♀Anne Roche

Anne Roche (born 2 July 1740; living in 1787) was a woman born at Lay-Saint-Christophe in the duchy of Lorraine^W — though her father was baptised at Tallard in Dauphiné^W, in the far south of France, in 1694, and married in Lorraine in 1719 — who married at Lay-Saint-Christophe in 1759 and later settled with her husband, Laurent Sigur, at St. Gabriel on the Mississippi, in Spanish Louisiana. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Sigur (born 1761).

Family and origins

Anne was the daughter of Claude Roche and Jeanne Guedon, both of Lay-Saint-Christophe, a village just north of Nancy. Her father was not a Lorrainer by birth. He was baptized on 23 April 1694 at Saint-Grégoire of Tallard, a market town on the Durance in Dauphiné, the son of Gaspard Roche and Magdeleine Faure. His marriage to Jeanne Guedon at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 21 November 1719 names his parents and his home parish in full. How he came to settle in Lorraine is not recorded. The Tallard registers name eight children of Gaspard and Magdeleine, Claude the youngest known, and record Gaspard Roche’s burial there on 8 June 1708, aged 65.

According to the indexed baptism register of Lay-Saint-Christophe, Anne was born on 2 July 1740 and baptized the next day. She was the youngest of the eleven children of Claude Roche and Jeanne Guedon baptized there between 1722 and 1740, two of whom died as infants. The couple had an earlier daughter named Anne, Anne Françoise, baptized in 1726; Anne is taken to be the child of 1740 because her own children were born as late as 1785, which a woman born in 1726 could hardly have borne.

Marriage

On 16 January 1759, at eighteen, Anne married Laurent Sigur at Lay-Saint-Christophe. He was the son of the late Laurent Sigur and of Jeanne Marchal, of the parish of Cheminot in the diocese of Metz; their banns were read in both parishes. The act describes Anne as the daughter of the late Claude Roche, so her father had died by then. Her widowed mother stood godmother that December to the couple’s first known child, Jeanne, born on 6 December 1759. Their son Pierre François Sigur, whose birth date is not known, was probably born between 1761 and 1772. An abstract of his marriage contract dated 13 November 1788 at the Attakapas post, as published in Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records, gives his origin as Pont Amonsson in Lorraine and names his parents as Laurent and Anne Roche; the abstract spells the mother’s name “Poche”, a slip taken for Roche.

Louisiana

The couple’s daughter Anne Françoise was baptized at Pont-à-Mousson in March 1772, so the family was still in Lorraine then. It next appears in the Spanish records of Louisiana. At a daughter’s baptism in January 1778 the couple are described as “of St. Gabriel”, and two more followed by 1785. When their daughter Anne married in 1782, the Spanish clerk recorded her parents as “of San Christoval, Province of Lorrena”, a rendering of Lay-Saint-Christophe, where the daughter Anne had been baptized in 1761 and where her parents had married. The daughter Anne is described as “of Nantes, France” at her own burial in 1797; the records do not say how the family came to Louisiana.

Anne Roche last appears on 8 April 1787, standing godmother to her granddaughter Rosalie Serrette, where the register names her as the child’s grandmother. No record of her death has been found.