Erie Patureau
Previously I have posted about my paternal grandmother, who we all called Mee Maw. Everybody still fights over who was her favorite and it’s a good kind of fight. And even though I posted a photo of her as a young girl a while back, I still think of her a matronly woman who loved to travel and visit with her children and grandchildren. But lately I’ve been getting to know her as just Erie Patureau. A girl who grew up in Plaquemine with six sisters and two brothers. The family ran a shop and there was lots of family around.
Things changed when her mother died in 1909 when Erie was just a teenager. The shop was closed, she graduated from Crescent Graded School around 1911, and the family moved to Lafayette in 1912. I’m not sure of all of the dates of those events, but I found a little clue in an article about her graduating class from SLI from March of 1915. It states that “The following January (1912) after all danger of finals was over Erie showed up. Modest and retiring, she was hard to make friends with, but we were determined and now she’s ours.”
So now I too feel like I have gotten to know her a bit and she is mine. But I’m willing to share her with the rest of the family.
A note about this photo – In January 2016 my brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grand niece and I went to Jennings to clear out my parents house since someone was interested in buying it. My parents had moved to an assisted living apartment in Lake Charles a few months earlier. While we were cleaning up, my brother-in-law came across several stashes of photos and slides. I was very excited about this and I think that he got a kiss on the cheek as a result. When I got home, I started sorting through pictures and slides to select which photos were going to be scanned.
There were several photos and slides that I had never seen before. And this was one of the slides that I had never seen. I wasn’t really impressed with it when I saw it. It’s difficult to see the details with a small slide viewer and old eyes. When I scanned it, I was excited because it was a nice photo of a younger Erie Patureau. There were lots of spots on the photo and the neck area was particularly splotchy. I wasn’t sure I could make it look good.
So I went to work on editing the photo. I spent a lot of time on it, and in the process so many of my female cousins came to mind when working on different features of her. I left the neck for last, because I wasn’t really sure how I was going to get it to look decent. So I started copying and smudging and smoothing. And copying and smudging and smoothing. And before I knew it, it was done. And it didn’t just look decent, it looked really nice! (If I may say so myself.)
When I posted it on Facebook, all of my cousins fell in love with it. And none of them reported having seen it before. How could such a nice photo of my grandmother – a photo that looks like a professional portrait – not remain in the family? I don’t know where my dad got the slide which was probably a photo of the original photo. But I’m glad he kept it where we could find it and I can share it with the rest of the family.
That is a great photo of Erie. It looks really professional.
Your dad seemed good about getting copies of old photos. He made me a copy of a video showing Aunt Ruth’s board of photos. I need to find that in case she has some comments about them. Have you seen that tape? I have scanned all the photos that hadn’t fallen off the board. That is where Jennie and some other good photos came from.
Memory is a tricky thing. I scanned a bunch of negatives from when my dad was young. No one had ever seen any of the photos. I later found a lot of them in Grandma’s albums.
thank you Van for including this in an email!!! i love the information. do you have your dad’s (20′ long) family tree? i recall seeing it across the picnic tables out at the gulf states utility park, at one of the reunions? look forward to seeing you in June! Lauren