The Patureau Home

I thought I’d continue with the theme of the past few weeks, especially since that is the theme I have planned for next week as well.  I’ve been planning the one for next week for quite a while, but then I found all the information about homesteading recently.  I’ve covered several lines with the ‘home’ theme, so this week I thought I’d apply it to my Patureau line.

The reason I picked the Patureau line is because of a couple of great photos that cousin Sis shared with me a while back that featured the old Patureau house. You might even call this post Meet the Patureaus of Patureau Lane – Part II.

This is an edited version of the photo.  It is more edited than I usually do.  Sis was wanting a photo of just the house, so I obliged.  I removed a few people and cleaned up the fence line.  This photo was taken several years after the original Meet the Patureaus post.

As you can see, a dormer has been added to the roof.  The trellis in front of the house is no longer there, but there is a nice white picket fence along the front.  The family is growing up and changing as well.  Grampa Max would have been a widower in his mid to late 40s.  His wife died in 1909, leaving him with nine young children to rear. 

According to a newspaper article, Grampa Max stayed in the Plaquemine area until 1912.  He had started a veterinary practice in Plaquemine, but then decided to move to Lafayette where a few other family members had moved. That worked out well for my grandmother Erie, because she started school at SLI that year.

Here is a copy of the photo before I made the major changes to it.  I only know the identity of one person in the photo.  The girl with her elbow on the mailbox is Zita Patureau.  She was a couple of years younger than Erie and also was a teacher in Lafayette for a time.

I don’t have any photos of their home in Lafayette.  I also don’t have any photos of the family home that Max grew up in.  He grew up in Plaquemine, where his father Ferdinand Pierre Patureau had a sawmill.  Ferdinand died in 1877 at the age of 50 as a result of an accident at his sawmill.  His wife Marie Emma Landry Patureau lived until 1892 and died at the age of 62.  One of these days I will post a photo of her.  I only have one and it is really terrible.  I’m hoping to improve on it somehow.  Maybe I’ll get a better version or I’ll just spend a lot of time improving what I already have.  (Fortunately, I found a better version of that old photo and it was much better of Emma. See post Maman Emma Was a Beauty.)

In the meantime I will leave you with this other photo that shows the old Patureau home in the background.  I haven’t done any editing on it.  I wish I knew who all of the people were in the photo.

I do know one person.  Again it is Zita at the mailbox.  Something makes me think that if she’d have been born into today’s world, she’d be one of those young adults with their eyes glued to their cell phones.