After several generations of their families living along the Cane River, my great-great-great-great grandparents, Ciriaque Rachal and Anaïs Compère, decided to move along with some of their friends and neighbors to form the nucleus of a small colony of Natchitoches Creoles at Liberty, Texas. The 1845 document by which they transferred their Cloutierville landholdings can be found among the Cane River Collection of the
Historic New Orleans Collection, which has been digitized as part of the "
Free People of Color in Louisiana" collection of the
Louisiana Digital Library. A few things stand out about the document. One is that it required the presence and signature of Madame Rachal, née Compère, for her portion of their property in a time when women's property usually defaulted to their husbands. The Creole society they grew up in, however, was different and married women had more rights to ownership of the property they brought into a marriage than they did in Anglo America. Another thing notable about the document is that Anaïs signed her own name to it in a clear and legible hand, only a generation or two removed from a time when most documents signed by women were marked by a cross next their name, which was written by someone else. (Her mother-in-law, Ciriaque's mother Marie Rose, was another notable exception. Her
1813 marriage contract shows an
elegant signature of her own.)
Also of some interest to historians of the area is the name that follows the Rachals: J. B. Chopin, the man to whom they sold their Cane River frontage. Chopin was a French immigrant to the area and was an in-law to the extended Rachal family through his marriage to Julia Benoist, one of Anaïs's cousins (Julia was a great-granddaughter and Anaïs was a granddaughter of
Julien Rachal). Madame Chopin was also a cousin to Ciriaque, but the relationship to his Rachal line was more distant. J. B. Chopin was to become the father-in-law of the writer
Kate Chopin, who was married to his son Oscar.
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