♀Melia Thibodeaux

Melia Thibodeaux (born about 1850) was a woman of Breaux Bridge, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, who lost her father when she was about seven and her mother when she was about seventeen, and who married Jean Baptiste Daigle in April 1868 while still a minor under her grandmother’s guardianship, four months after her mother’s estate went to court. She was the great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Amelia Pennison Daigle (1869–1906) and Amelia’s daughter Ida Serrette (1903–1990).

Early life

Melia was one of seven children of Leonard Thibodeau and Madeleine Ordalie Cormier, who lived in St. Martin Parish. Her given name is written in several ways across the records: Emelia in the court papers of her childhood, Emelie at her marriage, Melia on the censuses of her married life, and Amelia on the death record of one of her daughters. Her earliest appearance is on the federal census of November 1850, as an infant in her parents’ household in St. Martin Parish. A woman of forty named Mathilde also lived in that house. She was almost certainly Leonard’s widowed mother, Mathilde Landry, whom a later court record names as the children’s paternal grandmother.

Her father died in November 1857. In December of that year her mother swore an oath before the parish court as “natural tutrix”, or legal guardian, of his minor children, and Emelia is named among them. When the estate of her great-uncle, Achille Thibodeaux, was settled in February 1859, Leonard’s seven minor children shared their father’s portion of it, which had come to him through their grandfather, Placide Cyrille Thibodeaux.

Marriage and family

Her mother died in 1867, and a succession was opened for her at the end of that year. The inventory held a single small tract of land, seventeen arpents^W at Grand Bois, estimated at thirty-four dollars. On 17 January 1868 the court named her maternal grandmother, Celeste Dupuis, the widow of Michel Cormier, as tutrix of the seven children. Only the eldest, Felicia, was then of age, so Emelia was still one of her grandmother’s wards when she married. The marriage took place at Breaux Bridge on 22 April 1868 and was entered in the parish’s civil record book, which names both her parents and her husband’s, Maxilien Daigle and Ida Melancon. When the estate’s accounting was signed in 1871, “Emelia Thibodeau” and “Jean Baptiste Daigle” signed side by side on the same page, both by mark.

The couple’s first daughter, Amelia Pennison, was born at Breaux Bridge on 6 February 1869, and the family’s three known daughters were born between 1869 and 1879. In June 1880 the family lived in the 5th Ward of St. Martin Parish, where Melia was keeping house for her husband, their three daughters and his younger brother Deslua. Next door, in the household of Archin Bourrelle and his wife Emma, probably Melia’s sister, lived her brother Ernest, a single farm laborer, listed as Bourrelle’s brother-in-law. Twenty years later Ernest was living with Melia and Jean Baptiste themselves. The census of 1900 found the couple still in Ward 5 and recorded that they had been married thirty-two years, which agrees with the 1868 record. In 1910 the census still listed her, as “Mellin”, aged 60, in Jean Baptiste’s household in the same ward. No record of Melia’s death has been found. The 1943 death record of her daughter Marie gives the mother’s name as Amelia Thibodeaux.

Notes

Her age of 26 on the 1880 census would put her birth about 1854, the 1900 census gives her age as 51, pointing to about 1849, and the 1910 census gives 60, pointing to about 1850. The 1850 census, where she appears as an infant, points to a birth in late 1849 or 1850, and so does her place among her parents’ children. That record is the closest to her birth, and it is preferred here. The 1880 figure would have made her fourteen at her marriage.

The marriage is known from an index of the parish record book, not from the book itself. Its copy at the courthouse has not been seen. An 1860 census family at Bruley Bayou in Assumption Parish, with an “Emelie Thibodaux” whose parents were Ferdinand and Catherine, is sometimes linked to her. The marriage record names different parents, so that household belongs to another family.