♀Micaela Barba de Figueroa

Micaela Barba de Figueroa (died before 1753) was the wife of Manuel Muñoz, a governor living at Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala^W. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Maria Ana Muñoz y Barba de Figueroa (1733–1823).

Life

She is known from the baptism of her grandson Raphael Croquer, entered in the register of the cathedral parish (El Sagrario) of Santiago de Guatemala. The child was born on 5 January 1753, and the remaining ceremonies of his baptism were supplied on 21 January 1753. The register names the child’s parents, Estanislao Croquer and María Ana Muñoz, and as maternal grandparents “el Gobernador D. Manuel M[uñoz]” and doña Micaela Barba de Figueroa, both described as residents of the city. It calls her “difunta”, that is, dead: she had died before January 1753, while her husband was still living and stood as godfather to the child. Her given name is faint in the register and seems to be Micaela.

Her daughter’s name follows Spanish custom: Muñoz was her father’s surname and Barba de Figueroa her mother’s.

Notes

A biographical file on the Croquer family, compiled by a historian of colonial Central America whose own sources are not open to the public, gives her full name as María Micaela Barba de Figueroa y Álvarez de las Asturias and her years as 1713 to 1748. Those years agree with the register in placing her death before 1753, but no record of her birth, marriage or death has been found. The priest who supplied the ceremonies at her grandson’s baptism, Sancho Barba, rector of the church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, bore her surname, and burials at the cathedral parish in December 1772 and January 1773 were signed by a priest named Bernardo Muñoz y Barba, who bore the same pair of surnames as her daughter; whether either was a kinsman is not known.