♀Rosa Jacon

Rosa Jacon was a Canary Islander, an Isleña, of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, whose only known child settled among the Acadians of the Baton Rouge area. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son André Martin.

Origins

Rosa and her husband, Balthazar Martin, came from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and little more is told of them: they were “of St. Cruz, Canary Islands” when their son André married in 1794, and “of Teneriffe” and “nat. Tenerife” when his sons were baptized in 1803 and 1807. In the late 1770s Governor Bernardo de Gálvez^W had Canary Islanders, the Isleños^W, brought to Louisiana to people new settlements, among them Galveztown, Louisiana^W, on the Amite River, not far from where the family later lived. André is thought to have been from that community. A Baltasar Martín did sail from Santa Cruz for Louisiana in 1778 with a son Andrés, but the list names his wife Rosalía Pérez, and whether that was Rosa’s family is not settled.

Family

On 19 May 1794 André married Marie Anne Landry, a daughter of Acadian exiles, at St. Gabriel, and the couple presumably settled north of Bayou Manchac, in what became East Baton Rouge Parish. Rosa was named as their children’s grandmother at baptisms in 1801, 1803 and 1807. Most of André’s children are reckoned to have married into Acadian families of the district, and the family is said to have become thoroughly Gallicized during the antebellum period.

Notes

The 1778 passenger list

Gilbert C. Din’s The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (1988) prints a list of recruits who embarked at Santa Cruz de Tenerife on the packet boat Santísimo Sacramento on 10 July 1778: Baltasar Martin, his wife Rosalía Pérez, and five children, among them Andrés, aged nine. The father, the port and the son fit, and Rosa may stand for Rosalía. But Pérez is not Jacon (Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana also calls the daughter Antonia’s mother Rosa Peres at her 1783 marriage at San Bernardo), and an Andrés of nine in 1778 was born about five years before André’s age at death implies. A second surname or a misreading could reconcile them, or this is another family; the Baton Rouge registers do not connect them.

Galveztown

Cormier says only that André “probably was from the nearby Isleños community of Galveztown”. That his parents reached Louisiana by that route is an inference; no record names them in a particular convoy.

Her surname

The clerks never settled it: Jacon at the 1794 marriage, Rosa Martin and a garbled “Mlen” at two baptisms in 1801, Jaqeau in 1803 and Jaconez in 1807. Cormier lists Jaco, Jacon, Jacona, Jaconez and Jacquot.

What is not known

No record gives her birth, marriage, arrival in Louisiana or death, or Balthazar’s death; her birthplace rests on the origin the registers give. Nothing places her in Louisiana before her son’s marriage, or shows her or Balthazar living in his household. Where André settled, and the later marriages and Gallicization, are Cormier’s account.