♀Anne Sigur

Anne Sigur (born 3 July 1761; buried 14 November 1797) was a woman of the Spanish-era Mississippi settlements of Louisiana, the wife of a Bordeaux immigrant at St. Gabriel in what became Iberville Parish, whose own burial record gives her age as twenty-five — ten years too young for the marriage she had already made fifteen years before. She was the third great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Antoine Serrette (1789–1848).

Family and origin

She was the daughter of Laurent Sigur and Anne Roche, and was probably born on 3 July 1761 and baptized on 5 July at Lay-Saint-Christophe, a village just north of Nancy in the duchy of Lorraine^W, where the parish register records her parents’ marriage on 16 January 1759. Her marriage record describes her parents as of San Cristóbal in the province of Lorraine, a Spanish clerk’s rendering of Lay-Saint-Christophe. Her own burial record calls her “of Nantes, France”; the records do not say how the family came to Louisiana.

By 1778 the parents were described as “of St. Gabriel”, and four younger siblings are recorded: Anne Françoise, baptized at Pont-à-Mousson in March 1772, so the family was still in Lorraine then; Luce Laurence, born in November 1777 and christened in early January 1778 in the Ascension register; and Juan Lorenzo Martin (baptized 1781) and Gil (baptized 1786), both in the St. Gabriel register. The couple’s first known child was an elder sister, Jeanne, born at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 6 December 1759; Anne was a later child.

Marriage

On 17 September 1782, at the church of the Ascension at Donaldsonville, she married Jean Serrette, entered in the register as “of Bordeaux”, the widower of Anna Laroque. The couple lived at St. Gabriel, where the register records Rosalie’s baptism in 1787, with her grandmother Anne Roche standing sponsor; the marriage of Henriette, who married Magloire Dupuis in 1801 and, as his widow, Hypolite Hébert in 1822; and the marriage of Celestin, who in 1816 married Reine Sophie Leblanc, the sister of his brother Antoine’s wife. Rosalie married Antoine Davas Marionneaux in 1808. Her son Antoine was christened at St. Louis Cathedral^W in New Orleans on 19 September 1791, at the age of twenty-one months, so he was born about December 1789.

Death

She was buried at St. Gabriel on 14 November 1797. The register gives her age as twenty-five, which cannot be right: a woman of twenty-five in 1797 would have been ten at her marriage, and her mother was still bearing children in 1786. A birth at Lay-Saint-Christophe in July 1761 makes her about twenty-one at her marriage and about thirty-six at her burial. Her daughter Henriette’s marriage record of 1801 describes her as deceased. Her husband was buried at St. Gabriel on 26 November 1803, aged fifty-five. On 12 September 1805 an inventory of her estate was made at Iberville; it lists twenty-two enslaved people, and the heirs later sold them.

Notes

Her baptism

Her birth on 3 July 1761 and baptism on 5 July rest on a baptism at Lay-Saint-Christophe of Anne Sigut, daughter of Laurent Sigut and Anne, given in the FamilySearch collection France, Births and Baptisms, 1546-1896. It is taken to be hers because her 1782 marriage entry calls her parents “of San Christoval, Province of Lorrena”, which is Lay-Saint-Christophe, where they had married in 1759.