This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

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Jean Baptiste D’auby History, added information May 13,2013
The below paragraph was from a December 26, 2009 paper by Russell Guerin of New Orleans, LA and later placed on the Hancock County, MS Historical Society website. This paper is titled “The Letters of Two Historical Families: Jackson and Koch.” Mr. Guerin covers the history of Christian D. T. Koch, an early settler of Hancock County, MS, and cites various letters written by him and his family in the mid 1800’s. The original letters are housed at the Hill Memorial Library, L. S. U., Baton Rouge, LA. In one letter dated May 3, 1849, from Isabella Netto Litchfield to her sister, Annette Netto Koch, Mr. Guerin notes, “Annette received word of the unexpected death of her grandmother.” This “Annette” is discussed on page 16 of this History and was Annette Netto Koch, the daughter of Francisco Netto and Jeanne Florentine D’auby. Jeanne was the daughter of Jean Baptiste D’auby and Marie Jeanne Giraud (see page
3).
In the May 1849 letter to Annette, the Grandmother that was referred to was Marie Jeanne Giraud D’auby. We know she died and was buried on the D’auby plantation. We also know she did not appear in the 1850 Hancock County census, indicating she was dead by that year. With this, we can safely assume Marie Jeanne Giraud D’auby died in late April or early May of 1849.
“In May 1849, Annette received word of the unexpected death of her grandmother, and although the cause of death is not given, the presence of Cholera in New Orleans is mentioned. One month later, on June 29, 1849, Christian Koch wrote from Denmark, apparently commenting on the news he had received from Annette that the Pearl River had flooded causing great loss of life in Pearlington: “It is else a terrible lot of people there is dead since I left you, if they continue to die thus, will there be nobody left in Pearlington when I get back. It was a terrible history, that about the [illegible], I have never heard of a such a thing before; What kind of animall <sic> can it have been? It could not have been a panther because it would have killed the baby with one stroke of the paw.” The last sentence is quite obscure but may imply that wild animals were forced by the flood to leave the swamps and caused some problems for the local populace. There were apparently numerous deaths in-New Orleans as well as the Mississippi breached its levees.”
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