Last week, I was looking at newspapers.com, and stumbled across a notice in the London Standard of July 18, 1827, page 2 of the death of the Baron de Bastrop. He needs no introduction, being that he was a very large figure in our history. The article announced that the Baron died at Satillo, Mexico while helping frame a constitution for the State of Coahuela and Texas. I figured that he would have been Catholic, so there would have been a notice of his death in the local church records. Sure enough, the records for the Mexican church had been digitized on Familysearch. Unfortunately, I can’t read Spanish!
Dr. Charles Holloway, a Professor of World Languages at ULM was gracious enough to translate the above record for me. Here is what it says:
In the cemetery of this Parish of the town of Santiago in Saltillo, on the 24th of February, 1827, the interim custodial priest of the convent of this town, Br. Juan Nepomuceno Briones, with authorization of the parish priest, performed a processional mass and burial for Legislator Felipe Baron de Bastrop, a single male, who died from respiratory problems at the age of seventy years, having received the last rites and having made a will.
Ygnacio? Sanches
The obit, above record and translation will be placed in the biographies files of the Genealogy department at the Ouachita Parish Public Library for all to see.
Ouachita Parish History Tidbits 