Marie Barbe Vonflie
Marie Barbe Vonflie, known in Texas as Barbara, was born at one in the afternoon on 2 April 1846 at Gundolsheim, a wine village in the canton of Rouffach in the Haut-Rhin. Her father, Henri Vonflie, a thirty-year-old cultivator, carried her to the mayor, Georges Schmitt, the same day and gave her the names Marie Barbe. The record names her mother as Catherine Gross, twenty-seven, his wife. The witnesses were Jean Baptiste Simon of Bergholtz and Jean Mögle of Gundolsheim.
In November 1848 her parents took her across France to Le Havre. They sailed with her father's parents, François Henri Vonflie and Marguerite Ballmer, and reached New Orleans on the ship Gironde on 7 February 1849. The family went on to Castroville, the Alsatian colony on the Medina River west of San Antonio, where her father worked as a carpenter in 1850.
The frontier took both her parents within two years. Her mother died after childbirth on 30 December 1853. Her father was killed by Indians on 24 September 1855. Barbara was nine, the eldest of three surviving children, with a brother Henry of six and a sister Marianna of three. In 1860, by a compiled family record, the children were living in Castroville with their grandfather François Henri Vonflie in a household headed by a Gross.
On 24 October 1867, at twenty-one, she married Martin Hutzler, an Oberentzen-born farmer, in St. Louis Catholic Church at Castroville. They farmed about three miles west of Devine and raised at least eight children, among them William and Henry, Alvina, who married Joseph Echtle, Mary Louisa, who married Fred Haass, George, Albert and Kate. Martin died many years before her.
She died at home on 21 April 1919, at seventy-three, after a long illness. Her son George gave the details for the certificate, and he knew his grandfather's surname but not his grandmother's. She was a member of St. Joseph's Church at Devine, and her funeral there the next afternoon, conducted by Rev. Planchet, "was largely attended." She was buried in the Devine cemetery. The La Coste Ledger reprinted the notice and added that her brother Henry Vonflie of Castroville survived her, and that the late Mrs. Frank Salzman had been her sister.
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Cite: Heirology, "Marie Barbe Vonflie (1846-1919)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/marie-barbe-vonflie-1846-1919-8eb2db.