Eloise Bergeron is far better documented than my ancestor who had kids with her, Aaron King.
Eloise was born in October 1794. Her baptism was recorded at the church in Ascension Parish, but she was likely born between modern-day Thibodaux and Houma, as that’s where her father had his land grant from Spain. At that time, there were no churches nearby, and baptisms were recorded by traveling priests when they came through on missions. Eloise’s father, Charles Bergeron, was a baby during the Acadian expulsion and came with his family to Louisiana via St. Domingue. The family first went to the Attakapas region, then St. James, and finally settled in the Lafourche country. Eloise’s mother, Victoire Benoit, was Charles’s second wife. She was born in France after her parents were expelled from Acadia and came over on one of the Seven Ships.
Eloise had at least 13 siblings between her father’s two marriages. Eloise lands right around the middle, age wise, among her siblings.
In 1812, when Eloise was about 18 years old, she married Thomas Rhodes. Their marriage contract was recorded at the courthouse in Houma on 11 April 1812. Thomas was previously married to Eulalie Lirette, in 1809, and they they had one daughter together, Elizabeth, in January 1811. Eulalie passed away sometime between the birth of Elizabeth and Thomas’s second marriage.
Thomas Rhodes was a land surveyor, apparently from Georgia. He had land adjacent to Charles Bergeron’s. He and Eloise had two children together, John Jackson, born in 1815, and Celestine Delphine, born in 1816.
In May 1815, Thomas sold his plantation in Lafourche Interior (as Terrebonne Parish was called at the time) to Lemuel Tanner. Thomas’s precise next moves are unclear, but by 1818 he’s moved to Alabama, married a third time and celebrated the birth of another son, Rufus Randolph. He and Eloise were not divorced; at that time, getting a divorce required a legislative act, and I’ve looked at all of the legislative acts from this time period and not found them. Thomas took his daughter from his first marriage, Elizabeth, with him, and at first, he also took the two he had with Eloise. However, his new wife seems not to have liked having the younger two around, so they were sent back to Louisiana (potentially first being sent to an orphanage before being eventually reunited with their mother). A descendant of Elizabeth Rhodes, Gerald Lawson, did a ton of research on this family and wrote up a well-sourced history for them; it’s on file at the public library in Pascagoula, Mississippi, near where Thomas’s third family ended up living.
On 13 Sept 1822, Eloise had a three-year-old child baptized. His name was Charles Hatch. Charles’s baptismal record only names his mother, but his marriage record to Marie Madeleine Bourg in 1845 names his parents as “Silverius” Hatch and Eloise Bergeron. I have a lot of thoughts about the identity of “Silverius Hatch” that will have to be a separate post to avoid getting completely derailed. However, for now I’ll just say that he wasn’t around very long; if he ever lived in Terrebonne himself, it wasn’t during a census. He seems to have come from up north, lived in Iberville Parish for several years in the 1820s and eventually made his way to Texas.
Eloise’s first child with Aaron King, Louisiane, was baptized in 1827. Over the next decade or so, they had four more children, with the last being born about 1839. We can assume that she’s a part of his household on the 1830 census. I’m not sure where Eloise is on the 1840 census as it doesn’t list all names in the household, but I would expect her to be with one of her siblings’ households as Aaron’s not on there. Where he went is unknown; there’s no death record or any other kind of record that I’ve found to hint at what happened to Aaron.
In 1850, Eloise is on the census as “Eloise Besse”. She was living with Jean Besse, a man from France who was about twelve years her junior. Charles and his wife are with them, as well as the younger King children. Eloise was listed with Jean Besse again in 1860, and she died in 1870, when her succession was filed in Houma. Notably, her succession names her as “the deceased wife of Thomas Rhodes”. (People had a hard time figuring out how to refer to Eloise throughout her life, it seems. On the records relating to the division of her inheritance with her siblings, all her sisters are referred to as “Marguerite, widow of x” or “Anne, wife of y” or their maiden name. Eloise is “Madam Rhodes”, no husband named. Sometimes she’s referred to as “Widow Rhodes” or just “Eloise Bergeron”.)
Why is Eloise an outlier? Well, I almost never see marriages end unless one party dies, in my tree. Most of my ancestors were Catholic, and they really just didn’t divorce much at all back then. Eloise’s multiple unsanctioned relationships are certainly unusual. She seems to have been very unlucky; at least two of the men she had children with definitely abandoned her and started families elsewhere; the third may well have done the same. Perhaps Thomas leaving the way he did limited her legitimate prospects, as a technically-married-but-actually-alone woman.
Additionally, three out of four of Eloise’s known partners were not French or Acadian. This is also unusual when comparing to most of my other known ancestors. Most married within their ethnic group, or sometimes with another French-speaking, or at least Catholic, group. Acadian women marrying Anglo-American men was far from unheard of, but Eloise had children with three of them! In that time and place, it wasn’t that really all that common.