♂Valentin Serrette

Valentin Serrette (23 September 1822 – after 1870) spent his last recorded years unmarried, living in the West Baton Rouge household of his own nephew together with two of his sisters. He was a younger brother of Firmin Serrette (1818–), the great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

He was born on 23 September 1822, a son of Antoine Serrette and Marguerite Eulalie Leblanc, and was baptised at St. John the Evangelist Church, Plaquemine, on 31 March 1823, with Valentin Hebert and Emerci Leblanc as his sponsors. His mother died in 1837 and his father remarried. In March 1843 the court held a family meeting for the four children of the first marriage who were still minors: Valentin, Emma, Arcade and Aurore — under Louisiana’s civil law, a family meeting of relatives advised the court on the guardianship of minor children and their inherited property. Three months later, on 12 June 1843, he witnessed his sister Emma’s marriage to Guy Labauve.

Later life

His father died in West Baton Rouge Parish in April 1848. Valentin was living in the parish in 1850, aged 27. He stood as godfather to his nephew Alphonse, a son of his brother Firmin, in 1846, and at Brusly in 1856 to Joseph Jesse Penn. His sister Aurore had married Edouard Leray at Brusly in 1847. In September 1868 the parish police jury accepted the resignation of an Edouard Leray as inspector of roads and levees for the third ward, as the Port Allen Observer reported that October. This was most likely Aurore’s husband rather than their son, who was also named Edouard but appears in the records as Numidia. In 1870 he lived, aged 49 and with no wife recorded, in the West Baton Rouge household of his nephew Numidia Edouard Leray, together with his sisters Aurore, whose husband Edouard Leray was not in the household, and Emma, widowed since Guy Labauve’s death in October 1869.

Notes

No record of a marriage or of his death has been found in the published church records of the Baton Rouge diocese, and he does not appear in the 1880 census index; he probably died in the 1870s.