♀Madeleine Ordalie Cormier

Madeleine Ordalie Cormier (22 November 1827 – before 28 December 1867) was an Acadian woman of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, known as Ordalie, who was widowed with six young children and pregnant with a seventh, and, on her own death a decade later, left a tutorship contest between two grandmothers who the court found equally entitled by law to raise them. She was the great-great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) and Melia’s own daughter Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906).

Early life

Ordalie was born on 22 November 1827 in St. Martin Parish and baptized at St. Martin de Tours in Saint Martinville on 13 July 1828, the daughter of Michel Onésime Cormier and Céleste Dupuis, according to an abstract of the parish register and to Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana. Her father, born about 1799, lived at Grande Pointe on upper Bayou Teche and, by Cormier’s compilation, died in November 1853; her godparents at baptism were Eloi Cormier and Marguerite Uranie Dupuis.

Marriage and family

She married Leonard Thibodeau on 16 December 1845 in St. Martin Parish, and the couple lived in St. Martin Parish. They had seven children together, born between about 1846 and 1858, and several of their daughters married into the Daigle and Melançon families of St. Martin Parish. Ordalie was pregnant when Leonard died in November 1857, and their seventh child was born after his death.

Widowhood and death

As Leonard’s widow, Ordalie was named tutrix of their six living minor children in December 1857 and signed the court’s papers by mark; his brother Cyrille Damonville Thibodeaux administered the estate. She died before 28 December 1867 — the date her own children’s tutorship was reopened — probably at about forty; no place or cause of death has been found, though a later, uncited Find a Grave memorial gives 26 October 1867. When the court reopened the tutorship, it found both her mother and Leonard’s mother equally entitled by law to raise the orphaned children, as ascendants “in the same degree and of the same sex,” and a family council chose her mother, Céleste Dupuis, over Leonard’s mother, Mathilde Landry, who was passed over despite an equal claim.

Notes

At least three women named Madeleine or Magdeleine Cormier were active in St. Martin Parish in this period. A compiler’s family tree conflates Ordalie with a different Magdeleine Cormier who married Pierre Dolze Melancon in 1851 — impossible for this couple, since Leonard was alive until 1857 and Ordalie bore his children in 1852, 1853 and 1855. Her own succession calls her “Madeleine Ordalie”; an earlier estate record calls her “Marie Ordalie.” Her maternal grandparents, named in Cormier’s compilation as Pierre Dupuis and Rosalie Monique Thériot of St. James Parish, have not been confirmed on a register.