Submitted by Descendants: Michelle Marie CAMPOS; Christopher Allan, Mabelle, and Teresa D. SARDINAS
Tomas Sebastian Andreu was born the 22 of December in 1757 in Mercadal, Monorca, Balearic Islands, a British Colony at the time. He was the youngest son of Juan Andreu and Maria Angela Caules and was eleven years old in 1768 when he arrived in Florida with his mother and some of his siblings as part of the Turnbull colonists, during the Florida British Period. He married (1) Francisca Alberti in 1780, in St. Augustine, British Florida; their marriage did not last long since she died in 1781. Tomas Sebastian Andreu married (2) Margarita Preto on the 15 of September 1782 in the Minorcan Catholic Church as it was called, on St. George Street, St. Augustine, Florida, which was located on a property that previously belonged to the Avero Family, who had fled to Cuba at the end of the First Spanish Period in 1763. The building has been preserved, and presently houses the St. Photios Greek Orthodox Shrine.
Tomas Sebastian Andreu originally lived with his first wife, Francisca Alberti and one son, about eight miles out of the town of St. Augustine, on a four acre tract of land, which he owned and farmed. The farm was part of the Governor’s Grant. Later he moved to St. Augustine where he lived with his second wife, Margarita Preto, on historic St. George Street. A 1786 Spanish census indicated that he now owned seven acres of land. In 1793 he still lived in St. Augustine on the SW corner of Cuna Street and Bay Street, presently named Avenida Menedez, near where the Monterrey Courtyard Motel is located today.
Tomas Sebastian Andreu died in 1838 and in his Will he left his house to his wife Margarita Preto, who owned it until August 1846, when she deeded it to two of her children.
Tomas Sebastian Andreu and Margarita Preto had ten known children, one of them was Tomas Sebastian Andreu, born on the 6th of February 1792, and baptized on the 12th of February, in the same year, in the Cathedral of St. Augustine, by Father Miguel O’Reilly, during the Second Spanish Period in Florida.
Tomas Sebastian Andreu was first established as a Florida Pioneer in 2004