Gertrudis Flores: A Key Figure in Texas History (1807–1900)
Published: October 20, 2022
Updated: October 11, 2023
María Gertrudis Eusebia Flores de Ábrego, or Gertrudis Flores as she commonly appears in the records, was the wife of Juan N. Seguín, who served as political chief of the Department of Bexar in 1834. She was born in San Antonio on March 4, 1807, to José Antonio Flores de Ábrego and María Antonia Rodríguez. Her ancestry on both sides made her a member of San Antonio’s oligarchy in the years before the Mexican War. Descended from the Flores de Ábregos of Saltillo, her family was involved in the ranching industry in Texas from the middle of the eighteenth century. On her mother’s side, she was a descendant of Canary Islanders Salvador Rodríguez and María Pérez Cabrera. Further proof of her status is evidenced in her marriage to Seguín on January 18, 1826, for which Texas military commander Lt. Col. Mateo Ahumada and Josefa Navarro served as godparents, and future Coahuila and Texas governor Juan Martín Veramendi and Gaspar Flores served as witnesses. Among her four brothers, all of whom served on the Texas side during the Texas Revolution, were Salvador, who was an officer under Seguín, and Victoriano, who married Juan Seguín’s sister Maria Leonides and who owned the property where Floresville was eventually established.
Between 1827 and 1833, before the outbreak of the revolution, Gertrudis Flores and Juan had five children in San Antonio. Between the war and Juan’s abandonment of Texas in 1842, they had at least another three children. Traditionally, scholars have believed that the only child born to Juan and Gertrudis during his self-imposed exile in Mexico between 1842 and 1848 was Eugenio, born in Zaragoza, Coahuila, in 1843. It appears, however, that the Seguíns were still in Mexico in early 1849, when Gertrudis Flores gave birth to a girl on January 6, 1849, at San Luis Potosí. In November 1849 the last of the couple’s children, María Guadalupe, was born in San Antonio.
Little is known about Gertrudis Flores personally. Like the majority of women of the time but unlike her mother-in-law María Josefa Becerra, Gertrudis did not learn to read and write. The one known physical description of her comes from the pen of Mary Maverick and is unflattering. Maverick, who likely did not know Flores was three months pregnant, described her in reference to a June 1841 ball held in honor of President Mirabeau B. Lamar as “so fat that the general had great difficulty in getting a firm hold on her waist” as they danced the opening waltz. A Seguin descendant suggested Maverick may have been jealous that Flores had the first dance with the president, who Maverick criticized as a poor dancer.
Flores must have been a resourceful and steadfast matriarch from an early age. From Juan’s statement in his memoirs that he lost a son while the family resided at Nacogdoches during the Runaway Scrape, it is probable that Flores, who with her five other children joined her parents-in-law in racing for their safety in East Texas, gave birth during that time. She was once again apart from Juan during a critical period when she had to tend to the family between his flight to Mexico in April 1842 and his return to San Antonio in September with the Woll Expedition (see MEXICAN INVASIONS OF 1842). Flores’s support of her husband’s economic, political, and military ambitions by making available her separate property resulted on at least one occasion in its forfeiture. That support also meant traveling back to Mexico on occasion during the 1850s and permanently settling there by 1870. She and Juan were living in Nuevo Laredo in 1890 when she reported his death to Governor Sul Ross. She continued living in Nuevo Laredo and collected a widow’s pension for her husband’s military service during the Texas Revolution until her death sometime before 1907.
Bibliography:
Frederick C. Chabot, With the Makers of San Antonio (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1937). Jesús F. de la Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín. 2nd ed. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002). Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños: Spanish Texas in Texas, 1731–1821 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986).
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Jesús "Frank" de la Teja, “Flores de Ábrego, María Gertrudis Eusebia,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/flores-de-abrego-maria-gertrudis-eusebia.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FFL49
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- October 20, 2022
- October 11, 2023
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