♀Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc

Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc (9 February 1794 – 9 September 1837) was a Louisiana woman of Acadian descent, born at St. Gabriel in Iberville, who married Antoine Serrette in 1814 and died in West Baton Rouge Parish at the age of forty-three. She and her younger sister Reine Sophie married two Serrette brothers within two years of each other. She was the great-great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Firmin Serrette (born 1818), Firmin’s son Pierre Anatole Serrett (1853–1926) and Pierre’s daughter Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Early life

She was born on 9 February 1794 at St. Gabriel, in Iberville, then part of Spanish Louisiana, and was baptized there on 29 May 1794 under the name Margarita. Her parents were Joseph Leblanc, called “dit Agros” in some records, and Julie Trahan, who had married on 27 October 1787. The baptisms of her younger brothers and sisters call both sets of her grandparents Acadians. Her godfather was Magloire Dupuis, who in 1801 married Henriette Serrette, a sister of the man she would marry twenty years after her baptism. She was one of at least ten children; her brothers and sisters included Joseph, born in 1788, two brothers named Jean Baptiste, born in 1792 and 1798, Azelia, Reine Sophie, Constance, Pierre, Julie Emerite and Marie Ameranthe.

Marriage and family

On 5 September 1814, at St. Joseph’s church^W in Baton Rouge, “Eulalia LeBlanc, of Iberville” married Antoine Serrette, described as “of New Orleans”. Antoine’s brother Celestin was a witness. On 19 May 1816 Celestin married her sister Reine Sophie. The couple had five children, born between 1818 and 1829: Firmin, Valentin, Emma, Arcade and Aurore. A Constance LeBlanc, probably her younger sister, was godmother to Firmin at his baptism in 1819.

By 1837 the family was living in West Baton Rouge Parish, on a tract of two arpents^W front by forty deep, lying forty arpents back from the Mississippi.

Death and succession

Eulalie died in West Baton Rouge Parish on 9 September 1837 and was buried the next day from St. Joseph’s church in Baton Rouge, whose parish then served the Catholics across the river. Her succession was opened in the West Baton Rouge court on 25 September 1837 as the “Succession of Eulalie LeBlanc dec’d wife of Antoine Serret”. That day Antoine was sworn as legal tutor of their five children, all still minors, and Celestin as under-tutor.

The inventory taken at the house the same day valued the couple’s property at $4,242.45. It listed the land and buildings at $2,000, and five enslaved people: “Eliza a negro Woman of about 27 years with her three children, Joseph of 6 years, Francois of 4 years & Merite a sucking child, appraised together at fourteen hundred dollars”, and “Betty of about 60 years, appraised at One hundred Dollars”. Eliza, Joseph, Francois, Merite and Betty made up more than a third of the estate’s value. On 5 October 1837 a family meeting of the children’s “relations & friends” agreed unanimously that the whole community property should be set over to Antoine at its appraised value, so nothing was sold, and the children’s half became a sum their father owed them. In April 1840 her son Firmin gave his father a receipt for 200 piastres on account of what came to him from “the succession of my late mother”. Antoine remarried in 1838 and died in 1848.

Notes

Her baptism names her only as Margarita; she appears as Eulalie in her marriage, her burial and her succession, and the register’s parents and birth date identify her. The same baptism gives her mother’s name as Judith, where every other record of the couple has Julie. Her burial entry gives her age as 30, which does not agree with her baptism, her 1814 marriage or her son’s birth in 1818; she was forty-three. The baptism of her son Arcade in 1827 names his mother as “Ulalie Landry”, a slip for Leblanc.