A Cross and a Creole

This past March 5th was "It's My Park Day" here in Austin, and so I signed up to spend the morning documenting headstones at Oakwood Cemetery.  Oakwood is the oldest cemetery in town, and I'd visited it before to locate headstones of relatives buried there.  In fact, we started out documenting directly across from one of those plots - that of my 3x great-granduncle Dr. William Neal Watt, a North Carolina native who'd followed two siblings to Burton, Texas before moving on to make his home in Austin.

Caroline Deblanc Fortier
July 1 1843 - June 21 1895

While documenting one of the plots, a stone in the one adjacent to it caught my eye.  It was a granite monument about 5 feet high, in the shape of what's known as a "fleur-de-lis" cross.  I like to call them "French crosses", because I always associate them with French Catholic iconography.  The surname on it, Fortier, seemed to go along with that association.  The group working that plot had some trouble with the inscription due to the morning sunlight hitting the wrong side of the stone, so a few of us had walked over to see if we could help out.  Once the necessary info was obtained, it was just about time to finish up and leave for the day.

Only that wasn't quite it.  Not for me.  Something about that stone just wouldn't leave me alone.  I wanted to know more about the woman buried beneath it: who she was, where she came from.  Rainy, overcast weather also kept me from going back to try to obtain a clearer shot of the stone during the week (as it turned out, afternoon light helped me get a much more legible inscription, as you can see).  Fortunately the cemetery's burial registers are easily accessible online via the Austin History Center, so I was at least able to do some preliminary legwork via the internet.  Since I knew the year of death I was able to locate the correct entry despite a mistranscription of the surname as "Fortin".  This was where I was in for a revelation:  Mrs. Caroline Fortier, who died in Austin in 1895, was said in the burial register to be from Liberty County, Texas.  Aha, I thought.  And then, Hmm, maybe...

From a further search through the census records of Liberty County from 1850-1880, I was able to deduce that Mrs. Fortier was née Caroline Deblanc, a daughter of one of the original interrelated Creole families who had come from Natchitoches Parish to Liberty County in the 1840s!  Since my 3x great-grandmother Esilla Rachal and her parents were also some of these Liberty Creoles it's almost certain they even knew each other and may have even been relatives.  Caroline's mother was a Gillard, another of the main Liberty migration families, and I found baptisms matching a couple of Caroline's siblings in the books of Natchitoches records I keep at home, confirming their identities as Natchitoches Creoles.  I don't have a match yet for Caroline in those books, but I'll keep looking and check into a few additional published sources of Louisiana records to see if anything turns up.

Since the Liberty Creoles have been an ongoing genealogical and historical research project of mine for some time, the discovery of one buried so close to my home is nothing short of serendipitous.  And to think, it was all because of that particular style of cross grabbing my attention.  The stone spoke and I listened, and found a Creole kinswoman as a result.