♂Taylor Talley

Taylor Talley (2 February 1882 – 15 October 1968) was a Louisiana man of the Atchafalaya basin who spent most of his life at Krotz Springs, St. Landry Parish, and who, in the mid-1930s, took in his young nephew Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014). He was Floyd’s half-uncle: the eldest known son of Floyd’s grandmother, Marie Virginia Cottrelle (1858–1937), by her first husband, and so the elder half-brother of Floyd’s father, Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Early life

He was born at Breaux Bridge, St. Martin Parish, and registered as Denis Taylor Talley, the son of Denis Gédéon Talley and Virginia Cottrell, who had married in St. Martin Parish in the autumn of 1881; an elder sister, Isabelle, was born the same year. His father’s death has not been found; by 1894 his mother, described as a widow, had married Augustin Delahunt. In the 1900 census Taylor, then eighteen, was living in the second ward of St. Martin Parish in his widowed mother’s household, with his sister Isabelle, his brothers Thomas, Jefferson and Zack, and his two-year-old half-brother Jeffrey.

Krotz Springs

In January 1920 he was living in the second ward of St. Martin Parish with his mother, recorded as Virginia Talley, and his sister Isabelle, and the census recorded him as divorced: on 20 July 1912 he had married Ada Morrison in St. Martin Parish, a marriage that had ended by 1920. On 11 August 1920, at thirty-eight, he married Alida Angelle in St. Martin Parish. They had two daughters, Gladys, born at Cecilia in 1921, and Doris, born at Butte La Rose in 1924. By 1930 the family was living at Krotz Springs, where the household also held his widowed sister Isabelle and a nephew; they were still there in 1935, 1940 and 1950, when his married daughter Gladys and her family lived with them.

In the mid-1930s his half-brother’s son Floyd, who had left a Catholic children’s home in Lafayette at about thirteen, was sent by his mother to live with “Uncle Taylor and Aunt Lida” in their house on the Atchafalaya. According to an account Floyd’s wife later wrote down from his recollections, the boy rowed his uncle’s skiff while Taylor ran his fish lines, and went to school there for the seventh grade.

Taylor Talley registered for the draft at Krotz Springs in 1942, at sixty. He died on 15 October 1968, aged eighty-six; Alida died the following July.