♀Maria Ana Muñoz y Barba de Figueroa

Maria Ana Muñoz y Barba de Figueroa was a woman of colonial Guatemala, the wife of Estanislao Antonio Croquer de Los Cameros e Imbott, and her son Raphael’s baptism at Santiago de Guatemala in 1753 names her and her parents, and a Louisiana register names her again at his marriage fifty years later. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Raphael Croquer (1753–1834).

Life

On 12 September 1803 the register of St. Gabriel in Iberville recorded the marriage of Rafael Croker, “of Guatemala”, to Ozita Barbara Mollere, and named his parents as Estanislas and Maria Ana Munoz. Nearly everything else known of her comes from a biographical file on another of her sons, compiled by a historian of colonial Central America whose own sources are not open to the public.

That file gives her birth year as 1733 and calls her María Ana Muñoz of Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital now known as Antigua Guatemala. Her husband, it says, came to Guatemala from Puerto Real, near Cádiz, about 1748, as a militia commander, and was alcalde mayor of the province of Amatitlán-Sacatepéquez from 1753. The file dates their marriage at Santiago de Guatemala to 19 March 1750 in one place and to 1753 in another, and no register has been found to settle which is right. It gives her husband’s death as 22 December 1772, which left her a widow with young children. Her eldest known child, Raphael, had been born earlier, in 1753 (see below).

The file concerns her son don Antonio Croquer y Muñoz, born at Santiago de Guatemala on 23 March 1765, a priest who became rector of the University of San Carlos^W and a canon of the cathedral of Guatemala. It names two more of her children, Julián and María Josefa. It does not mention Raphael, whose place in the family rests on the parents’ names in the Louisiana register and on his own baptism. An index of Guatemalan marriage records also names a daughter, Maria Gertrudis Croquer Muñoz, born at Antigua, who married Carlos Josef Yudice in Guatemala on 15 April 1780, and the entry names both parents, her and Estanislao Antonio Croquer.

Parents and her son Raphael’s birth

Raphael was born on 5 January 1753 at Santiago de Guatemala and received the ceremonies of baptism on 21 January 1753, as the register of the cathedral parish (El Sagrario) records. The entry names his maternal grandparents, and so her parents, as don Manuel Muñoz, with the title of governor, and doña Micaela Barba de Figueroa, who was already dead; both are described as residents of the city. The governor was also the child’s godfather. Earlier family-tree estimates placed Raphael’s birth about 1771; the baptism shows he was born in 1753, when she was about nineteen, and that he was her eldest known child. Part of the entry is written in faint ink, and the possibility that a younger brother of the same name was born around 1770 has not been excluded.

Notes

Her name follows Spanish custom: Muñoz was her father’s surname and Barba de Figueroa her mother’s. The biographical file gives her parents’ full names as Manuel Muñoz y Martínez de la Carra and María Micaela Barba de Figueroa y Álvarez de las Asturias; the baptism of 1753 confirms the names Manuel Muñoz and Micaela Barba de Figueroa, but the longer forms rest on the file alone. Burials at the cathedral parish of Guatemala in December 1772 and January 1773 were signed by a priest named Bernardo Muñoz y Barba, who bore the same pair of surnames; whether he was her kinsman is not known. The family tree gives her death as about 1823 in Guatemala, but no record of her death has been found.