Author: Van

Magdelena and Her Husband Augustin

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Succession Ve A’in Landry 2d April 1814 – The succession for the widow of Augustin Landry AKA Marie Magdelena; p. 80 part I

I went to a genealogy meeting last week at the West Baton Rouge Genealogical Society.  The presenter was talking about reasons to do genealogy.  Like I need more reasons to spend my time reading about dead people!  He was involved with the Hebert Society, which is for those people such as myself who are descended from Heberts.  I was able to figure out my Hebert connection to him and I’m sure there are probably other connections as well.  Some other members were talking about books and such that were available at the local museum gift shop. 

The next day I went to that gift shop to buy a few books about West Baton Rouge Parish history and the families that lived there.  I was actually listed in one of the books, and so are all of my siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles!  Not that any of us live in that parish, but our ancestors did.  It was a listing of the descendants of my great great grandparents Trasimond Landry and Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol.  The books spent a little more time on the Landry family and talked about the first generation of Acadian Landrys who settled in Louisiana – Augustin Landry and his wife Marie Babin.  I like to think of them as Magdelena and her husband Augustin. 

Succession Ve A’in Landry 2d April 1814 – The succession for the widow of Augustin Landry AKA Marie Magdelena; p. 80 part II

You remember them, right?  I’ve talked about them a few times before.  I recently wrote a short story about what might have happened on their voyage to Louisiana in 1767.  That was a follow-up to the post  about Landrys in my “From Acadian to Cajun” series.  But today this post is kind of a continuation of a post I wrote two years ago.  In that post I wrote about the succession papers that I had discovered for Veuve Augustin Landry.  Magdelena Babin Landry died in 1814 and I found the document about her succession quite interesting.

Succession Ve A’in Landry 2d April 1814 – The succession for the widow of Augustin Landry AKA Marie Magdelena; p. 80 part III

One of my favorite things about that document was on page 80 of the register.  The first part of it is in French, so I’m not exactly sure of what was said.  I haven’t taken the time to try to make out the words and translate them to English with an app.  But in the middle of the page is drawn a chart with the names of her descendants.  I guess you could call it a family tree.  That’s pretty amazing. 

In box 1 is listed Joseph.  That would be our Joseph Ignatius Landry.  There was a Joseph Marie Landry, but he was the son of Augustin’s first wife Anne Rivet.  Magdelena did not leave him out, though.  On another page they list his children and Magdelena leaves them a little something.  She was a generous step-mother.  She outlived both of the Josephs. 

So in box 1 is listed the descendants of Joseph Ignatius.  1 Emanuel is my ancestor who married Celeste Bruneteau.  I descend from two of their daughters and that’s the connection to my Bujol and Leveque cousins.  2 Elie is not my ancestor.  I have had several DNA matches show up who descend from him.  3 Rafael later married to a Rosalie Guidry and they had a large family.  4 Narcisse is another of my ancestors.  He lived in West Baton Rouge Parish and was the father of Trasimond and Alcide.  Both of them married back into this Landry family.  5 Valerien was not my ancestor.  He would later marry Ameranthe LeBlanc, the daughter of Joseph dit a gros LeBlanc.  He is listed as Magdelena’s son-in-law.  Ameranthe is a daughter from his second marriage.  6 Onezime was another of my ancestors, but I only descend from him once.  But he was married to Zerbine Dupuy and their daughter Emma married Ferdinand Patureau.  From that line I think I have more cousins than from all of the other lines from Onezime’s brothers.  There are so many Patureau relatives out there!

The last grandchild of Magdelena listed in box 1 is Joseph Ignatius’s daughter 7 Madelaine.  She had passed away, but she had been married to Joseph Hebert and had two children.  It looks like 1 is Eribert and 2 is Hebert.  I’ve seen records of Eribert or Ribert, but I don’t know who the second one is.  Maybe I’ll find more information about him one day.  But this page has information that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, so I kinda doubt it.  I’ll keep looking anyway.

In box 2 is listed the descendants of Magdelena’s son Mathurin.  This was another son that she outlived.  I suppose that’s what happens when you almost reach 90 years of life.  His children were 1 Xavier, 2 Marguerite, 3 Joseph, 4 Ursin (my good friend, coworker, and cousin Marisa descends from him),  5 Artemise (my good friend and artist Karen descends from her), 6 Landry, 7 Dorville, and 8 Emerand. 

I’ll talk about box 4 now.  That one is for Magdelena’s deceased daughter Madelaine.  She was the first of her children to die.  Madeleine was married to Joseph LeBlanc dit a gros and they had three children.  Only two are listed – Marie Madeleine and Bellony.  There was a third child born in 1786 named Joseph, but he didn’t survive and neither did his mother.  Madeleine was only 22 years old when she died.  Since it happened around the same time as the birth and death of her son Joseph, it could have been the result of complications from childbirth.  Her husband went on to marry again, as I stated earlier in this post.

Now back to Box 3.  It only has Magdelena’s daughter Marguerite and her husband Joseph LeBlanc dit Michel listed in it, even though they had a large family of their own.  That’s because she is listed as Vivante!  She was still alive.  Of Magdelena’s five children and two step-children, she outlived all but one of them.  What a life she had.  The first part of her life was lived in Acadie.  Then she spent 12 years in Exile in Maryland.  The family made it to St. Gabriel, Louisiana, in 1767, and that’s where she spent the rest of her life.  The last 33 years of her life were spent as a widow.  That’s how she acquired the title Veuve Landry.  But she was more than just a widow.  She was a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.

She was my great great great great grandmother.

Karen in ’78

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I’ve been thinking of my sister Karen this week, because it is the one year anniversary of her death.  I write about people who have died pretty much every week, but when it is someone so close, it is much more difficult.  Usually I research people and connect with them because of what I find out.  I’ve known my sister my whole life.  It’s when you lose a sibling that you realize just how much they are a part of your being.  A piece of you is gone. 

Karen on Rob and Al’s bed in the boys’ bedroom in the front of the house at 758 Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana, on December 25, 1978. Photo by Van.

I wanted to have a photo associated with this post, so I thought I’d post my favorite photo of her.  Nothing really popped in my head when I thought that.  I thought of the one I posted when she was just a girl standing in front of the tiger cage at LSU.  She was never too happy about me posting that photo.  She always thought that they (my older siblings) looked like little urchins in the photo.  I decided against that one because not only did she not like it, but I wanted one of her when she was older.

I also thought about posting the one I posted of her in her Shakey’s days.  It’s really a good photo of her, but she’s wearing a garishly colored shirt with a fake straw hat.  It was the uniform that we wore when we worked there, but it wasn’t the most flattering colors.  It reminds me of fun days when we sang as a family band.  Here’s an example of the kind of fun we had.  She was singing the song “Little Things Mean a Lot” one day, while I was playing the bass.  When she sang the line, “Say I look nice when I’m not,” I whispered to her, “You look nice!” with a sarcastic grin to her.  Younger brothers!

I thought of posting the family photo that we took during a trip to Branson, Missouri, during Thanksgiving 2017.  We were trying to make sure we had some good family times together while Karen was still able to do so.  It was the last big family trip that she made and it was probably a bit more difficult for her than we realized.  The photo is nice, but it was not a favorite. 

So I went searching and found this one I posted.  I didn’t realize how good of a photo it was of her until tonight.  I like the way she is looking at me.  And she was looking at me.  I took this photo on Christmas Day 1978 with the new Canon TX SLR camera I got that year.  I took it in the boys’ bedroom in our house on Lucy Street.  It’s actually a photo of Karen and Jamie.  Sorry for cropping you out, Jamie!  I think Jamie was playing the guitar (which she has picked back up recently) to a Billy Joel song.  It’s not that I have a great memory, you can actually see his name on the sheet music in the original photo!  The other thing I like about the photo is that she’s wearing a shirt with lots of blues in it.  It was her favorite color.  How could I have a favorite photo of her without her favorite color in it?

So this is my favorite photo of her today.  It may not be tomorrow, but that is yet to be seen.  I like the way her cowlick reveals her widow’s peak.  She didn’t really like that, but I thought it was interesting.  So that’s my post today in honor of my sister Karen.  I thought about talking more about her final years or days, but decided against it.  What more do I need to say than to say that a piece of me is gone?

Dreaming of Easters Past

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Last night I had a dream.  I was at work and someone said to me, “Tell me about your fifth Advent.”

I replied by saying, “Boy, that’s an odd question.”

“Is that too personal?” he asked.

“No, it just wasn’t expected.”  I knew that he was talking about my fifth Easter, which would have occurred in the spring of 1965.  Yes, I know that Advent is the season before Christmas and Lent is before Easter, but in my dream it made perfect sense to me.

The Landry siblings in 1965 with our Easter loot.

When I woke up I tried to remember what my fifth Easter looked like, but I couldn’t quite picture it.  The picture that came to mind was a photo of me when I was actually three years old.  So I went to my computer and found the photos from my “fifth Advent.”  The photos in question are from April 18, 1965, in Jennings, Louisiana.

I had previously edited this photo with the idea that I would share it on a Throwback Thursday.  But then my dream intercepted that.  I’ll go ahead and share it since it is the Easter weekend.  This is a photo of me and my siblings sitting around the dinner table that we had back then.  From left to right is Jodie, Al, Jamie, me (Van), Rob, and Karen.   This was in an old two story house that we rented the first two years we lived in Jennings.  It was on Highway 26 just north of Interstate 10.  Recently after this we moved into town at 758 Lucy Street. 

Betty Lou Bucklin Landry on April 18, 1965.

This is the other photo that I have from that 1965 Easter.  I really liked the look of this photo, but it needed to be cleaned up and enhanced.  So my dream inspired me to finally get around to fixing it up.  In the words of Brett Waterman, “Do you like it?”

This is my mom when she was just a few weeks shy of her 32nd birthday.  Betty Lou Bucklin from Hathaway, Louisiana, married Robert Joseph “Bob” Landry, Jr. on November 1, 1952, and the rest is history.  They had six children in their first ten years together and the fifth one was me.  You can see that she was wearing her finest Easter dress.  As appropriate for the time, she was wearing head covering since we were going to a Catholic mass.

You can also see a painting that she had painted a few years before.  When they were first married, they moved to California in the Mojave Desert.  At the edge of the Mojave Desert, where it meets the Colorado Desert, is Joshua Tree National Park.  It was definitely a different environment than the small Louisiana town that she grew up in.  It obviously inspired her to paint that unique landscape.  The painting was always displayed in their home and I’m not sure who has it now.  I’m sure it is still being enjoyed.

I was about to close, but then I remembered that I left something out.  Not really.  I had typed it all out and then hit “Control Z” to Undo, but this program doesn’t respond the same way as most of them do and it was all lost.  I had to redo a lot of what I had said.  What I left out was the fact that we were sitting around that old table with all of our chocolate Easter bunnies.  I think that was probably the last time that that happened.  Some of us probably graduated to World’s Finest chocolate bars at the next Easter.  I couldn’t find an Easter photo from 1966 to verify this.  Can you believe it?  I don’t have a photo to document that event!  It’s a good thing my coworker in my dream didn’t ask about my Sixth Advent.  I wouldn’t have known what to do!

Grandpa Phenice Working in the Yard

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I had a hard time choosing the best title for this post.  When I refer to the man in the photo as “Grandpa Phenice,” some people may think that I’m referring to my mom’s grandfather who was Harry Clifton Phenice.  I myself did not have a grandfather that was a Phenice.  My maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Myrtle Phenice and she was married to Fred Bucklin, so she was usually just called Grandma.  Sometimes I do refer to her as “Grandma Bucklin” just to be a little clearer.  The man in the photo was Myrtle’s paternal grandfather Samuel Charles Phenice.

Samuel Charles Phenice fought in the Civil War out of Pennsylvania and was a witness to the Lincoln Assassination.  Shortly after those events he got married to Cathrine Jane Foster.  They had children and moved around (for more details of that, see my post HCP in 1938) and ended up in Nebraska.  During that time there were documents about homesteading and marriages.  Samuel Charles was called either “Samuel” or “Charles,” while Cathrine was usually called “Kate.”  So I could have called the post “Grandpa Charles Working in the Yard.”  I just didn’t like the sound of it. 

Samuel Charles Phenice in Precept, Nebraska, circa 1920s.

The “Working in the Yard” part was the easy part.  As you can see from this old photo circa 1920s, Samuel is working hard in his yard.  He’s cutting logs, possibly for firewood.  It gets cold in the winters in Nebraska and I’m sure he would have a fireplace or two burning in that house to keep warm.  I can see that he had at least two chimneys showing in his house. 

I’m thinking that this is his home in Precept, Nebraska.   That’s where he lived with Kate until she died in 1921.  He was 76 years old when she died and probably lived there by himself for a few years.  I know that in 1930 he was living with his daughter Emma Quillen in Richmond, which is in the same county (Furnas) as Precept.  So my guess is that the photo was taken between those dates.

I got the photo from my cousin Mona who is the granddaughter of Emma Quillen.  She was kind enough to share it with me almost four years ago.  She sent me several photos and I call it the Lincoln Collection.  I call it that because of Samuel being a witness to the Lincoln Assassination, but also because Mona’s father was born and died on Lincoln’s birthday and his middle name was Lincoln.  If you’ve looked at my blog posts, you’ve seen most of my copies in the Lincoln Collection.  I’m running low on new ones to share.  I’m hoping that there are possibly some more that could be added to my collection.

This photo is not the best image quality, but I still really treasure it.  Something about how he is busy about his work and it looks like he is not even aware that his photo was being taken.  He’s just going about the business of getting his chores done:  Grandpa Phenice working in the yard.

1946 High School Graduate Bob Landry

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1946 Graduating Class of Landry Memorial in Lake Charles, Louisiana. From page three of the school yearbook The Clarion.

I was looking through photos of my dad to use as a post today and came across one from around 1945.  It made me wonder what year he graduated from high school.  Last year I posted a photo of him when he was in junior high school at Landry Memorial.  I still didn’t remember the exact year that he graduated.  So then I found this page from a school publication that says that he was in the graduating class of 1946.  That would make this year the 75th anniversary of that graduating class.

I remember seeing this page when I was growing up.  It kinda surprised me because it shows that he was on the football team for one year and the softball team for two.  I never thought of him as an athletic type of person and I seem to recall that he was against any of us playing football in school.  Not that I ever wanted to!  He definitely was in favor of us participating in band and music.

It’s obvious from what they wrote about him that he was seriously interested in music from a young age.  He had four years of band, he received music awards two different years, and his hobby was playing and collecting musical instruments.  In another article I read, it says that he started teaching other students musical instruments during his senior year because there was a shortage of music teachers during World War II.  He taught cornet, trombone, French horn, bass, clarinet, and saxophone.

Diploma for Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. at Landry Memorial Senior High School in 1946.

The article from The Clarion also says that he participated in Dramatics for four years and Sodality for three.  I knew what Dramatics was right away.  He must have been involved with plays and other productions at the high school.  But I had to look up that Sodality one.  It was a social group or fraternity for young men in the Catholic Church.  Since this was a Catholic school, that kind of makes sense.  I was surprised that he made the Roll of Honor for two years.  I must have just seen his bad grades when I was young.  Or they impressed me more.  I never thought of him as unintelligent in any way, but he did talk about studying just enough to pass what he needed to.

It also shows that he was involved with ROTC during his whole time at Landry.  That’s interesting.  I never noticed that before.  It must not have made an impression on me one way or the other.  I never think of him in that way.  I know he served in the Air Force, but he never fought in a war.  He was in the band, for Pete’s sake!  ( A nod to P.R.)  I don’t know what his motivation was for being in the ROTC for all those years.  It’s not something I recall hearing him talk about.

I’d better bring this post to a close, before I make it look like I didn’t know my own father!  I know that he graduated from high school on May 28, 1946.  Of course I only know that because I found his diploma in a box of his belongings he left.  But I take care of those family keepsakes like he did when he was alive.  I’m glad he saved them so we could have a peek into some of his high school activities.

My Irish Roots in My Hometown

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Mary Ann McGrath Bucklin was my great great grandmother. I estimated this photo was taken in the 1880s. This photo has been edited.

I’ve been thinking about my Irish roots this week, because yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day.  One of my classmates put a post on Facebook saying, “I’m actually part Irish from my dad’s mom!”  So I responded to her by saying, “I’m actually part Irish from my mom’s dad!!”  – which is true.  My mom was Betty Lou Bucklin, and her dad was Fred Bucklin.  Fred’s father was Louis Charles Bucklin and his mother was Mary Ann McGrath Bucklin.  When I looked back at my previous posts, I realized that I’ve been negligent of my Irish roots.  It’s been three years since I wrote anything about it.  I’ve been hoping to find the exact year of when they immigrated.  I was thinking that I would find that important morsel of information and write a nice post about it.  It hasn’t happened, but I shouldn’t let that keep me from writing about my Irish peeps.

When I responded to my classmate, I also realized that I usually overlook Mary Ann and talk about being a great great great grandson of Maria Ettadosia Mooney McGrath.  I just love saying that name.  But I want to talk a little about Mary Ann and what she did.  I’ve mentioned her in two other posts, but only in relation to her son Joe who had such a tragic life.  In those posts, her death is just one of the tragedies in his life.  I’m sharing a photo of her that I’ve shared before.  Even when I posted that photo of her before, it was in relation to finding out who Maria Ettadosia was.  So let’s explore Mary Ann’s life.

Mary Ann was born in 1834 in Roscommon, Ireland.  She was the fourth of seven children of Edward and Maria Ettadosia McGrath.  The youngest sibling was born in 1838 in Ireland.  In Ireland at the time, potatoes were a large staple in the diet of the Irish people.  They would have some version of it for almost every meal.  So it’s hard to imagine the massive impact that a potato blight had on the population.  The Irish Potato Famine was in full force in 1845, when Mary Ann was not yet a teenager.  I talk about the tragedies that her son Joe had to endure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mary Ann endured even more.  From 1845 to 1855 about a million Irish people died from starvation.  And just because the family survived, doesn’t mean that it was an easy time.  I wish I knew more about what they experienced. 

Besides the deaths from lack of food, almost two million people left Ireland in hopes of finding a better situation.  The McGrath family was included in this group.  They left Ireland and settled in Palmer, Massachusetts.  Like I said at the beginning, I haven’t been able to find out when they arrived in the US.  I know they were here by 1854, because that was the year that Mary Ann married James Bucklin in Springfield, Massachusetts.  It was the second marriage for James.  He was married to a woman named Rhoda Maria Gove and they had two children together – James and Mary.  Sadly, Rhoda died at the age of 26 in 1849.

So Mary Ann was 20 years old when she married 33-year-old single father of two James Bucklin on Sept. 21, 1854.  A year later they had a daughter named Jennie.  In 1861 Joseph was born.  At some point in the next few years the family moved from Massachusetts to Iowa.  They were there at least by 1864, because Edd Bucklin was born in Sand Springs, Iowa, that year.  Sand Springs is in Delaware County and the family stayed in this area for another 10 years.  My great grandfather Louis Charles Bucklin was born April 11, 1873, in Masonville, which is in Delaware County.

When the family moved south to Louisiana in 1884, Mary Ann was a 50-year-old mother of four and step-mother of two.  And she was a grandmother!  Jennie gave birth to a son named Clarence Kenyon in 1879.  She was married to another man named Ben Taylor by 1884, and they came down to Louisiana with the family.  Jennie had a daughter named Vera shortly after arriving in the south.  So Mary Ann had two grandchildren in 1884, but there were more to come through the years.

But now that I’ve got her down to Louisiana, I wanted to tell about her influence in my hometown of Jennings, Louisiana.  When we were kids, we used to go to the big library on Cary Avenue.  It is a public library and it is named the Jennings Carnegie Public Library.  I always liked that old, cool library when I was young.  It had such a soothing smell of old paper.  I wasn’t aware of its connection to my ancestor until I was older.  So when I went to my 40 year High School Reunion in 2019, I decided to look into the connection that I had heard about.  I arrived in Jennings a little earlier so I could go to that old library and see if there was any family history information available.

Newspaper article about the Jennings Carnegie Public Library mentions my great great grandmother Mary A. Bucklin.

Sure enough, there was.  I found a letter that was written to my great grandfather Louis Bucklin.  But more importantly, I found a newspaper article that talked about the founding of the library I had always been fond of.  It spoke about the Organization of the library, “The library society grew out of a society for mutual aid, social and intellectual improvement formed by the following ladies…” and the second person listed is none other than Mary A. Bucklin, my great great grandmother.

It looks like she was present at the first meeting which was held on January 24, 1885.  This is less than a year after the family moved down to Louisiana.  This must have been something important to her, because they didn’t live in Jennings proper.  They were homesteading north of Jennings around the Hathaway area.  She would have been taking a wagon into town and meeting with those other ladies to discuss ways to improve the area. 

I don’t know much more about her involvement, but I like the fact that she is linked to the beginnings of that old library I know so well.  She was also involved in the lives of her children and grandchildren who lived in the area.  Her son Joe lived in Jennings with his wife and two daughters.  But then his wife died in 1899 after giving birth to a son.  At the end of that year his 6-year-old daughter died as well.  Joe must have been having a hard time taking care of his infant son and other daughter, because Mary Ann went to live with them to help him out.  (James had died in 1890.)  

She was only able to help out for a few months, then she came down with the flu.  She ended up dying from that on April 10, 1900, in Jennings at the age of 66.  She is buried in an unmarked grave at the Jennings Greenwood cemetery.  That is another fact I  was unaware of when growing up in Jennings.  I’m glad to know about her connections to Jennings and I’m proud to be the great great grandson of Mary Ann McGrath Bucklin.  Erin go bragh.

 

Grandma Belite and Family

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Almost two years ago I wrote the post “Christmas 1923 With Grandma Amelie” and it included a photo from Grandma Belite’s last Christmas with some of the women in her family.  It was the first photo from that family gathering in Lafayette, Louisiana, that I had seen.  I assumed that it must have been a gathering of women, since that’s the only people in the photo.  But then I found more photos from the same event and they showed that it was a much larger gathering than I initially thought.  I’m posting two more photos from that long ago Christmas day.  They were shared with me by the Tin Can Collection keeper, my cousin Tricia.  I also got versions from my dad’s first cousin Sis and she had some of them labeled.  She has everyone in the photo labeled, which is really nice.  It looks like the photos have the same people in it.  We’ll discover that as we go along.  Right now, I don’t know.  But I should know by the time I finish this post.

Grandma Belite (on far left) with her family at Christmas in 1923. This was taken in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the home of Louis and Clemence Babin Landry on South College Road.

When I got this photo from Sis, she had all the names of the people in the photo on the back of it.  So let me tell you who everyone is and say a little bit about them.

First off we have Grandma Belite (Grandma Babin to some family members) on the left side.  She was my great great grandmother.  My dad was Bob Landry.  His mother was Erie Patureau Landry (my Mee Maw).  Erie was the daughter of Marie Therese Landry Patureau, who was the daughter of Belite.  She was born Marie Amelie Bujol in 1843 in Brusly, Louisiana, during the time of slavery.

She was known as one of the beautiful daughters of the Veuve Bujol during Civil War times.  But that was long ago even when this photo was taken and Belite was an elderly woman of 80 years old.  I wish I had a photo of her when she was a young woman.  I may have to try out some of those age-regression photo apps to see what comes out.  But unless a photo of young Belite shows up, we’ll never know just how beautiful she might have been.  This was her last Christmas.  She passed away just over a month later.

Next to Grandma Belite in the front is her granddaughter Hazel Landry.  She was the 7-year-old daughter of Belite’s daughter Clemence Babin Landry.  She was the youngest of six children.  When she grew up, she changed her name to Roberta.  That’s because she became a nun and took on the saint’s name of Robert.  So she was known as Sister Roberta.  I think I went to her Golden Jubilee or something like that many years ago.  She died in 1988.

The next two people in the photo are Emma Patureau Mouton and her daughter Therese Wynhoven.  We knew them as Aunt Emma and Tez.  Emma was my Mee Maw’s sister.  They lived in Duson, Louisiana, where Emma was the organist at the Catholic Church for many years.  She also wrote poetry.  Tez was my dad’s first cousin.  If we got confused as children and called her “Aunt Tez,” he was quick to correct us.  And I don’t think it was just for the sake of genealogical correctness.  She was a link that brought many family members together.  As the saying goes, “Misery loves company.”  And a visit from Tez could sometimes bring misery.  Though she’s been gone almost twenty years, the stories of her visits are legendary.

The last two people in the front are two of Hazel’s older siblings.  The boy next to Tez is Henry Louis Landry.  I saw his grave a few months ago when I visited Belite’s grave in Lafayette.  Just recently I had a DNA match show up on Ancestry who is a great granddaughter of Henry.  I sent her a note to let her know about photos like this that I have of her family.  Maybe she’ll be interested.  Next to Henry is his sister Wana Clemence Landry.  She never got married.  She used to have family gatherings at her home.  She is buried along with her parents and grandparents in Lafayette.

On the back row we begin with Belite’s granddaughter Marie Therese Patureau.  She was another of my Mee Maw’s sisters.  She was known as Aunt Bee, like the character on The Andy Griffith Show.  She was a young woman in this photo and almost ten years later she would marry Clarence Schafer.  She was the mother of Sis and Syl.  For the sake of clarity for this picture, I’ll call her Patureau Sis.  She is the one who provided the names for all these people.

Next to Bee is Belite’s daughter Clemence.  She was the mother of Henry, Hazel, and Wana C.  She was the half-sister of my great grandmother Marie Therese Landry Patureau.  Her father was Magloire Babin, the second husband of Belite.  She had an older full sister named Amelie who died as a child.  She also had a younger sister named Albine who died in 1903 at the age of 18.  So Clemence was the only one of Belite and Magloire’s daughters to have children of her own.  And since Clemence (Aunt Clem) married Pee Paw’s brother Louis Joseph Peter Landry (Uncle Louie), they are double kin to us.  This photo was taken at their home in Lafayette on South College Road.

After Clemence comes three family members in my line of the family.  Vincent Maximilian Patureau was married to Belite’s daughter Marie Therese, who I have identified as my great grandmother.  So he was my great grandfather, but I always refer to him as Grampa Max.  He is standing next to his daughter Lydwin Patureau who is holding his granddaughter Mona Mel Mouton.  Lydwin or Aunt Win also never married and did not have any offspring.  She is holding her sister Emma’s youngest daughter (at the time) Mona Mel who was born earlier that year.  Mona Mel did get married, but she did not have any children of her own.

The next group are the three older children of Clemence and Louis.  Ethelbert was the third child and he went by Bert.  I don’t know much about him.  Call it the middle child syndrome.  Next to Bert is Naomi Landry and for the sake of this post I’ll call her the Landry Sis.  So my dad had two first cousins that were called Sis and both of them were interested in family history and have been helpful to me.  My dad made a video where he talked with Landry Sis about all of the cousins and their families.  She also identified some family photos.  Patureau Sis is much younger and is still around to help out with family history information and photos. 

Back to the photo.  After Landry Sis is Thornwell Fay Landry.  He was the oldest child of the family of six children.  I just realized that they had three boys and three girls, just like the family I grew up in.  They had about the same spacing in ages that we had, too.  I wonder if they enjoyed it as much as I did?  After Thornwell is Mee Maw’s younger sister Sylvia.  A few years later she would marry Son Marionneaux.  Like Mee Maw she would have a large family of four sons and four daughters.

The tall man in the back on the right in this photo is Anthony Joseph Mouton.  He was married to Mee Maw’s sister Emma and was known as Uncle Toby.  He lived in Duson, Louisiana, and died in 1969.  I don’t have any memories of him, but my brother Rob and my older cousins do.  He must have been a pleasant fellow, because everyone seems to speak of him fondly.  The last person on the right in this photo is Mee Maw’s brother Vincent.  He lived in Baton Rouge like I do.  One of my favorite family heirlooms is a banjo that belonged to him.

Landry family in 1923 at Christmas

Now to look at this other photo from the same day.  I decided to post it with the other one because I actually prefer it to the other one.  But the other one had the names provided, so I went with that one first.  It wasn’t until I got to Uncle Toby in my descriptions that I realized that the tall guy in the back right of this photo isn’t Uncle Toby.  He’s in the same location in the photo and he’s even posing the same way, but Uncle Toby is in the front holding Tez in this one.

The new person in this photo to the far right is Louis Joseph Peter Landry.  He was an older brother of my Pee Paw and he’s the father of six of Belite’s grandchildren in the photos.  He was the son-in-law of Belite.  But beside that, Louis’s mother Marie Celeste Leveque was Belite’s first cousin.  That puts a whole new spin on the relationships I talked about in these photos.

But all you really need to know is that they were family getting together to make sure that their cherished Grandma Babin (or Grandma Belite) had a wonderful final Christmas.

Animating Old Photos

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A month or so ago I ran across something that I thought was fascinating, amazing, and a little bit disturbing.  It was a short clip in a genealogy group that showed an old photograph.  What was so different was that the person in the image blinked and turned their head slightly.  It was just a short little two- or three-second clip.  It looked like it was an ad for a website or for someone who had some type of software to create the short clips.  I wondered what it would be like to see some of my own images of my ancestors with animation.  Would it be eerie?  Would it show their personality in a way that a photograph can’t?  Would it help me connect with them by making them seem more real?  I really didn’t pursue it much, but when I looked at some of my photos, I wondered how they would look animated.  I even thought about looking to see what the cost of it might be.  It was intriguing.

Then last weekend there was a genealogy conference online and it was free.  How could I pass that up?  So I signed up and went looking to see what I might learn from other people who are obsessed with their family history.  I got distracted by a feature they had that showed you all of your relatives who had signed up for the programming.  I had cousins from all the lines in my family.  People who had Patureau, Phenice, Landry, Bucklin, Leveque, Hine, Keys, Stanbrough, McGrath, or other names in common with me.

As I was trying to get going with some of the programs available, I decided to look at my emails.  I had gotten several reminders for the event with suggestions of “must watch” videos.  Instead of finding that, I found a notice of a new feature on the website MyHeritage.  They were announcing that they had acquired a program for animating photos.  I had already paid for a year-long membership because of their feature for enhancing photos. (That and a deal of only paying 1/3 of the regular prices!)  I’ve mentioned that feature before, because I have posted photos that have been enhanced.   So now, in addition to enhancing (and/or coloring) photos, I can also animate them.  Who needs a conference?   I had some animating to do!

So that’s what I did all weekend.  I have a lot of old photos.  It’s really amazing to see some of those old photos come to life.  The people in them can look sweet, pensive, or concerned with just a blink of an eye or a slight turn of the head.  Like the first example I posted above.   That one is of my great great grandmother Cathrine Jane “Kate” Foster Phenice.  I grew up seeing one photo of her that my mother had.  In that photo Kate was an older woman and she always reminded me of Grandpa Munster.  I got this photo of Kate taken in 1890 from a cousin (thanks again, Mona!) a few years ago.  It’s one of the first photos that I used with the enhancement feature and I was amazed with the results.  It’s one of my favorites for the animation feature, too.  Now when I think of my great great grandmother, I think of that impish smile from this video.  I think that if I had known her, I would have been able to get her to grin like that.  This is much better than thinking of her as a Grandpa Munster lookalike!

But how realistic is it?  While I do find some really amazing looking animations, I go through so many more that I discard.  I posted some of the better ones last weekend on Facebook.  One of them was of me from the 2nd grade.  I had originally discarded the first results it showed.  It showed me looking up to the side and my eyes were badly crossed.  That’s not how I looked back then.  (Most of the time.  I didn’t cross them often because my mom warned me they could get stuck like that!)  When I found out that there were 10 options for each photo, I went back to my 2nd grade photo again and found an acceptable option.  Yet even with the best results, I still get comments about the animations being “creepy” or “freaky” or “robotic.”

And they are right.  Here is an animation of Kate’s granddaughter Myrtle Phenice.  She was my maternal grandmother.  We all called her Grandma.  This was made from my favorite photo of Grandma.  I was able to get a good version of the photo because of the enhancement feature I talked about.  Yet, when I use the animation feature on it, I can’t get a good result.  I can get something better than this one, but I’m using this as an example.  It doesn’t leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling like the first one.  It’s the same exact process, but the results are more on the disturbing side.

While it is easy to accept the sweet, impish grin of Kate and to reject the distorted face of Myrtle, neither one of them could actually represent what the person was really like.  While it may help you notice some features of someone that you might have overlooked, take it with a grain of salt.  But I still think that I could have gotten Grandma Kate to smile like she does in the animation!

Photo of Myrtle Phenice Bucklin taken circa 1930. This is the photo used for the animation above.

Harry Clifton Phenice in 1938

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Grandpa HC in 1938 in Elton, Louisiana

Here is a nice old photo of my mom’s maternal grandfather Harry Clifton Phenice.  Mama always referred to him as Grandpa Phenice or Grandpa H. C.  I’m not sure if most people knew him as H. C. or as Harry.  I’m rather fond of the Grandpa HC moniker.  He always looks like a kind person.  Maybe I’m biased because my mom always had good things to say about the only grandfather that she knew.  Her Bucklin grandfather died before she was born.

HC was born on May 24, 1874, in Butler County, Pennsylvania.  His parents (Samuel Charles Phenice and Cathrine Jane “Kate” Foster) were also born in Pennsylvania.  Charles and Kate lived in Pennsylvania for a few years after their marriage in 1866.  Their first child Chauncey was born in 1868.  Later that year they moved to Tennessee, which is where Anna May was born in 1869.  They moved back to Pennsylvania in 1970, where they had three sons in succession – William Emory in 1871, James Edmund “Edd” in 1872, and HC in 1874.

I don’t know why they moved back to Pennsylvania.  Maybe it was to be with family.  Cathrine’s mother Anne Magdaleen Milliron Foster Richael died in 1873 (her father Morris Foster had died in 1852) in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. Charles’ parents were still alive, but that didn’t stop Charles and Kate from moving their family to Milford, Nebraska, to start homesteading that same year.   Charles’ mother Susan Jackson Phenice died in 1877 in Butler County.  That left Charles’s father Daniel Phenice as their only living parent.  He must have been willing to relocate, because he showed up in his son’s household in Nebraska in the 1880 Census. 

In Milford Charles and Kate had another daughter named Mollie in 1881, but she died as an infant.  Daniel Phenice died at some point before the 1885 Nebraska Census in Milford.  Then after 12 years of living in Milford, the family moved to Hitchcock County and applied for a homestead there in November of 1885.   That is where Lola Myrtle was born in 1886 and Emma was born in 1889.  I don’t know what life was like as a family homesteading in Nebraska in the 1890s.  There was no electricity, no radio, no TV, and no cars or tractors.  It must have been a much quieter place than our modern world.  We were out of our comfort zone recently because of cold weather causing us to be without electricity for a few days.  They never had electricity and I’m sure the winters of Nebraska were colder than the ones down here in Louisiana!  But somehow they survived.  That’s probably why HC learned to play the fiddle.  The family needed entertainment during those long cold winters.

Those cold winters may have been the driving force in HC relocating to southern Louisiana when he was a young man.  Even though his family moved around when he was growing up, once HC got married to Daisy, they stayed in one place.  Well, not really.  They did stay in the Hathaway area, but they lived in several different houses through the years.  There’s a long list of places.  I think I’ve mentioned that before.  Since they did stay in the same area, my mom got to know her grandfather pretty well.  And like I said, she always had good things to say about him.

He looks like a man with a pleasant disposition – like he would welcome any of his little grandchildren with open arms and a warm smile.  In the photo I also notice a few men sitting on a porch behind him.  It looks like they could be waiting for him.  It was traditional at their family get togethers to play a few games of dominoes.  This looks like a family gathering after Sunday church.  (Why else would he be wearing shoes?)  He was at his brother-in-law’s house in Elton, Louisiana.  So after posing for a few family photos, he may have been ready to shuffle a few dominoes. 

Pee Paw Worked at Gulf States

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Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry, Sr. (on the left) receiving his 40 year service award pin from Gulf States Utilities. “President Nelson” is giving him a congratulatory handshake.

I thought I may have posted this photo before, but I could find no evidence of it.  It’s hard to remember which photos I’ve actually posted on here after I’ve shared over 250 photos and/or stories.  There are hundreds of other photos that I’ve considered posting and sometimes I think I’ve actually used them when I haven’t. 

I got this photo from Uncle A. J. a few years ago.  It didn’t have any identifying information written on it, but that was okay.  I already had the information about the photo.  It was published in a Gulf States Utilities May 1957 newsletter called ‘Plain Talks’ and it was captioned, “R. J. Landry  received his 40-year pin at the banquet held in Lake Charles this month.”  He was the only one receiving the 40 year pin that year.  That’s why he is alone in the photo.  There were 10-year, 20-year, and 30-year pins given out, as well.  Those were given out in groups.  Pee Paw was the top of the heap with his 40 years of service!

The other man in this photo was in all of the photos.  I didn’t know who he was, but then I noticed he was in another photo honoring two members from Beaumont who also received 40-year pins.  In that photo he is identified as President Nelson.  He must have been the president of Gulf States Utilities at the time.

Reddy Kilowatt service pin

Forty years is a long time to work for one company.  And all they got was a little pin?  I say that now, but my dad had a few Reddy Kilowatt pins in his chest of drawers when we were kids.  I always thought it was kinda cool.  “Who is Reddy Kilowatt?” you asked.  He was the cartoon spokesman for Gulf States back in the day.  His body was made up of red lightning bolts.  And my grandfather knew him personally!  At least he got a few pins from his years of service at that company.  Of course he was probably paid pretty well and most of those companies had a good retirement plan for their dedicated employees.

Page from 1957 Gulf States Utilities newsletter.

Pee Paw did not benefit from that retirement plan.  Ironically, in that same May 1957 newsletter, there was an article that warned about the signs of a heart attack.  On the opposite side of another photo of Pee Paw showing the 40 year employees, the article was titled “Have a Heart to Heart Talk With Yourself.”  I wonder if recently-turned 64-year-old  Rob Landry had a heart to heart talk with himself?  If he did, it doesn’t seem to have helped.  He died from a heart attack on August 28, 1957.

So this is one of the last photos of my paternal grandfather.  It’s nice that they recognized his dedication to their company.  I don’t even know if he retired.  I’ve always heard about people who retire and then die shortly afterwards, but I don’t recall that being the case for my grandfather.  I’m sure one of my older cousins will help me out with that piece of information. (I was right, cousin Kenny said that he died just as he was about to retire.)  They might even share a photo of a Reddy Kilowatt pin.  (My sister Jamie shared the photo of a pin she has.)  Pee Paw died before I was born, so I was never able to ask him any questions about his life.  I think I missed out on knowing a good man.

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