♂Leonard Thibodeau

Leonard Thibodeau (11 May 1823 – November 1857) was an Acadian farmer of Grande Pointe, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, whose modest estate, administered by one of his own brothers after his death, became entangled in litigation that reached the Louisiana Supreme Court^W. He was the great-great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) and Melia’s own daughter Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906).

Early life

Leonard is said to have been born at Saint Martinville on 11 May 1823, the son of Placide Cyrille Thibodeaux and Mathilde Valentine Landry, who had reportedly married in 1820 and settled at Grande Pointe on the Bayou Teche. Three of their six sons died young, among them the eldest, Placide, and Zephirin, at eleven months; Leonard grew up with his younger brothers Cyrille Damonville and Olivier Thelismar. Their father seems to have died at the end of 1838, when Leonard was fifteen, and in January 1839 their mother petitioned as the boys’ tutrix. In 1854 the three brothers inherited from their uncle Achille “par représentation de Placide Thibodeau, leur père, décédé”, in their dead father’s place.

Marriage and family

On 16 December 1845 Leonard married Madeleine Ordalie Cormier, daughter of Michel Onésime Cormier and Céleste Dupuis, and they made their home in St. Martin Parish. In November 1850 the census found them with Felicia, Placide and a six-month-old daughter, probably the child later called Melia, and with a woman of forty named Mathilde, presumably Leonard’s widowed mother. Seven children were born between about 1846 and 1858; several of the daughters married into the Daigle and Melançon families. Land Leonard had bought carried a mortgage in favor of his father-in-law’s heirs, and Ordalie’s inheritance from her father went toward paying for his purchase.

Death and estate

Leonard died in November 1857, at thirty-four, and is thought to have been buried in Saint Bernard Cemetery at Breaux Bridge, in an unmarked grave. A note he gave a creditor that May appears to bear his own signature; Ordalie signed the court’s papers by mark.

Ordalie, pregnant when he died, was sworn in December as tutrix of their six children, and the court named his brother Damonville curator for the unborn child, a daughter later named among the heirs. Damonville, as “one of the brothers of said deceased”, also took charge of the estate: land, a house, a Creole horse, four cows, a plow and the cattle brand “27”, worth just over a thousand dollars, with no enslaved people.

Settling the estate took nine years. Damonville and Narcisse Thibodeau, a neighbor from another branch of the family, brought cross-suits that went to the Supreme Court, and the children sued the succession of their great-uncle Achille, settling for $500 plus $150 to their attorney. The balance of $1,034.70 went to Ordalie in 1866, a year before her own death.

Notes

Birth and parents

The birth date is from an abstract of the Southwest Louisiana church records, which names his parents as Placide Thibodeaux and Mathilde Landry; his Find a Grave memorial and a Thibodeaux genealogy in the Attakapas Gazette (1985) agree. The tree once carried 1 May, uncited; its christening of 20 September 1823 cites no record. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana gives the parents’ marriage at the St. Martinville church in November 1820 and their settling at Grande Pointe. The Gazette genealogy, citing the St. Martin registers, gives the marriage as 20 November 1820, Placide’s birth as 4 October 1802 (a date the baptism register does not yet confirm) and his parents as Cyrille Thibodeaux and Scholastique Breaux, and lists Achille as his brother. Find a Grave gives the father’s death as 7 December 1838; his widow’s petition of 28 January 1839 shows him dead by then.

The 1850 household

The census names the older woman only as Mathilde; a later court record names Mathilde Landry as the children’s paternal grandmother, so the identification is likely, not certain.

Death and the seventh child

The widow’s petition of 11 December 1857 says only that he died “in the month of November 1857”; an earlier compiled date of 8 November has no record behind it. The burial place is from Find a Grave. The promissory note, to Eugène Breaux on 4 May 1857, may be in one hand throughout, so the signature is in all likelihood his, though not certainly. The posthumous daughter is entered as Celeste Ozea, from the succession record; Cormier’s compilation calls her Ulodie, a name in no other record of the family.