06/12/2026
BITS OF EVIDENCE NO. 694
Marie Thèrèse Coincoin: The Final Years
In 1972 Sister Frances Jerome Woods published her sociological study of Cane River, MARGINALITY AND IDENTITY. There, she opined:
“Another indication that Marie’s children did not intend to perpetuate her memory is their failure to have her buried in the cemetery beside the church which they built for their own ethnic group. Even if Marie died prior to the er****on of the church, her burial place must have been known to her children. With the great emphasis Creoles placed upon ancestry and reverence for the dead, the failure to have her remains rest with those of her children can only be interpreted as deliberate.”(1)
Across the decades, many descendants—who do, lovingly, perpetuate Coincoin’s memory—have inquired about her burial site. As Sister Jerome speculated, the family’s matriarch died before the Chapel of St. Augustin was built in 1829.(2)
Meanwhile, two events documented long ago have allowed us to bracket the time frame of the lady’s death:
• In April 1816, she went into the office of the Parish Clerk at Natchitoches to file the deeds by which she distributed her property among her children.(3)
• in December 1817, when Pierre Metoyer Jr. and his new wife-to-be, Henriette Cloutier, went before a notary to create their marriage contract, Pierre stated that he was the son of the *deceased* Marie Thérèse Coincoin.(4)
Prior uncertainty over Coincoin’s burial site has one cause: the destruction of records when the Church of St. François des Natchitoches went up in flames on 29 March 1823. Those of you who have used my translations of surviving church records from Natchitoches have seen, depicted on the cover of NATCHTOCHES, 1800–1826, the kind of damage that fire did.
Many marriage records for that quarter-century survive now as just partial pages with signatures, while the names, dates, and relationships stated in each act itself are charred away. Many baptismal acts are lost forever. Burial registrations are completely destroyed from January 1816 through mid-1818—the period of Coincoin’s death.
Over the past 50 years (yes, since 1972!) I have sought to find every record in existence created by or about Marie Thérèse Coincoin. I've found them in archives not just at Natchitoches and not just in Louisiana, but from Texas to Seville, Spain, to Washington, DC. I have studied all the surviving documents at the Natchitoches courthouse, created by everyone, to place her into the context of the world she lived in and the people she lived among. During the Covid lockdown of 2020, I spent those isolated days assembling all the evidence that sheds light on Coincoin’s last years—specifically her last home and her final resting place.
That study was published in June 2021 in the journal of the Louisiana Historical Association: “Laying a Legend to Rest: Marie Thérèse Coincoin and Archaeological Sites 16NA785 And 16NA789.”(4)
This week, the one-year period of exclusive publication rights has ended and I have posted the article at my website HISTORIC PATHWAYS (https://www.historicpathways.com/download/LayingaLegendtoRest.pdf). In sharing it with you, I thank Joseph Balthazar Milon for allowing us to use his poignant photography of the cemetery; and the incomparable Jeffrey Girard and Dustin Fuqua for the archaeological insights they offered.
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1. Frances Jerome Woods, MARGINALITY AND IDENTITY: A Colored Creole Family through Ten Generations (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1972), 45.
2. For the blessing of the chapel, see St. François Parish (now Immaculate Conception, Natchitoches), Register 6:116; parish rectory, Natchitoches. The first burial occurred on July 20, 1829; see St. François Register 15, section “Enterrements des personnes de Couleur Libres et Esclaves, au 1827,” entry 1829:7. For all the burials in the first 10 years, see Bits of Evidence Nos. 414–464.
3. Natchitoches Parish, Conveyance Record Book 3: 522–37.
4. “Laying a Legend to Rest: Marie Thérèse Coincoin and Archaeological Sites 16NA785 and 16NA789,” LOUISIANA HISTORY 62 (Spring 2021), 177–223.
HOW TO CITE:
Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Forgotten People," FACEBOOK (https://www.facebook.com/ForgottenPeopleCaneRiverCreoles/photos/a.290563547742106/2662812243850546/ : posted 9 June 2022), "Bits of Evidence No. 694: Marie Thérèse Coincoin: The Final Years."
