♂Raphael Croquer

Raphael Croquer (5 January 1753 – before 10 November 1834) was a native of Guatemala who served in Spanish Louisiana as a captain of grenadiers in the Regiment of Louisiana and as commandant of a parish and of the post at Baton Rouge. He was the third great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Croquer (1811–1862).

Origins

He was born on 5 January 1753 at Santiago de Guatemala, then the capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala in the Spanish empire in Central America. He received the ceremonies of baptism on 21 January 1753 at the church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios outside the city walls, and the baptism is recorded in the register of the cathedral parish (El Sagrario). A priest, Carlos Coronado, had baptized him privately because his life was in danger. He was given the names Manuel Telésforo José Judas Tadeo Rafael de Guadalupe. The register names his parents, Estanislao Croquer and María Ana Muñoz, and his maternal grandparents, the governor don Manuel Muñoz, who was also his godfather, and doña Micaela Barba de Figueroa, then already dead. He was the eldest known child of the couple, whose marriage is dated 1750 in the file described below. The register of his marriage in Louisiana in 1803 calls him a native of Guatemala and names his parents as Stanilas Croker and Maria Anna Muñoz, both then dead. A biographical file compiled by a historian of colonial Central America, whose own sources are not open to the public, names the founder of the Croquer family in Guatemala as Estanislao Antonio Croquer, who came there from Puerto Real, near Cádiz, about 1748 and married María Ana Muñoz of Santiago de Guatemala. The file concerns another son of that couple, don Antonio Croquer y Muñoz, a priest who became rector of the University of San Carlos and a canon of the cathedral of Guatemala, and it names two more of his siblings, Julián and María Josefa. The file does not mention Raphael, but his own baptism and the Louisiana register both name the same parents. When and how Raphael came to Louisiana, the records do not show.

Service in Louisiana

Spain governed Louisiana from the 1760s until 1803, and the Regiment of Louisiana was the colony’s standing infantry regiment. Its officers were often appointed commandants of the river parishes and posts, where they held both military and civil authority. In October 1796 “Don Rafael Croquer” was at the Fort of Nogales, at the Walnut Hills (now Vicksburg), where he witnessed an act before the commandant Elias Beauregard, and a catalogue of the Spanish colonial papers at Seville lists, among the governor’s correspondence of 1795 to 1797, letters he sent to Governor Gayoso from the post of Esperanza. On 26 September 1798 he took over the district of La Fourche des Chetimachas, the present Ascension Parish, from its commandant Evan Jones; the inventory of the district’s archives that passed between them was signed by both men. A marriage at Ascension in June 1801 was witnessed by “Rafael Croquer, Commandant of this Parish”, and his own inventory of the district’s archives, dated 20 March 1804, is the last record of his command there. A later entry in the diocesan registers calls him a captain of the Louisiana Regiment and commandant of the post at Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge remained a Spanish post, as part of West Florida, after the rest of Louisiana passed to France and then to the United States in 1803, until a revolt in 1810 ended Spanish rule there. The registers do not give the years of his Baton Rouge command.

Marriage and family

On 28 October 1800 a Rafael Croquer witnessed the second marriage of Joseph Mollere, a lieutenant in the militia, at St. James. On 10 January 1803, according to a compiled list of Ascension Parish land records, Raphael sold a Joseph Mollere a place of nine arpents on the left bank of Bayou Lafourche, a league from the Mississippi, with a house 42 feet by 16. On 12 September 1803, Raphael married the militia lieutenant’s daughter, Barbe Osite Mollere of Iberville, at St. Gabriel in Iberville; the register names her as Ozita Barbara Mollere, the daughter of Joseph Mollere and Ozita Barbara Blanchard, and the witnesses were Josef Landry and Luis Mollere. The register calls him a lieutenant of the Louisiana infantry regiment and the political and military commandant of the Fort of La Fourche de Chetimachas, a native of Guatemala. It names his parents as Stanilas Croker and Maria Anna Muñoz, both then dead.

The couple had at least three children: two sons, Raphael, born on 19 June 1809, and Joseph, born on 7 June 1811, and a daughter, Mary Gertrude, who married Abraham Billings, of Nashville, Tennessee, at St. Gabriel in 1834. At Joseph’s baptism in June 1812 the register described his father as a captain of grenadiers in the Regiment of Louisiana in the service of His Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain. Joseph’s godparents were his uncle Raphael Moller and his aunt Maria Enrrieta Blanchard.

Later life and death

The family record gives his wife’s death as 25 December 1823 at Baton Rouge; no register entry for it has been found. Raphael Croquer had died by 10 November 1834, when his son Joseph married at St. Gabriel. The date and place of his death have not been found.

Notes

His surname appears in the registers as Croquer, Croker and Crocker. An unrelated English-speaking Crocker family appears in the same registers and is not connected to him. Earlier accounts estimated his birth at about 1771; his baptism shows he was born in 1753, so he was about fifty when he married in 1803.