♀Anne Catherine Benich

Anne Catherine Benich (buried 17 December 1748) was a colonist of the German Coast^W, the settlements on the Mississippi above New Orleans in colonial Louisiana, married first to Jacques Foltz and then to Christof Huber. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Foltz.

Family

She was a daughter of Joseph Benich and Magdelaine Seiler, and a native of Burcken, probably the village of Bürchen in the Valais, in Switzerland.

Jacques Foltz and Anne Catherine Benich raised their family in the parish of St. Charles Borromeo^W on the German Coast. Three of their daughters appear in its register: Marie Catherine, baptized on 15 November 1739, and Anne Barbe and Marguerite, both called natives of the parish when they married, Anne Barbe to Hans Jakub Tutzek on 2 July 1748 and Marguerite to Simon Tregle on 19 May 1750.

Widowhood and death

Jacques died in the parish and was buried on 11 June 1746. On 31 January 1747 Anne Catherine, as his widow, married Christof Huber at St. Charles Borromeo. She was buried there on 17 December 1748, less than two years after the second marriage, and no children of it are on record.

Notes

Name and origins

Her entries are known from Woods’s printed abstracts of the St. Charles Borromeo register, the Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, volume 1. The marriage of 1747 is entered as “BENICH Catherine (Joseph and Magdelaine SEILER), native of Burcken, widow of Jacob FOLTZ, dec. in this parish”, and gives her new husband’s name also as Christofle Huber, Houver and Houwer. Her daughters’ entries write her surname Benick and Binnies, and Marguerite’s marriage calls her Anne Catherine. The register gives only the name Burcken; its identification as Bürchen, in the Valais, comes from a family tree on WikiTree. Her burial entry gives no age.

Her first marriage

No record of her marriage to Jacques Foltz is known. The census of 1724, printed in Deiler’s 1909 history of the German Coast, gives Jacques a wife and a child of one year but does not name the wife, and the records do not say whether she was Anne Catherine. The first entry that names her as his wife is the baptism of their daughter Marie Catherine in 1739.