♂Andre Dreger

Andre Dreger (born about 1687) was a colonist of the German Coast^W, the settlements on the Mississippi above New Orleans in colonial Louisiana, whose family appears in the registers of St. Charles Borromeo^W between 1742 and 1753. Two of his daughters, Anne Catherine and Marie Julienne, were married on the same day, 1 May 1753, on the same page of the register. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Simon Tregle.

Family

Andre Dreger and his wife, Catherine Kalender, raised their family in the parish of St. Charles Borromeo on the German Coast, and their children appear in its registers. A daughter, Anne Barbe, was baptized there on 6 November 1742. A son, Jean Georges, “native of this parish”, married Veronique Rommel on 3 December 1748.

Andre’s first marriage was to Anne Barbe Brendel, at Phalsbourg in Lorraine on 14 August 1720, one of about forty-five marriages blessed that day at the request of Jean Hesler, the commissioner conducting the colonists bound for Louisiana. The act names the groom as the son of the late Jean Träger, of Wernstein in Bavaria, and of Anne Marie Ulrich; Andre was probably that son.

Two daughters, Anne Catherine and Marie Julienne, both “native of this parish”, were married on 1 May 1753, on the same page of the register: Anne Catherine to Jean Lefevre and Marie Julienne to Jean Baptiste Foltz. When Jean Georges’s son was baptized in June 1750 the godmother was Catherine Dreger, “the father’s sister”, who was probably Anne Catherine. An Antoine Dreger appears only by kinship: the register names him as “brother” when he stood godfather to Jean Georges’s infant son Antoine in September 1752, and as “paternal uncle” when he stood godfather to Simon’s daughter Marguerite in 1754. Both terms fit a son of Andre and Catherine, and he was probably one, but no record names his parents.

About 1740 an Andre Dreger, probably the same man, sold a habitation, as a farm was called in the colony, to Delachaise. The sale is listed in a published calendar of the colony’s St. Charles Parish papers, but the act itself is missing.

Notes

The baptisms and marriages above are known from Woods’s printed abstracts of the St. Charles Borromeo registers, in the Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, taken from photocopied pages kept in a library’s family file and put online. The wife’s surname is written Kalender, Calender and Colender in these abstracts, the Foltz surname also Folz, and Anne Catherine’s husband Jean Fevre, with the form Levefere in brackets after it.

Simon Tregle’s parentage rests on inference. His marriage names his mother but not his father, and the case for Andre as his father depends on the godparents of his daughters being called their paternal aunts and uncle. The identification of the godmother Catherine Dreger of 1750 and 1754 with Anne Catherine is an inference from the name, and Antoine’s place in the family rests only on the kin-terms the registers give him. The tie between Andre Dreger and Deiler’s Andreas Traeger is not proven; the 1720 marriage act names a father, but not the town of Donauwörth.

His son Simon

Simon Tregle was probably also a son of the couple, though no record names Andre as his father. When Simon married Marguerite Foltz at St. Charles Borromeo on 19 May 1750, the register named his mother as Catherine Colender and left his father’s name blank. The link to Andre runs through the godparents of Simon’s daughters. At the baptism of Marie Julianne on 19 January 1753 the godparents were Jean Baptiste Foltz and Marie Julianne Dreger, “the infant’s paternal aunt”, evidently the daughter of Andre and Catherine who married Foltz that May. At the baptism of Marguerite Tregle on 13 June 1754 the godparents were Antoine Dreger and Catherine Dreger, her paternal uncle and aunt, the aunt again probably Anne Catherine. A paternal aunt is the father’s sister, so Simon was a brother of Andre and Catherine’s children, and most likely their son.

The surname is written in many ways in the colony’s records, among them Dreger, Tregue, Taigler and Tregle; a history of the German Coast published in 1909 treats these as forms of the German Traeger, now spelled Tregre.

The 1720 marriage

The entry is the second on page 97 of the Phalsbourg marriage register for 1712–1734, kept by the Archives départementales de la Moselle, dated 14 August 1720. It gives the groom as “André Träger, fils de deffunt Jean Träger vivant habitant de Wernstein en Bavière, et d’Anne Marie Ulrich”, and the bride as Anne Barbe Brendelin, the act’s spelling of Brendel. The act states that the couple were bound for the colony of Louisiana. The link of this groom to Andre Dreger is a probable one: the name, the date and the destination agree, and no record made in Louisiana names his parents.

Origins

Andre Dreger may well be the Andreas Traeger of Donauwoerth, in Bavaria, whom J. Hanno Deiler’s 1909 history of the German Coast finds in the census of 1724, a Catholic hunter of 37 with a wife and a child at the breast, living in the “First” Old German Village and two years on the place, and whom Deiler calls “the progenitor of all the Tregre families in Louisiana”; the match is plausible, since Andre is the French form of Andreas, but no record joins the two men. If he is the same man, he was born about 1687 at Donauwörth, the year the age of 37 in 1724 implies. By 1731, in Deiler’s census extracts, Andreas Traeger’s household numbered husband, wife and three children. The 1720 marriage act, if it concerns him, names his late father as Jean Träger, of Wernstein in Bavaria, and his mother as Anne Marie Ulrich; it does not name Donauwörth.