♀Louisiana Marie Delahunt

Louisiana Marie Delahunt (17 February 1867 – 30 October 1905) was a Louisiana-born woman, the first child of her parents, who married J. C. Gillory in Avoyelles Parish at eighteen, raised a family of sons there, and died at thirty-eight. She was the eldest daughter of Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and his first wife, Mary Christoffel (1850–1924), and so a half-sister of Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), the father of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Delahunt was born on 17 February 1867 in Louisiana, fourteen months after her parents’ marriage at Mansura in December 1865, when her mother was fifteen. She was the eldest of the eight children her parents had between 1867 and 1886. The census of 1870 found the young family at Marksville, Avoyelles Parish, with their first daughter, then three and entered as Marie, and a sixteen-year-old Martin Delehant in the household. In 1880 she was thirteen and single, helping to keep house on her father’s Avoyelles farm; the enumerator entered the whole household by initials only, and she appears as “L.”.

Marriage and family

On 1 October 1885, in Avoyelles Parish, she married J. C. Gillory (died 1933). The couple had at least three sons, born between 1888 and 1893: Lennie J. Gillory (1888–1946), Arthur Jules Gillory (1892–1961) and David Oliver Gillory (1893–1974). A family history posted online by a descendant of the first marriage states that about 1894, when Louisiana was already married with children of her own, her father left his wife and children and went to St. Martin Parish, where he married again; Jeffrey was a son of that second marriage. An index of the 1900 census, which spells her name “Louisiana Guillorg”, lists her in Ward 8 of Avoyelles Parish, the same ward in which her mother was then living as head of a household; the listing rests on the index alone.

She died on 30 October 1905, at the age of thirty-eight; a Find a Grave listing places her burial at Moreauville, Avoyelles Parish. No record gives the cause of her death. Her husband outlived her by twenty-eight years. Her mother’s return to the census of 1910 counts six of her eight children as living, one fewer than in 1900, the drop that Louisiana’s death accounts for.

Notes

The census of 1900 gave her birth as April 1868, about a year later than her birth in February 1867, and the index of that census spells the family’s surname Guillorg.