Carmel Bracamonte Balsz

Carmel Bracamonte Balsz, 1868-1895
Young Wife and Mother
 
Buried in IOOF Cemetery, Block 2, Lot 1, Grave 4

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Carmel Bracamonte was probably born in Navojoa, Sonora, Mexico. She was the sixth of eight children belonging to Juan Bracamonte and Jesus Celaya. The name given to this girl child at her christening in 1868 was Maria Benigna Carmen Bracamonte Celaya, although she seems to have been called ‘Carmel’ or ‘Carmelita’ thereafter. 
 
Carmel was still a child when her mother passed away in Altar, Sonora, Mexico. Shortly afterward, the entire family moved north to Phoenix, Arizona. Since her father does not appear to have remarried, Carmel and her younger siblings were probably raised by their older sister Sotela and/or other relatives.
 
On October 29, 1879, Carmel’s sister Sotela married Frederick Balsz in Phoenix. Balsz was a prosperous, 48-year-old widower with several children; Sotela was only about seventeen. She would be his fourth—and last—wife.
 
Two years later, on Christmas Day 1881, Carmel herself married Frederick’s son Nicholas. At the time, Nicholas was 21 and Carmel might have been about 13. According to Arizona territorial law, the minimum age for girls to marry with parental consent was 16, but perhaps Carmel looked older than she was--or maybe she had been baptized as a little girl, not as a newborn. Their first child was born in November 1882, but died at the age of one month. 
 
The Balszes went on to have four more children—all boys. Like his father, Nicholas Balsz was a meat-cutter and may have worked in the Balsz family butcher shop. It seems likely, therefore, that the family enjoyed some of the comforts of a middle-class life.
 
Nevertheless, Carmel died of uremia on February 5, 1895, and was buried in the same lot with other Balsz relatives in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery.
 
Her widowed husband, Nick Balsz, married Cruz Chretin in 1896. However, the 1900 federal census records him living not with his new wife or his four sons by Carmel, but in the household of his aged father Frederick. Nick died of typhoid fever in October 1902.
 
© 2026 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 24 September 2026.

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