♂Terry L. Delahunt

Terry L. Delahunt (May 1880 – 9 September 1931) was a Louisiana-born railroad man who worked as a brakeman at Shreveport and, by the dates on Find a Grave memorials, lost his younger son and his wife within four months of each other in 1926. A family history posted online by a descendant of the first marriage credits him with moving his mother and most of his brothers and sisters from Avoyelles Parish to the railroad town of Marshall, Texas. He was a son of Augustin Delahunt (1845–1915) and his first wife, Mary Christoffel (1850–1924), and so a half-brother of Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929), the father of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Delahunt was born in May 1880 in Louisiana, one of the eight children his parents had between 1867 and 1886, and grew up on the family’s farm in Avoyelles Parish. The family history states that about 1894, when Terry was about fourteen, his father left his wife and children and went to St. Martin Parish, where he married again; Jeffrey was a son of that second marriage. At the census of 1900 Terry was twenty, single and a farm laborer, living with his mother, who was entered as a widow and head of the household, in Police Jury Ward 8 of Avoyelles Parish. His father was in fact still living; in 1903 he entered the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in New Orleans, where he died in 1915.

The railroad

The family history says that early in the twentieth century Terry, a railroad man, moved almost the entire family from Avoyelles Parish to Marshall, Texas, then a major railroad center; his mother, his brother Walter and his sisters Angela and Cora all settled there. The same account supposes that when his father, in his last years, came up from the Soldiers’ Home on leave to visit the family at Marshall, he traveled by train on passes that Terry obtained for him.

According to the family history, Terry married Agnes Delahunt (1881–1926), born Agnes Nellie Voinche, in Avoyelles Parish in 1905; it describes her as a granddaughter of Auguste Voinche, the leading merchant of Marksville in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their elder son, Henry Delahunt (1906–1982), was born on 16 March 1906 in Texas and christened in Harrison County, the county of Marshall, and a christening index names his mother as Agnes Voinche. By 1910 the couple were living in Police Jury Ward 2 of Vernon Parish, Louisiana. A second son, Terry, was born about 1913 by his Find a Grave memorial. The family history says that Terry later moved to Shreveport, another railroad center, and worked there as a brakeman on the Kansas City Southern Railway^W; a FamilySearch census index has Agnes and the two boys at Shreveport in 1920.

Later life

Find a Grave memorials give the younger son Terry’s death at Shreveport on 7 May 1926, aged about thirteen, and Agnes’s there four months later, on 7 September 1926. At the census of 1930 Delahunt was a widower and head of his household at Shreveport, still working as a brakeman, with Henry, then a salesman, living with him. A Find a Grave memorial and the Louisiana statewide death index give his death at Shreveport on 9 September 1931, at the age of fifty-one, almost exactly five years after his wife, and his burial there.

Notes

The family history lists a brother, Sam G. Delahunt, with a birth date in October 1879, seven months before Terry’s; the tree now gives Sam’s birth as 13 October 1874, from the 1880 census and his World War I draft card. The records read so far do not give the cause of Terry’s death, or of his wife’s and younger son’s.