♀Mary Christoffel

Mary Christoffel (8 February 1850 – 17 June 1924) was a Louisiana-born daughter of German immigrants who married at fifteen, bore eight children on an Avoyelles Parish farm, and by 1900 was running a farm herself as head of her household. A family history posted online by a descendant of the first marriage records that her husband left her about 1894 and married again in St. Martin Parish while she was still his wife. She was the first wife of Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915), the grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014); Floyd’s line descends from Augustin’s second marriage, not from hers.

Early life

Christoffel was born on 8 February 1850 in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, the daughter of George Christoffel (1818–1901) and Angelia Kamis (1828–1883). The family was in Avoyelles Parish at the census of 1850, and the census of 1900 records that both of her parents had been born in Germany. The family history adds that her father came from Berus, near Saarlouis, then in Prussia, landed at New Orleans in 1847, and settled in the German community of Hamburg in Avoyelles Parish, where he met and married Angelia Kamis, herself a daughter of German immigrants.

Marriage and family

On 21 December 1865, at fifteen, she married Augustin Delahunt, a Confederate veteran of twenty, at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Mansura. The couple farmed in Avoyelles Parish. The census of 1870 found them at Marksville with their first daughter and a sixteen-year-old Martin Delehant in the household; in 1880 she was keeping house while he farmed, and the household included twin daughters aged two. She bore eight children between 1867 and 1886. By her own return to the census of 1900, seven of the eight were then living; the one who had died was a daughter born about 1870, whose name is not known. Her eldest daughter, Louisiana Marie, died in 1905.

According to the family history, about 1894 Augustin Delahunt left his wife and children, went to Butte La Rose in St. Martin Parish and there married a widow, Marie Virginia Cottrelle, though the first marriage had never been dissolved. When the census was taken in 1900, Christoffel was head of her own household in Ward 8 of Avoyelles Parish, listed as a farmer and as widowed, with four of her children at home. Her husband was in fact still living, so the entry was not literally true; the records do not say who gave it to the enumerator. The family history says that he later took up contact with his first family again, and visited them at Marshall, Texas, while on leave from the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in New Orleans, which he entered in 1903.

Texas and the pension

After 1900 most of the family moved to Marshall, Texas, a railroad town; the family history says the move was led by her son Terry, a railroad man. The census of 1910 found her at Marshall, living in the household of a married child. By 1916 she was at Alexandria, Rapides Parish, living at 920 Elliott Street.

Augustin Delahunt died at the Soldiers’ Home on 3 December 1915. In July 1916, aged sixty-four by her own statement, she applied to the state for a Confederate widow’s pension. She swore that she had no property and no means of support, and signed by mark, a sign that she could not write her name. The state pension board rejected the claim in January 1917 because the War Department held no record of her husband’s service. She applied again in April 1917, this time naming St. Paul’s church at Mansura as the place of her marriage and giving her children’s help as her only support. Asked how her husband had died, she answered that she did not know, because the family was not notified of his death until after the burial. The board indicated that it would reject the second application on the same grounds.

By 1920 she was back at Marshall, living with one of her children. She died there on 17 June 1924 and was buried at Marshall. The Shreveport Times carried her obituary two days later, under the heading “Mrs. Mary Delahunt”.

Notes

The family history states that she received a widow’s pension; the pension file shows the first application rejected and the board announcing that it would reject the second. The family history also gives her death as 1925 and names the cemetery of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church at Marshall as her burial place; the 1924 newspaper obituary fixes the year, and the cemetery rests on the family history alone. Her two pension applications gave her age as sixty-four in July 1916 and sixty-three in April 1917, two or three years younger than her birth in 1850 would make her; the census of 1870, which gave her age as twenty, agrees with 1850. The first application also places the 1865 wedding at Cocoville rather than Mansura, in a hand that is hard to read. A FamilySearch index gives her husband’s second marriage as 14 July 1894 at St. Martin Parish, and a compiled genealogy gives 17 July; only the index entry is known.