♂Simon Tregle

Simon Tregle (dates unknown) was a colonist of the German Coast^W, the settlements on the Mississippi above New Orleans in colonial Louisiana, whom a Spanish register of 1802 calls a native of that coast. He married Marguerite Foltz at St. Charles Borromeo in 1750, and in 1762 contracted for a house and a mill. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Tregle (baptized 13 June 1754).

Family and marriage

Simon Tregle married Marguerite Foltz at St. Charles Borromeo on 19 May 1750. The church register calls him a native of the parish and names his mother as Catherine Colender, but leaves his father’s name blank. His own father is not named in any entry, but the godparents at his daughters’ baptisms point to one. Marie Julianne Dreger, godmother of his first daughter, and Antoine and Catherine Dreger, godparents of his second, are each described as the child’s paternal aunt or uncle, so they were Simon’s sister and brother; and the same register enters a Marie Julianne as the daughter of Andre Dreger and Catherine Kalender, a name it also spells Calender and Colender. Simon was therefore most likely the son of Andre Dreger and Catherine Kalender.

J. Hanno Deiler’s history of the German Coast, published in 1909, names Andreas Traeger of Donauwörth in Bavaria, a hunter of thirty-seven in the census of 1724, as the founder of the Tregre family, and the Dreger of the church records may be the same man. No record says so.

On the German Coast

In August 1752 Simon was among the buyers at a public sale of cattle at Fort des Allemands. His first daughter, Marie Julianne, was baptized on 19 January 1753 and buried on 30 March. Her godparents, Jean Baptiste Foltz and Marie Julianne Dreger, married each other on 1 May 1753. Marie Julianne was Simon’s sister, and Jean Baptiste shared his wife’s surname, so the Dreger and Foltz families were joined a second time; the records do not say whether he was Marguerite’s brother. A second daughter, Marguerite, was baptized on 13 June 1754.

On 26 September 1762 Simon signed a contract with a carpenter, André Plaimbler, who promised to build him a house and a mill and to cut the timber on the place Simon would show him. The agreement was written on the German Coast in German. In May 1763 the carpenter sued him over cattle owed, and the Superior Council of Louisiana took witnesses’ statements on the German Coast that month.

At some point Simon married a second time, to Catherine Michel. Their daughter Veronique married Leonard Periot at St. John the Baptist on 20 August 1775. No record gives the date of Marguerite Foltz’s death, but she was presumably dead by the time of the second marriage.

Notes

Simon’s name is written many ways. The 1752 sale record calls him Simon Tregue, and the 1762 contract abstract calls him both Simon Taigler and Simon Tregle. The church registers file his family under Dreger, and the Louisiana colonist surname was later written Tregre. The Spanish baptismal register of St. Paul the Apostle at Mansura, Avoyelles, names him once more, in the entry of 20 April 1802 for his grandson Augustin Marcotte, where the child’s maternal grandparents are given as Simon Fregle and Margarita Folkes, “naturales de la Costa de Alemanes”, natives of the German Coast. The surviving copy of the register page is worn, and his given name is hard to make out on it; a certificate of the same entry made in 1980 reads it plainly as Simon and spells the surname Fregle. Fregle, Tregle and Tregue are most likely forms of the one surname.

Deiler describes the building contract as made in 1763; the abstract of the Superior Council’s records dates it 26 September 1762. The printed heading of the carpenter’s suit is partly garbled in the scanned text, but the witness statements that follow it are dated May 1763. No record of Simon’s own birth or baptism has been found.

Death

No record of Simon’s death has been found. Two compilations quote a published abstract of the civil records of St. John the Baptist Parish. They give a sale of the succession of “Simon Draguer” on 29 April 1766 and, on 15 October 1770, the appointment of a tutor for the minor children of the late Simon Tregle, with Jean Baptiste Marcotte named as their brother-in-law. If that is right, Simon died before April 1766, and Jean Baptiste Marcotte, the husband of his daughter Marguerite, was a brother-in-law of the younger children through her.