♂Jacques Foltz

Jacques Foltz (born 27 January 1697, buried 11 June 1746) was a shoemaker from Ramstein, in the Palatinate^W, and one of the early settlers of the German Coast^W, the settlements on the Mississippi above New Orleans in colonial Louisiana. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Foltz.

On the German Coast

He is said to have been born at Ramstein on 27 January 1697. By 1724 he had been two years on his land on the German Coast, a Catholic shoemaker of 26 with a wife and a child of one year, written Johann Jacob Foltz of Ramstein in the census of that year. He had cleared four arpents^W and kept one pig, but a flood held that year’s rice to seven barrels, and he had been sick the whole summer. By 1731 there were two children in the household.

Family

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.

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.

Notes

Birth and parents

The date of 27 January 1697 comes from Robichaux’s compilation German Coast Families, as quoted in a family tree on WikiTree, which gives it as the day of his baptism at Ramstein and names his parents as Johann Adam Foltz and Anna Elisabeth. The age of 26 in the census of 1724 fits a birth early in 1697.

The census of 1724

The census is printed in J. Hanno Deiler’s The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent (1909), as entry 59: “Johann Jacob Foltz (now ‘Folse’), of Ramstein, Palatinate. Catholic; 26 years old. Shoemaker. His wife. A child of one year.” It adds “Four arpents cleared. Two years on the place. One pig. This year made only seven barrels of rice on account of inundation. Was sick the whole summer”, and for 1731 “Two children.” The census does not name his wife, and the records do not say whether she was Anne Catherine Benich; the first entry that names her as his wife is the baptism of 1739.

Names in the register

The St. Charles Borromeo entries are known from Woods’s printed abstracts, the Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, volume 1. They call him Jacob Foltz at Marie Catherine’s baptism and Anne Barbe’s marriage, and Jacques at his burial and at Marguerite’s marriage, where her parents are given as “Jacques and Anne Catherine BENICK”. His wife’s surname is also written Benick and Binnies, and Marguerite’s husband appears as Jean Simon Dreger. The burial entry gives no age; it is taken to be his because his widow’s marriage of January 1747 calls her the “widow of Jacob FOLTZ, dec. in this parish”. Deiler gives Folse as the later form of the surname on the German Coast.