Ten Years

Can you believe it?  I’ve made a whole ten years of writing these family history blog posts without missing a week.  I’ve even wrote a few extra along the way, so I have more than 520 posts.  I had no goal when I first started posting old photos that I started to collect when looking into the history of my different family lines.

Those first posts were just sharing old photos and identifying who the people were.  I started adding the connections I had with the people.   Then I started telling stories about the information I was finding.  Most of the times I was talking about photos, but I also wrote about letters, musical instruments, death notices, artwork, a bed, or any other item that was associated with my family one way or the other. 

I’ve learned a lot about my family over the past ten years.  Lots of times I write the information I have found so I won’t forget it.  It’s also so other people in the family can learn about their history as well.  I have no idea how many people read it or whether they are saving copies of some of those old photos I’ve found.  I don’t really keep track of it.  Of course, I do like it when I get positive comments and people share information that they remember about certain family members and events.  

I thought I’d post some of my favorite photos that I’ve discovered while doing these posts.  When I’m running out of photos, it encourages me to seek out old photos from various sources.  I’ve even had people send me photos that they had found so I can use them for these posts.  I’ve gotten together with cousins who are so good about sharing their old photos. 

So my favorite photo is also one of the oldest photos that I have.  I had an old version of it for many years.  It was just an old Xerox copy of the Patureau family from 1864.  My dad must have gotten it from a cousin years ago.  His mother was a Patureau.  I tried editing it a few times, but it wasn’t really good.  I used it in a post in 2018, but I was always on the lookout for a better version.

In 2021 I found out about the Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection at the Tyrrell Historical Library in Beaumont.  One of the Patureau cousins had donated a huge collection of items associated with the family.  I went there to see it and one of the things I was looking for was that old 1864 photo.  You cannot imagine how thrilled I was to see that original photo in excellent condition.  I stood up from where I was sitting and wanted to hoop and holler!  I could barely contain my excitement.  I got a little choked up and maybe even shed a tear.  Definitely the strongest reaction I’ve ever had to a photo.

And now for second best.  At times like this when I realize how many wonderful old photos I have.  I’ll have to go with an image I cropped from an old family photo on my mom’s dad’s side of the family.  I love the original photo.  My mom had an old photo of the photo that I never really paid attention to.  

When I started researching, I got in touch with mom’s cousins and got lots of Bucklin photos.  I even got an original framed print of this photo of the Hine family.  My grandfather Fred Bucklin’s grandfather was George Hine.  I edited the photo from a scan that my cousin Joseph had done.  I spent a lot of time on that photo! 

But what struck me the most when I was doing that was the face of George.  There’s so much character in that face.  So I made a crop of the face and worked to get it looking just right.  I have a framed enlargement hanging in our bathroom.  

My third favorite photo that I’ve gotten during this time is a photo of my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. in January of 1912.  I think it came from my dad’s collection that I got when my parents moved into Assisted Living.  I don’t remember seeing that photo before then.  He had several other great photos that I didn’t know of, including one my Mee Maw when she was a young girl known as Erie Patureau.  That one almost made the cut.

But the one of my grandfather with a group of friends/cousins is definitely a favorite.  And my favorite version of it is this colorized one.  I’m not usually a fan of colorized photos, but for some reason it works for this one.  I like it because some of the cousins in the photo are also related to some of my coworkers.  I have a copy of it hanging in my cubicle at work.

I can’t talk about favorite family photos without mentioning my old gold mine photo.  My mom had it as long as I can remember, and now I have it.  It’s a photo of her grandfather Harry Clifton Phenice (man sitting front right with mustache) in a gold mine in Colorado around 1906.

I don’t know how they took such a great photo in a gold mine back then.  You can even see the candles they were using to be able to see down there.  I spent a bit of time on this one, too.  If you saw the original, you wouldn’t think that it would scan well.

Besides having favorite photos, I also have some favorite posts where the main focus wasn’t a photo.  I’d have to say my favorite was the one about the Bumply UG.  It is a story loosely based on my dad’s cousin Therese Wynhoven Mouton.  She was known by various nicknames such as Tez, Wynie (sounds like Whiney), and by some as Cousin Wart. 

So many of my cousins could relate to the story, because they had stories to tell about Therese as well.  I think I got more comments on that post than any of the others.  The story and the comments always make me laugh.  Tez was a character, and she liked to travel with my grandmother.

On a more serious note, one of my other favorite posts was about a much sadder situation.  In 2020 I decided to write about the experiences that my Acadian ancestors had been through during the Grand Derangement or Great Expulsion.  If you don’t know about that, it was back in 1755.  A group of French people settled the area of Acadie in North America in the 1600s. 

They were some of the earliest settlers in the New World.  But the area they lived in was disputed between English and French for many years.  In 1755 the English got fed up with the Acadians and decided to Exile them.  They burned their homes, destroyed their churches, slaughtered their livestock, and forced them onto ships to the English colonies.  I had read about this for a while and decided to try to find out the stories of my ancestors.

There are so many sad stories.  So many people lost family members.  Lots of times they lost touch with most of their families and didn’t know whether they lived or died.  While looking through all of those family tragedies, one of them stood out.  It was the experiences of Marie Magdeleine Granger.  So many personal tragedies.  I won’t go into all of the details again, but she really does personify perseverance. 

So there you have it.  My looking back at my looking back.  I hope you keep enjoying them.