The Hyphen Family Lineage

Note: Researching Eleanor Cayot and family

Finding records that pertain to Eleanor has been a serious challenge, in some part for the same reasons faced by other members of her family - phonetic spellings and variations due to differences in accents and dialects, along with varying degrees of literacy both in those recording the information and in the subjects themselves, and later in transcription of older physical records and the handwriting thereon. For whatever reason, those records belonging to Eleanor were subject to much greater variation in spelling than her siblings, both in her surname and her given name, and for nearly the length of her life.

Eleanor's birthdate is in some question, as the date I currently have (from research by Annette Lynch, who echoes these thoughts) is three years earlier than her parents' marriage and a year prior to her father's arrival in America. This date (24 May 1841) is the same one engraved on her headstone. Looking more closely at the records I have found so far - notably, the US Census records for her households - we see the following:

- in 1850, she was listed as seven years old (on a form dated 31 Oct)
- in 1870, she was listed as twenty-seven (21 Jul).
- in 1880, she was listed as thirty-nine (28 Jun).
- in 1900, she was listed as fifty-nine, with her birth year and month given as May 1841 (27 Jun).
- in 1910, she was listed as sixty-seven (28 Apr).
- in 1920, she was listed as seventy-seven (12 Jan).

The original forms were inspected to verify there was not a transcription error in the indexed file. All of these suggest a birth year between 1841and 1843. Her Indiana Death Index record gives her age at death as seventy-nine, which would suggest a birth year of 1843, though as mentioned above, her gravestone is engraved with a date in the year 1841.

She is named in her father Pierre's will as an heir with the other children, which indicates an equal legal status with his biological children, if nothing else. As the next sibling in the family (Julia Josephine) was born just ten months after their parents' marriage, this suggests that Eleanor was not born to Pierre and Marie. It is possible that she was born to an earlier, short-lived marriage of one of her parents - a marriage ended due to an early death of a spouse, perhaps - but her father, Pierre, had only landed in America in 1842, leaving little time to marry, have a child, and become a widower. This, of course, assumes that she was born in 1843, as an earlier year makes it even less likely (or even impossible) for Pierre to have been her father. To my thinking, the likeliest explanation is that she was adopted by the family as a very young girl, an orphan from a neighboring French-heritage family or even a relative of Pierre or Marie, and was raised as an equal child of the family.

Eleanor married twice - first to Jules Joseph Voirol in late 1862. Jules' place of birth is not fully determined, as it was not consistently reported in the records I have been able to find. In the 1870 US Census - the only federal census that counted him after his marriage but prior to his death - he reported his birthplace as Switzerland. On future federal censuses, his children would report his birthplace as Germany, Pennsylvania, and "Switzerland France." Some of the other Voirol men close to Jules' age who also settled in Allen Cty, Indiana during that same time - likely relatives of his, possibly even as close as first cousins or siblings - were typically reporting their birthplace as Switzerland, and occasionally as Germany or France. Given the Voirols choice of settlement - near other families of French Catholic heritage - I would guess that Jules (and the other Voirols) were from the region in or near Alsace. Several other families in the French settlements of Allen Cty were also apparently Alsatian, so this seems a strong possibility for Jules' place of origin.

Jules' birthdate is unconfirmed, and the only record that would indicate his age - the aforementioned federal census - places his year of birth at about 1833. When he immigrated to America is unknown, though I would expect that it was in the late 1850s or very early 1860s. I have not found record of Jules prior to his marriage in 1862, including in the censuses in 1850 and 1860. His death date is also uncertain, though I expect it would be no earlier than mid-1871 (when his youngest child was conceived), and may have been as late as the mid-1870s. I have not found a listing of a burial location for Jules.

Some time after the death of her first husband, Eleanor remarried to Jacob Lamblin in early 1878. Jacob was reportedly French-born, a son of Pierre "Peter" Lambelin (or Lamblin), and on the 1900 US Census listing for his household reported that he had immigrated to America in 1840. Interestingly, there is a passenger record for a Pierre Lambelin into the port at New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana in 1840, arriving on the ship Columbiana and giving his age as forty-two.

(Interestingly, Pierre gave his birthplace as "Würtb," which almost certainly refers to what at the time was the Kingdom of Württemberg, a neighboring region to Alsace; there was significant migration from Alsace into some of the eastern Germanic regions during the time of the French Revolution. I suspect Pierre Lambelin's family may have been among those that fled Alsace, returning in the early 19th century to Alsace and other French-aligned regions.)

Jacob and Eleanor remained married until her death in 1922, with his following in 1924. The two of them are buried together in Saint Louis Besancon Roman Catholic Cemetery in New Haven, Allen Cty, Indiana.

Eleanor's two marriages produced at least nine known children - six with her first husband, Jules Voirol, and three more from her marriage to Jacob Lamblin. Of these, the youngest of her Voirol children (Joseph Edward) died at age ten, and the oldest of her Lamblin children (August) appears to have never married or had children, living at home for most of his eighty-nine years. Of the remaining seven:

- William J. Voirol died at about the age of forty-three, a father of four children between five and ten years of age. Those four children (two daughters and two sons) would go on to give him at least eighteen grandchildren.

- Louis August Voirol died at about age eighty, and was a father of at least twelve and grandfather of at least twenty-nine (at least twenty-five of those born before his death).

- Frank F. Voirol died at about age seventy, fathered four children and was a grandfather to at least thirteen.

- Mary Eugenia "Jennie" (Voirol) Oberley lived to be nearly eighty-nine years old, and bore at least five children. She was a grandmother to at least twenty-six children, including two sets of twins.

- Albert Peter Voirol died at the age of eighty-one, and had one son. I have not determined if he had any grandchildren. Albert's wife, Elizabeth A. Potts, was the widow of Albert's older brother William.

- Mary E. (Lamblin) Voirol lived to be nearly sixty-seven, and was a mother of four and grandmother of at least thirteen.

- Louise M. (Lamblin) Voirol lived to be eighty-three, and was a mother of eleven and grandmother of at least twenty-two.