♀Mathilde Valentine Landry

Mathilde Valentine Landry (25 February 1805 – 13 October 1879) was a woman of Acadian descent born at St. James on the Mississippi, who married into the Thibodeaux family of the Bayou Teche and spent her life in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana. Her middle name was her father’s first name, Valentin, a detail that helped identify her baptism. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Leonard Thibodeau (1823–1857).

Early life

She was born on 25 February 1805 and baptized at St. James on 17 November 1805, the daughter of Valentin Landry and Celeste Bourgeois; her godparents were Jean Baptiste Flecher and Arthemise Hebert. She was one of at least nine children. Her brothers Valentin, Adelard and Leonard and her sister Anne Fanelia were baptized at St. James between 1796 and 1803, a sister, Celeste, married there in 1812, and three younger sisters were baptized between 1807 and 1813. Family memorials later called her “a native of Saint James Parish”, and the register confirms it.

Marriage and family

She married Placide Cyrille Thibodeaux, and a compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana places the marriage at the St. Martinville church in November 1820, when she was fifteen. A compiled abstract of the St. Martin church register, printed by Donald J. Hébert in Southwest Louisiana Records, gives the marriage at Saint Martinville on 28 November 1820, when both were minors. A Thibodeaux genealogy published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1985, which cites the St. Martin church registers, gives the marriage as 20 November 1820 and names the bride as “Mathilde Valentin Landry, d/o Valentin Landry and Celeste Bourgeois”, the same parents as in the St. James baptism. The same genealogy gives Placide as born on 4 October 1802, a son of Cyrille Thibodeaux and Scholastique Breaux. Published abstracts of the St. Martin church registers record four daughters of Valentin Landry and Celeste Bourgeois married there between 1814 and 1827, two of them into one Thibodeaux family, Mathilde to Placide and Euphrosine to his brother Achille in 1825. The couple settled at Grande Pointe on the Bayou Teche. The 1830 United States federal census places her in St. Martin Parish, in the household of her husband Placide Thibodeaux. Their children, whose baptisms name her as Mathilde Landry, included Placide, who died in infancy, Leonard, born in 1823, Zéphirin, who died at eleven months, Cyrille Damonville, Narcisse Daluska and Olivier Thelismar. In November 1850 a woman named Mathilde, whose age the census gives as forty, almost certainly she, was living in her son Leonard’s household at Grande Pointe. Compiled sources give Placide’s death as 1838, which would make her a widow from that year; no church record of his burial is known.

Death

She died on 13 October 1879 and was buried at Breaux Bridge, according to a memorial index; the church record of her burial has not been seen.