Our Erie the Student Revisited
I posted a few photos five months ago pertaining to my paternal grandmother’s school days. The photos were somewhat grainy because they had been taken from school programs or newspapers and they were over 100 years old. I’m revisiting that topic because I got an improved photo this past weekend. My cousins and I actually got together and looked through some old photos and memorabilia! We had been talking about it for a while and it came together at the last minute.
The SLI Class of 1915 included my grandmother Erie Patureau Landry.
This is one of the photos that I had seen a previous version of before. The difference between my first version and this one is vast. A wrinkled up school program just isn’t quite as good as an original 5 x 7 photo. You can actually make out people’s faces and facial expressions. It’s a really nice photo, which is why I wanted to share it with everyone.
That and the fact that my grandmother is in it. Since you already read the title, you know that it is about my grandmother Erie. Her given name was Germaine Erie Patureau. She was born in Crescent, Louisiana, (near Plaquemine) in 1895.
This photo was taken shortly before March 29, 1915, in Lafayette, Louisiana. That date is the issue date for the Vermilion, which was the school newspaper for SLI. It was a special issue for the Class of 1915. Erie can be seen in the first row, second from the right. Once she graduated from SLI, she taught in Lafayette for a number of years before she got married in 1921 to my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. They had eight children who grew up and had children of their own.
All through that time, she held on to this old photo. When meeting with my cousins, I realized she held on to many more photos as well. Plus there were newspaper clippings and death notices. They were all relating to ancestors, children, grandchildren, and relatives. That didn’t include all the things that I had gotten from my dad. He also had her “Patureau Family Papers,” which was the genealogical information that she collected through the years. You could tell that all the things she collected had been divided among her children . Of course this must have been when she died in 1973. A few of those things got back together this past weekend.
You could also tell that she had an appreciation for her family. I think she passed that down as well.