♂Pierre Dupuis

Pierre Dupuis (baptised 8 December 1778) was the earliest known son of an Acadian exile family at St. James, on the Mississippi River in Spanish Louisiana, later of St. Martin Parish. He married Rosalie Theriot on 17 February 1800 in a double wedding: the same day, on the same page of the register and before the same witnesses, his sister Maria married Rosalie’s brother Caesar. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Céleste Dupuis (born 1801).

Early life

Pierre was baptized at St. James on 8 December 1778, the son of Joseph Dupuis and Marie Poirier, Acadians who had married there in 1774; his godparents were Pierre Poirier and Marie Cormier. The abstract of the baptism does not give his date of birth. He grew up at Cabahannocer, as the St. James settlement on the Acadian Coast^W was then called, the earliest known son of a large family whose younger children were baptized there through the 1790s, in abstracts that render their names in Spanish forms.

Marriage and family

On 17 February 1800, at St. James, Pierre married Rosalie Theriot, daughter of Thomas Theriot and Agnes Daigle; the witnesses were Thomas Theriot and Joseph Bourgeois. His sister Maria married Rosalie’s brother Caesar the same day. With the double wedding, the two households had made three matches in less than a year: nine months earlier, on 6 May 1799, another sister, Geneviève, had married Rosalie’s brother François. Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana records a fourth, a younger sister Rosalie marrying another Theriot brother, Joseph, in 1806, after the families had moved west.

The couple’s first children were baptized at St. James: Céleste, born on 15 January 1801, with Rosalie’s mother Agnes Daigle as godmother; a son, Elisée, born in June 1802 and baptized in March 1803 under the name Elisa (the priest’s form); and Henriette Hélène, born in April 1804, who was buried at St. James in August 1805 at fifteen months. Elisée married Céleste Guilbeau at St. Martinville in 1823 and died in St. Martin Parish in July 1849. By 1807 the family had moved to Ascension, where a son, Alexandre, was baptized at Donaldsonville that November.

Sylvestre was born on 2 May 1810, one of twins; Cormier’s compiled history places the birth at Grand Pointe and says the other twin, a boy, died at birth. Daughters Marguerite Uranie and Marie Doralise followed in 1815 and 1817, and Roseline, born 24 February 1817, was a twin of Doralise. Two sons died young: Pierre, born 1 June 1812, who died on 6 July 1815, and Joseph, born 2 February 1819, who died on 8 October 1820.

By 1816 the family was in St. Martin Parish, where Céleste married Michel Cormier at the St. Martinville church on 8 July 1816. Cormier’s history places the household at Grand Pointe, also called La Pointe, on upper Bayou Teche, near the Dupuis and Theriot kin who had crossed the Atchafalaya Basin before them. The 1820 census for St. Martin Parish counts eight free people in the household, the two parents, three sons and three young daughters, and eight enslaved people, whom the census does not name. Marguerite Uranie stood as godmother to Céleste’s daughter Madeleine Ordalie Cormier in 1828, and married Joseph Dulecide Guidry at St. Martinville in 1847. A census transcription has Alexandre still living in St. Martin Parish in 1850.

Death and estate

Cormier’s compiled history records that Pierre died at Grand Pointe in August 1833, aged 55. His succession was opened at St. Martin Parish on 5 September 1833, when his widow, Rosalie Theriot, petitioned the court and called him “late of the parish of St. Martin.”

The estate was divided into seven equal shares, one for each of the seven children who survived him: Céleste, by then the wife of Michel Cormier fils; Elisée, Alexandre and Sylvestre, who acted in their own names; and the minors Uranie, Doralise and Roseline. Elisée became tutor of his sister Roseline, Michel Cormier fils became tutor of Uranie and Doralise, and Charles Theriot was undertutor. The inventory was taken on 19 October 1833.

Notes

The identification of the 1778 baptism as his rests on its being the only Pierre born to Joseph Dupuis and Marie Poirier in the St. James register abstracts. Cormier’s history also credits the couple with further sons, among them twins born at Grand Pointe in 1810, one of them Sylvestre, and two boys who died young, in 1815 and 1820. Sylvestre is one of the seven heirs named in the 1833 succession, St. Martin Parish estate No. 734, which also names Roseline and Doralise. A transcribed Louisiana birth entry gives an unnamed boy born on 2 May 1810 to Pierre Dupuis and Rosalie Theriot, placed at Saint Martinville; it does not say which twin he was, but twins share a birthday, so the day is Sylvestre’s either way. Roseline and Doralise are both given the birth day 24 February 1817 in transcribed entries; that they were twins rests on those entries and on the two minor daughters named in the 1833 papers. The two boys, Pierre and Joseph, also appear in St. Martin parish register abstracts under both parents’ names. The 1820 census spells the family name Dupuye and does not count the infant Joseph, born in February 1819; the household is identified by the ages of its members, which fit this family. Baptisms at Assumption from 1818 onward of children of a “Pierre and Rosalie Theriau” belong to a different family, that of Pierre Cancienne, who married Marie Rosalie Terieaux there in February 1817.