♂Joseph François Mollere

Joseph François Mollere (13 October 1764 – 30 August 1811) was a militia officer in Spanish Louisiana, entered in the registers as “of Canada”, rising from lieutenant to captain of the Iberville militia, whose grant of cypress land at Pointe Coupee was signed by Governor Gayoso on 14 February 1799, the day after a royal order stripping the governor of the power to grant land had reached him. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Barbe Osite Mollere (1784–1823).

Early life

He was born at Montreal on 13 October 1764 and baptized the next day at the parish church of Notre-Dame, the son of Francois Mollere and Marguerite Perrodeaux, whose name the priest wrote as Peladeau; the Louisiana registers would later say only that he was “of Canada”. A baptism of 1796 records his father as “of Burdeas”, that is, Bordeaux, and his mother as “of Canada”, and the same register calls Joseph himself “of Canada”. The records do not say when the family came to Louisiana, but by the early 1780s they were living at Ascension on the Mississippi, at what is now Donaldsonville. His brother Francisco was buried there on 14 May 1783, aged twenty, three weeks after Joseph’s wedding, and another brother, Louis, married Anne Apolonia Landry there in 1789. His mother was buried at Ascension on 28 April 1800, aged sixty-eight, by then a widow.

Marriage and family

On 20 April 1783, at Ascension, he married Ozite Barbe Blanchard, the daughter of Anselme Blanchard and Esther Leblanc, of an Acadian family that had come to Louisiana by way of exile in Maryland. Their first child, Barbe Osite, was born the following January; her godfather was her grandfather Anselme Blanchard, then commandant of the Acadian post of Valenzuela on Bayou Lafourche. The couple had a large family; at least nine children are known, the earlier ones baptized at Ascension and the later ones, from the mid-1790s, at St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish. At the baptism of his son Guillaume in 1796 the godfather was entered as “Manuel Gayosa Brigdelos”, very probably Brigadier Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, then governor of the Natchez district.

Ozite died at New Orleans on 15 October 1799. A 1943 history of the Acadian exiles in Louisiana, drawing on the recorder of conveyances’ acts, records that by 26 September 1800 he had a house at Ascension, 48 by 16 feet and built on the ground rather than raised on blocks. On 28 October 1800, at St. James, Joseph married Magdalena Braux, the widow of Jean Baptiste Landry and the daughter of Armand Braux and Magdalena Cloatre. The register calls him a lieutenant in the militia, and one of the two witnesses was Raphael Croquer, the Guatemala-born officer who married his daughter Barbe Osite in 1803. A son of this marriage, Jean Baptiste, was born on 25 August 1806, baptized at St. Gabriel on 2 September, and died on 6 September.

Militia and land

His rank rose in the registers over the next decade: “Lt. in the Militia” in 1800, an “officer of the Militia” at his son Joseph’s marriage in 1804, a “Capt. of Militia” at the baptism of his son Jean Baptiste in 1806, a “Capt. of the Militia” in 1809, and “Capt. of Iberville Militia” in August 1811. Two of his daughters married regular officers: besides Barbe Osite, his daughter Marie des Douleurs married Antoine Baldero, a lieutenant of the Louisiana Regiment, and on 12 August 1811, eighteen days before his death, Joseph stood as godfather to their infant daughter at St. Gabriel. On 20 April 1808, at Iberville, he sold a fifteen-year-old enslaved woman, Françoise, to Rosalie Serret.

A Louisiana Supreme Court case of 1845, Chopin v. Michel, sets out the history of his land at Pointe Coupee. On 26 November 1798, writing from New Feliciana, he petitioned for 800 superficial arpents of cypress land in the district of Pointe Coupee, fronting the Mississippi two and a half leagues below the old fort. Governor Gayoso ordered him put in possession on 14 February 1799, and the Surveyor General, Trudeau, located the tract on 4 June 1800. A witness testified in 1804 that he had spent several days on the land with Mollere, who had one or more cabins there “for the use of himself and some slaves who were there getting timber”.

The claim was nevertheless rejected by the American land commissioners for want of proof that he was in possession on 1 October 1800. The court noted the deeper flaw in the title: a royal order of 22 October 1798 had taken the power to grant land away from the governor and restored it to the intendant, and that order was communicated to Gayoso on 13 February 1799, the day before he signed the grant. That timing left the grant open to challenge.

Death

He died at St. Gabriel, in Iberville Parish, on 30 August 1811. His estate sale at Iberville on 4 February 1812 included forty-three enslaved people. In July 1814 the Iberville parish judge emancipated his son Celestin, a minor over eighteen, and the court’s papers describe him as the son of Joseph Molere and his wife, both deceased, and as heir to their estate. In October 1814 a family assembly of Celestin’s first cousins and family friends approved a loan of $3,000 from that inheritance. On 2 July 1818 the parish judge of East Baton Rouge sold the Pointe Coupee land at auction as the property of his heirs; Pierre Gautier bought it for $800 and sold it in 1820 to Michel, whose title was the one contested in 1845. The Iberville court’s register of successions enters Celestin’s petition under his father’s name as well, as a probate of 13 July 1814.

Notes

His surname appears in the registers as Mollere, Moller, Moler and Molere. His Montreal baptism writes his mother’s surname as Peladeau, a form of Perodeau; the Louisiana registers state only that he was “of Canada”. His second wife is Magdalena at her 1800 marriage, Marie Anne at Jean Baptiste’s 1806 baptism, and Manette at her other children’s marriages.

Iberville sales and estate

The sale of 20 April 1808 and the estate sale of 4 February 1812 are both recorded at the Iberville courthouse and abstracted in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Louisiana Slave Database, 1719–1820. The 1808 sale names the seller as “Joseph Molliere Sr.”, and the 1812 estate sale covered forty-three enslaved people. Among the buyers at the 1812 sale is a “Marie Breaux, widow Molere”, a name that differs from his second wife’s, Magdalena Braux, at her 1800 marriage. The Iberville court’s register of successions dates his probate to 13 July 1814, the day of Celestin’s emancipation petition, not to the estate sale of 4 February 1812.