♀Marie Cidalise Lambremont

Marie Cidalise Lambremont (born 20 December 1799) was a Louisiana woman of St. Gabriel, Iberville Parish, whose first husband was a native of Venice, in Italy, and whose second marriage, to Joseph Croquer, was blessed in church in 1834 only after a civil marriage, in a ceremony that formally recognised the two daughters already born to the couple. She was the great-great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Emilie Croker (born 1834), Emilie’s daughter Marie Virginia Cottrelle (1858–1937) and Marie Virginia’s son Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929).

Early life

She was born on 20 December 1799 at St. Gabriel and baptized there on 18 May 1800, the daughter of Michel Lambremont and Marguerite Pelagie Braux. The parish was then part of Spanish Louisiana, and the priest entered her in Spanish as “Francisca Cilari”; later registers give her name as Cydalie, Cidalize or Cedalie. Her godparents were Augusta LeBlanc and Ysabel Landry, and the entry names all four of her grandparents: Pierre Lambremont and Francoise Eloi on her father’s side, and Janvier Braux and Osite Landry on her mother’s. Her mother had been married before, to Pierre LeBlanc, and was his widow when she married Michel Lambremont at St. Gabriel on 15 October 1793. Cidalise was one of several children of that marriage baptized at St. Gabriel. In March 1811, aged eleven, she stood godmother at St. Gabriel to Jean Baptiste Adrien Dupuis, a twin son of her half-sister Marie Henriette LeBlanc, her mother’s daughter by the first marriage.

First marriage

On 15 June 1818, at St. Gabriel, she married Jean Baptiste Meneghetti, whom the register names as the son of Joseph Méniguetes and Marie Lentine Brigita, “de Venise en Italie” (of Venice, in Italy), and seven years in the country, so there since about 1811. Her father was among the witnesses. The records do not explain what brought him from Venice to Louisiana. He stood godfather to one of her sister’s children in 1821, and she was godmother to another sister’s daughter in 1830. The couple’s children included a son, Joseph Gustave, born on 19 July 1819 and baptized at St. Gabriel that December; a daughter, Marie Lentine, born in March 1821, who died aged fourteen months in June 1822; a son, Jacques Jean, born in March 1823; and a daughter, Marguerite Clorinde Meneghetti, born on 12 February 1829, who married Gabriel Housiaux in October 1843. Jean Baptiste was very probably the “Jn. Bte. Menegeti”, a native of Italy aged 33 to 35, who was buried at St. Gabriel on 22 September 1831; the burial entry does not name his wife, so the identification rests on the rare name, the Italian birth, the parish and the age.

Her mother was probably the “Madame Michel”, aged 60, buried at St. Gabriel on 12 March 1822; the entry does not name her. Her father was buried there on 28 July 1829, aged 62.

Second marriage

She married Joseph Croquer at St. Gabriel on 10 November 1834. He was the son of Raphael Croquer, a former captain of grenadiers and commandant at Baton Rouge in the Spanish service, and of Barbe Osite Mollere, both by then dead; the entry also calls her own parents deceased. The couple had already been married in a civil ceremony, and the church act recognized two daughters born before it: Marie Euphrasie, born 19 February 1833, and Marguerite Emilie, born 21 October 1834, less than three weeks before the wedding. The act turned the civil union into a church marriage and legitimized^W both girls.

The couple had four children, born between 1833 and 1839. Their daughter Marie Inna died as a young child. Marie Euphrasie married Adolphe Housiaux at St. Gabriel in 1850, and Emilie married John Cotreall there in 1851; Emilie’s marriage entry names her parents as Joseph Croker and Cidalise Lambremont. Joseph Croquer was recorded in Iberville Parish in the census of 1840 and died at Plaquemine on 13 February 1862.

Notes

No record of her death or burial has been found.