♀Catherine Kalender

Catherine Kalender (dates unknown) was a colonist of the German Coast^W, the settlements on the Mississippi above New Orleans in colonial Louisiana, and the wife of Andre Dreger, whose family appears in the registers of St. Charles Borromeo^W between 1742 and 1753. Two of her daughters, Anne Catherine and Marie Julienne, were married on the same day, 1 May 1753, on the same page of the register. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her 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.

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.

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, read from photocopied pages kept in a library’s family file and put online; the entries were checked against the page images of those photocopies. 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 rests only on the names and the place, and is not proven.

Her son Simon

Simon Tregle was probably also a son of the couple, though no record found 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.

Origins

Her own parents and origins are not known, and the register abstracts found so far give no date for her birth, marriage or death. Her husband 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 with a wife and a child at the breast, but Deiler does not name the wife, and the match between the two men is only plausible.