes, he married Marie-Anne Laroc (Larocque), daughter of Jean Laroc and his wife Anne, both of that parish. The register names the bride’s mother “Anne Sillerie”, a reading Tanguay shares, while Jetté gives the name as Seleurier and places the bride in the Couillaud dit Larocque family. The witnesses were Jacques Gaultier, Christophe Mongeau, who could not sign, and the Sieur de Martigny. A marriage contract had been drawn up privately the day before and was deposited with the Montréal notary Nicolas Senet dit Laliberté on 13 July 1728. Jetté records a daughter, Anne, baptized at Varennes on 21 January 1729, and Tanguay a daughter Marie, who married Claude Lafond at Varennes on 18 October 1746.

Pointe Coupée

By the middle of the century he had gone south to Louisiana. On 1 May 1752, at Pointe Coupée, he married Marie Jeanne Rabalais, the widow of François Laserre; the register describes him as a native of Sainte-Anne of Varennes in the diocese of Québec, and the witnesses were Louis Bouchard, Joseph Lafleur and Pierre Ledoux. When their first child, Joseph, was baptized in April 1753, the godparents were the bride’s own parents, Jean Baptiste Rabalais and Marguerite Belanger.

Six children of the marriage are given, born between 1753 and 1767, and the Pointe Coupée baptismal abstracts add at least two more, a son Joseph born on 28 December 1770 and a daughter Jeanne born on 29 December 1772. The register also records the burial in October 1764 of a Marianne Joffrion aged fourteen months, but it names no parents, and her age fits none of the couple’s known children. The eldest son, born on 12 April 1753, and two younger sons, born on 26 February 1759 and 28 December 1770, were all baptised Joseph. The one born in 1759 appears in later registers as Jason; the line runs through the youngest, who is probably the Joseph who married Magdelaine Bizet at Opelousas in 1795 and settled at Avoyelles. By 1810 the census of Avoyelles listed three Joseph Joffrion households on a single page, told apart only as “Joseph”, “Joseph fils” and “Joseph Jun.” His wife was buried at Pointe Coupée on 30 December 1772; a genealogical column gives her death as 29 December, the day her last daughter was born.

Later life

He is said to have died after 1791, but no record of his death is known. A genealogical column published in an Avoyelles newspaper in 1980 states that he was living with his elder son Joseph at Avoyelles Post in September 1791, aged 83, which agrees exactly with a birth in March 1708. A lineage compilation adds that he took the oath of allegiance at Pointe Coupée in 1769 and appears in the census of Avoyelles Post in 1785. Neither claim is confirmed by a record.

Notes

When he married at Pointe Coupée in 1752 the register called him the widower of Geneviève Anne Guiot, not of Marie-Anne Laroc. No record of a marriage to a woman of that name is known, and whether she was a second wife, married between 1728 and 1752, is not known. The 1980 column dates the Pointe Coupée marriage to 10 May 1752; the register gives 1 May.

Some compiled family trees give his birth of 18 March 1708 at Varennes to his son Joseph Jason, making the son older than his own mother. The son was born in 1759; the 1708 birth belongs to the father.

Date of death

The date comes from Thomas, LaVerne, LeDoux, A Pioneer Franco-American Family (1982), page 776, which gives him as “son of Joseph Joffrion (1708-after 1791), native of Varennes, Canada”. This is a compiled family history, not a record of the death. It agrees with the 1980 column, which has him living at Avoyelles Post in September 1791.