Early Burials on Lower Cane River. Cloutierville, Shallow Lake & St. Augustine, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Volume 7, Cane River Creole Series - Paperback

by Elizabeth Mills (Author)

Early Burials on Lower Cane River. Cloutierville, Shallow Lake & St. Augustine, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Volume 7, Cane River Creole Series

By convention, Louisiana Catholics bury their loved ones in consecrated grounds. However, in the civil parish of Natchitoches, as elsewhere, communities were settled prior to the establishment of a church parish with a resident priest to offer last rites, conduct burials, and create official records.

Occasionally, a death along lower Cane River happened to occur during a pastoral visit by a priest from a distant parish. In such cases, those pastors memorialized the burials in the registers of their own church, after their return home. Consequently, the records of early burials within remote communities can be scattered among churches where modern researchers would not expect to find the people they seek.

For this slim volume, the compiler has combed the registers of older churches to ferret out burials occurring in three specific communities. For Cloutierville and Isle Brevelle, this volume covers burials prior to the creation of their church parishes: St. Jean Baptiste de Cloutierville and St. Augustine de l'Isle Brevelle. For the Shallow Lake community, whose cemetery dates from the 1760s but never had an attached church or chapel, readers will find all burials that can be documented before 1917, the date of the last known interment there.

Elizabeth Shown Mills

2026, 6" x 9", paper, index, 40 pp.

ISBN: 9780788456404

101-M5640