♂Joseph Joffrion

Joseph Joffrion (born 28 December 1770) was a settler of Avoyelles, Louisiana, born at Pointe Coupée, who married Magdelaine Bizet in 1795; he was the third son of his parents to be baptised Joseph, after brothers born in 1753 and 1759. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Celeste Aimee Joffrion (died after 1850).

Early life

He was born at Pointe Coupée, a settlement on the Mississippi above New Orleans, on 28 December 1770, and baptized there on 31 March 1771, with Louis Marrionneau and Catherine Juneau as his godparents. His father, Joseph Joffrion, was a native of Varennes, near Montréal, who had married his mother, Marie Jeanne Rabalais, the widow of François Laserre, at Pointe Coupée in 1752. The couple had already named two sons Joseph, so three brothers of one household shared the name, and in later years clerks had to tell the Josephs of the family apart as “senior” and “junior”.

His mother died when he was two: she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne, on 29 December 1772 and was buried at Pointe Coupée the next day. A newspaper column published in 1980 records his father, then 83, living with the eldest son at Avoyelles Post in September 1791, and a family history written by a descendant says the family moved north to escape the flooding of the Mississippi.

Marriage and family

On 10 September 1795 he married Magdelaine Bizet at Opelousas, in an act written in Spanish; the marriage index that records it writes her name as Marie Magdeleine Bissette. By 1810 the family was living at Avoyelles, where the census of that year listed three households headed by a Joseph Joffrion on a single page. His, entered as “Jun.”, held eight free people, among them a man and a woman aged between 26 and 44, a boy and four girls, two of the girls aged 10 to 15, together with four enslaved people.

On 19 September 1816 his daughter Celeste married Augustin Marcotte at Avoyelles, in a civil ceremony before the parish judge Alexandre Plauché. The acts call her father “Joseph Joffrion junr.”, and he and his wife came before the judge in person to give their consent. A second daughter, Octavine, married Joseph Firmin at Avoyelles on 26 October 1824; the index of that marriage names her mother as Madelaine Berzett. A family history written by a descendant names four children: Marceline, Celeste, Joseph and Octavie. No record of his death has been found.

Notes

The Avoyelles acts of 1816 call Celeste’s father only “Joseph Joffrion junr.” and do not name his parents. He is identified here with the son born at Pointe Coupée in 1770 because, of the three Joseph Joffrion households on the 1810 census page, only the one entered as “Jun.” had daughters old enough to marry by 1816. The plain “Joseph” was over 45, the age of the eldest brother, born in 1753, and “Joseph fils”, most likely that brother’s son, born in 1774, had boys only. The third entry was once read as “Sen.”; the printed transcription of the census reads “Jun.”. A descendant’s family history and an online family tree make the same identification; FamilySearch’s shared family tree gives the 1795 marriage to the nephew born in 1774 instead. The marriage act at Opelousas survives; it is written in Spanish, and the groom signed it “Joseph Joffrion fils”. The lines naming his parents are too faded to read, so it does not settle the question.

Calendars of colonial and early civil records list a Joseph Joffrion “junior”, or “the younger”, at Avoyelles from 1797, alongside a Joseph Joffrion “senior”. Which of the younger Josephs those entries mean has not been established.

The Pointe Coupée register records that a Joseph, son of Joseph Joffrion and Jeanne Rabalais, married Julie Guerin on 26 November 1789, without saying which of the brothers he was. If this Joseph was Magdelaine Bizet’s husband, he was not that groom: Julie Guerin’s children by her husband were baptized at Pointe Coupée until 1810.

The descendant’s family history dates the marriage to 10 July 1795; the index gives 10 September. An online family tree gives his death as 11 January 1832; no record of it has been found.