The Patureau Bakery
Have you ever heard of the Patureau Bakery? I hadn’t heard anything about it before I found a reference to it this week. Granted, it was a long time ago that we’re talking about, but with all the research that my dad and grandmother did, it seems like it would have come up. Maybe they knew about it and I wasn’t listening. There are lots of things that I wish I could ask them. Now I have to rely on old newspapers and other documents in one place or another.
So this is what I found. It’s a newspaper article from the Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet on Feb. 14, 1858. The title of the article is “The Staff of Life” and I’m not sure what that means. It talks about a man named Jules Bonnecaze that purchased the Bakery of P. Patureau.
Now it doesn’t say that the baker was Pierre Patureau or that the bakery was in Plaquemine, but I’m pretty sure that’s who they were talking about. Even though I hadn’t heard about a bakery owned by the Patureau family in Plaquemine, I had wondered if there had been one.
Pierre Patureau was born August 29, 1800, in LaRoche-Chalais, Dordogne, France. He was married to Anne Rose Machet on July 24, 1820, at the same place. Rose was born Aug. 19, 1801, in Mareuil, Charante, Poitou-Charantes, France. They had five children (including my great great grandfather Ferdinand Pierre Patureau) and then in 1840 they immigrated to the United States. The passport names Pierre Patureau and lists his wife and four children. (There was an older daughter named Jeanne who either died or stayed behind in France.)
On the 1840 passport, as well as the 1856 passport, Pierre is identified as a boulanger. Boulanger is the French word for baker. So I knew he was a baker in 1840 when he came to the United States and sixteen years later another passport says the same thing. He was also listed as a passenger on a ship leaving France in 1857 with the destination of New Orleans. On that passenger list he was also identified as a baker (boulanger).
Those documents made me wonder if he continued his culinary skills when he reached his new country. So when I saw the newspaper article this week, I just knew that the P. Patureau with a Bakery was our very own Pierre Patureau, boulanger.
The other thing I found interesting about the passport is that they give a description of my great great great grandfather Pierre. Since there are no photos of him, it is the best way to get an idea of what he looked like. His hair, facial hair, and eyebrows were light brown in 1840, but by 1856 they were graying. He had a large, somewhat open forehead over light grey eyes. He had a rather large nose, an average to large mouth, and a round chin with an oval face with a dark complexion.
I don’t know what to make of the height that they give for him. One of them says 70 cm and the other says 72. That can’t be correct! That would be only 28 inches. If we had an ancestor that was only two and a half feet tall we would have heard about that. I think something is missing in the translation. Yet the nose must have been large. On one document it was described as ‘wide’ and the other one said ‘big.’ Official documents don’t lie.
“Grandpa, what a big nose you have!”
“Oui, oui. The better to tell when the bread is just perfect.”
July 29, 2023 Update
Voila! I have been studying French for the past 105 days (started on April 16) and I thought I’d look over some of my French documents. I was looking at numbers and it reminded me of this post about the height of my ancestor Pierre Patureau. In this post I said that the documents report him being 70 or 72 centimeters. I knew that had to be wrong, because that would have been only 28 inches tall and we would have heard about that. But it was because I read the passports incorrectly. For the category of his height (taille) it reads “d’un Meter ______ Centimeter.” I thought it meant height in meters and that they said he was 70 (or 72) Centimeters. But what it says is “one meter ____ centimeter.” So it is actually saying that he was 1.70 or 1.72 meters! That comes out to be about 5′-8″ in American measuring terms. Now that sounds more like it. Much more likely than 2′-4″ for a grown man, even if he was French.
Oh, yeah, I also have determined that an old family photo is of Pierre Patureau. You can see what he looks like in the post “I Say This is Pierre Patureau.”