Author: Van

Landry Brothers – 356 Years and Counting

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I went to a genealogical society meeting last weekend and ran into a cousin that I didn’t know.  That’s not really difficult to do when I go to the genealogical meetings in West Baton Rouge Parish.  Our Landry ancestors have been in southern Louisiana since 1767.  They started out in St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish, then 100 years later they were in Brusly in West Baton Rouge Parish.  Another 100 years later my family was in Lake Charles and Jennings. 

Al, Rob, and Van Landry in 1965 on Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana. 

When I met this cousin, Jocelyn from Addis, I found out that we were related through two different Landry lines.  My great great grandfather Narcisse Landry had an older brother named Elie that Jocelyn descends from.  (I also descend from their brothers Elie Onezime and Joseph Emmanuel.)  Narcisse’s father Joseph Ignatius had a brother named Mathurin that Jocelyn also descends from.  All of this made me think of the topic of brothers.

There have been a lot of Landry brothers through the years.  How else would we get all of these Landrys in southern Louisiana?  A good many of them descend from Rene Landry (b. 1634) who was from France and was a founder of Acadie.  He had eight sons (I descend from three of them) and seven daughters (I descend from two or three of them as well).  I get my last name from the first son born to him in 1660, Antoine.

Antoine had six sons and six daughters.  I only descend from one of his sons – Pierre, who was born in 1690.  I descend from two of the daughters – Anne and Francoise.  Pierre had three sons, including Augustin who was born in 1719.  He was the father of Joseph Ignatius and Mathurin that I mentioned earlier.  They also had a brother named Francois and a half brother named Joseph Marie.

Landry brothers Alcide (in 1890) and Trasimond (in 1861). I descend from both of them.

Joseph Ignatius was really special.  I wrote a post about him and the five lines of descent from him to me.  I descend from three of his eight sons.  That would be Narcisse, Onezime, and Manuel that I mentioned earlier.  Narcisse had four sons and I descend from his youngest two – Trasimond and Alcide.  They are the first generation that I have photos of.  Though I have a photo of Alcide when he was older, he was actually the younger of the two.

Landry brothers of the 1910s – Sebastien, Louis, Joe, and Rob (my grandfather) were sons of Alcide.

Alcide was my great grandfather along my paternal line.  He had seven sons and the youngest of those was my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.  He was known as Rob, Uncle Rob, Papa, Pappy, or Pee Paw by the family, depending on your relationship to him.  He married his cousin, but so did his brothers Seb and Louis.

Uncle Joe did not marry a close cousin, but he did marry a woman with the last name of Landry.  That’s my inside joke when I talk about all of the cousin marriages in my family line.  I always say, “At least they didn’t marry someone with the same last name.”  That doesn’t seem to convince anyone of the normalcy of cousins marrying cousins.

My grandfather Rob Landry with his sons A. J., Hubert, Bob, and Johnny in 1955.

But thankfully, my dad and his siblings turned out all right.  (Though we often wonder about the youngest one!)  Rob was the father of Alcide Joseph (Uncle A. J.), Hubert Joseph (Uncle Hubert), Robert Joseph, Jr. (my dad, known as Bob or Pluto), and John Alfred Xavier (Uncle Johnny  – the youngest).  Uncle Hubert and Uncle Johnny both had more than one son, so there are more Landry brothers out there.

Now that takes us down to my generation.  I have two brothers named Rob and Al.  You can see us in the first photo that I posted that was taken in 1965.  I don’t have any children and neither does my brother Rob.  My brother Al has four children – two boys and two girls.  So there is yet another generation of Landry brothers in my family.

Van, Ryan, Luc, and Bob Landry in Jennings on December 31, 2006.

And since this is Throwback Thursday, I’ll use a photo from way back when for those young brothers.  It didn’t seem that long ago to me, but it is from December of 2006.  And look!  There’s newfangled color and it’s a digital photo.  I’m not used to dealing with those kinds of photos on my blog!

So that brings us through 300 years of Landry brothers in my family line.  I very much appreciate my brothers and it gives me a satisfaction that my ancestors had some of the same experiences.  I don’t know the history before Rene Landry, nor do I know what the future will bring.  Maybe this chronicle will be updated by someone at some future date.  If so, thank you.

Finding Cathrine Foster’s Family

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Cathrine Foster Phenice circa 1910

Have I done it?!  I think I have.  The pieces all seem to add up.  I am very excited about it, since members of the family have been trying to find evidence of Cathrine Foster Phenice’s family for at least the last 50 years.  DNA was helpful in this case, but so was time spent looking.  Let me see if I can explain it for those who are interested.

My mother’s name was Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  Her mother was Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  Grandma’s father was Harry Clifton Phenice.  His parents were Samuel Charles Phenice (witness to the Lincoln Assassination) and Cathrine Jane Foster (died as a result of terrible burns).  We knew some of the ancestry of Samuel, but not of Kate.  The one thing we knew for certain was that she was born in 1848 in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. 

I wanted to find out more, so I decided to use my newest tool for researching.  I did a search on newspapers.com for Phenice and Kansas.  I had already done a search for Phenice and Nebraska.  I found some interesting items, but nothing led me in the direction of Kate’s Foster family.  I had to be open to the chance that her last name was not originally Foster.  It’s possible she could have been married before or possibly adopted.  There was rumor that the Foster name came about because she had grown up in a foster family.  If that had been the case, the title of this post would be “Finding Cathrine’s Foster Family” and it isn’t.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My search for Phenice and Kansas came up with one particularly juicy morsel.  It reads, “Mr. W. E. Phenice, of Trenton, Nebraska, who has been at Perry, Okla., is visiting at Chalk Mound at present.  Mr. Phenice is a nephew of A. E. Millison.”  (The Eskridge Tribune Star and Eskridge Independent, August 30, 1894)

I know who W. E. Phenice is.  Samuel and Kate had an older son named William Emory (b. 1871) and they homesteaded in Trenton, Nebraska, from 1886 to 1889.  So that part fits just right.  But neither Samuel nor Kate had a sibling by the name of A. E. Millison, because that’s the only way he could be a nephew. 

I didn’t really think about it much and then went to look at one of the sites that I have my DNA matches.  And can you guess what I found?  I found a DNA match with the last name Millison.  It really stood out since I had just seen this newspaper article with the same surname identified as a relative.  So I had to check it out a little.  I looked to see who else in the family was a DNA match to this Millison person.  My mom and both of her siblings matched him at the same point on Chromosome 9.  None of their first cousins were a match, but one of their second cousins were.  And…drumroll, please…it was our cousin Mona Q. who also descends from Samuel and Kate Phenice.  And it wasn’t just any other random DNA matching segment, it was the same exact spot on Chromosome 9. 

So I sent off a note to that DNA match to ask what he knows about the Millison name.  I was also wondering how he might be connected to this A. E. Millison.  And if he did know who he was, was either he or his wife from somewhere around Mercer County, Pennsylvania.

After I sent the note, I looked him up on 23andMe, which is where he tested.  On his profile he showed that his great grandparents lived in Council Grove, Kansas, which is the same area as Chalk Mound.  So he looked like he was from the same family.  Then I found an obituary for a Uba Millison at newspapers.com.  There was no information in that article, but the name is so unusual that I figured I could search for it on Find A Grave.  It worked!  I found Alexander E. Millison who died in Wabaunsee, Kansas, which is where William Emery Phenice lived in 1895.  But more importantly, I found out that A. E. Millison was born in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, the same place that Cathrine Foster was born.

Of course A. E. Millison was married to someone and she could have been born in Mercer County, too.  Kate and Samuel were both born there.  Amazingly enough, I heard back right away from my Millison DNA match.  That’s practically unheard of.  He was able to provide a few quick links for some family information.  I was able to determine that A. E. Millison was married to Phoebe Cummings who had been born  in Quebec.  So the common DNA came through A. E. Millison.  The name is also spelled Milliron and Milleson.  The family originated in Germany.

I did some research on the family and wasn’t able to find a connection to Kate right away.  A. E. did have a daughter named Orra, which is the middle name of Kate’s daughter Emma (Mona’s grandmother).  He also had sisters by the name of Catherine and Susannah, both of which are family names in the Phenice line.  But the Catherine that was his sister had a well-documented family that did not match our Cathrine.  Where was the connection?

1850 Census record from Venango, Pennsylvania. The first complete household shows Moore, Ann Magdelene, James, Emory, Catharine, and Thos Foster.

I found another tree that had the Millison family documented on it.  I thought I would try a different approach.  I searched for the last name Foster to see if that was in the tree.  Sure enough it was.  And there it was – a Catherine Foster born in 1848.  I went to check out her page and saw that her mother was listed as Anne Magdeleen Milliron, born in Mercer County, Pennsylvania.  She was the sister to A. E. Millison.  There was a brother of Cathrine with the name of Emery, another name to tie it all together.

When I saw that her father’s name was listed as Morris Foster, I thought it looked familiar.  In the beginning of 2018 I had come across a Census record from Venango, Pennsylvania, in 1850.   There was a two-year-old daughter in the household named Catharine.  She had a brother named Emory, a mom named Ann Magdelene, and a father named Moore Foster.  I had saved this but was never able to find any other information on this household.

Maybe if I had been searching for Morris Foster I would have had better luck.   The other problem is that Morris Foster died in 1852.  Ann Magdelene soon married George Rihel and the first of their nine children together was born in 1854.  So little Kate Foster grew up in a household of Rihels after that point.  She was a Foster child, but in name only. 

Catherine Foster in the Rihel household in 1860

So the relationship to A. E. Millison stated in the article was slightly inaccurate.  Kate was his niece (not his sister) and William Emory Phenice was his grand nephew.  They must have had a close family connection for them to visit like they did.   Yet that article was instrumental in making a great connection.  I am going to have to pay close attention to those old newspaper blurbs about family visiting family because you never know what little morsel of information can lead to a great discovery.

And a great discovery it is.  For Kate’s father’s side, I only have his name so far.  But for Anne Magdeleen, she is the first of four generations found.  The family was in Pennsylvania for a long time.  Most of them were from Germany, and one of our ancestors was born on the voyage to the US.  Another was a Revolutionary War soldier who died in the Battle of the Wabash at the age of 36.

Now that I’ve updated my family tree with these new names, I’ve been able to identify many DNA matches who also have these names.  I had suspected that they were connections through Cathrine Foster and now I have enough information to make the connection. 

Now that I have walked my way through all of this information, I’m starting to believe it a bit more. 

Cathrine Jane Foster Phenice family tree

Bobbie Circa 1937

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I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today.  There aren’t any 100 or 200 year anniversaries in my family that I am aware of.  So I just decided to look through my old photos and see if anything jumped out.  I had been thinking of an old photo of my dad today, since it is his side of the family’s turn for a posting.  I looked at that old photo of my dad as an infant, but it didn’t inspire me.  So I kept looking through my folder.

Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1937. (Photo edit by Van Landry

And then I saw this photo.  I’m pretty sure that no one in my family is familiar with this photo.  I know it was in a group of photos of my dad from his school days.  When I was in high school or so I put together a family photo album that included a few old photos.  For me back then, it meant including a few photos of my parents’ grandparents and some photos of their own childhood. 

Since class photos were the big thing back then, I included my mom’s and dad’s school photos.  This is one of those that I included of my dad, but it didn’t really stand out.  It’s a small black and white photo that gets lost on a page full of other photos.  So when you scan it, it comes out looking much larger and you can notice more details.

Even though this one is a bit blurry, it’s a nice photo.  He looks like a sweet, cute kid.  I did clean the photo up a bit.  When I zoomed in on the photo to get rid of dust and scratches, the different parts of his face reminded me of childhood photos of me and my brothers.  The eyes reminded me of Rob, the middle of the face reminded me of Al, and the lips reminded me of myself. 

But the earlobes didn’t remind me of anyone else but my dad.  He always had those earlobes.  For some reason I thought they must have grown when he got older.  They probably did, but they started out large from the start.  The reason I noticed this is that my mom had connected earlobes and I inherited that trait.  It’s one of the traits that the DNA companies have learned to identify.  Really, though, all you have to do is look!

So there you have it.  A photo of my dad when he was in about the 3rd grade.  Not a centennial anniversary, but sufficiently in the past.

Becoming a Father Posthumously – A Hine Story

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Two hundred years ago a young man named Peter Hine decided to write his will.  He was only twenty-four years old and less than a year married.  And though I’m sure he must have had plenty of dreams for a future, he also must have realized that those dreams were not to be.

Peter Hine was born October 10, 1794, to German-born immigrant Johannes Hein and first generation American Juliana Catherina Schneider.  He was the first American-born Hine in my line of the Hine family, though he was not the first one born in his immediate family.  Actually he was the tenth of eleven children.  He was not the first child of John and Catherine to die, either.  He had an older brother named Phillip that died in 1815 and another older brother named John that died earlier in 1819.  There also had been a first-born daughter that died at birth.

Marriage contract of Peter Hine and Margaret Miller

So Peter came from a large family and may have thought that he would follow suit with that tradition.  At the time it was also traditional to get married first, and that’s what he did.  On August 4, 1818, he married his 18-year-old sweetheart Margaret Miller.  His brother Henry signed as a witness.  Henry was almost exactly two years older than Peter.  His birthday was on October 9th, so they may have celebrated together and were close.  He actually was the only surviving brother that Peter had in July 1819.

I wonder if Peter knew he was ill at the time of his marriage?  Or if he knew he was ill when he found out that his newlywed wife would soon be expecting a child?  All I know is that he had consumption and that was not a good thing back in the 1800s.  Margaret gave birth in September of 1819, and you can tell from the title that Peter did not survive to meet his bouncing baby boy.  In July of 1819 Peter must have begun to have some serious problems with his disease, because on July 17th of that year he wrote down his final requests.

July 1819 will of Peter Hine

It is a very bittersweet thing to read.  He writes, “My beloved wife Margaret being pregnant, I give and bequeath unto the child of her body that tract or parcel of land…Twenty one acres…and interest in a certain undivided tract of land lying in Stokes County.  In case my beloved wife should be delivered of more than one child, the children are to possess equal rights to the above mentioned tracts of land.”  He leaves his other belongings to his beloved wife.

He tried to cover all circumstances as best he could.  One child?  Two?  They didn’t have ultrasound back then.  He also could not take it for granted that the child would even survive to adulthood.  That is never a given and there were lots of things that could happen to prevent that from happening.  But the main point was this:  his wife was going to live on and give birth to their child without him being around.  He would not be there to hold his child.  He didn’t even know what the sex of the child would be.

And he wasn’t exaggerating.  As the 1819 diary from Bethebara, North Carolina states, “July 22.  This morning the married Br. Peter Hein died of consumption.”  So less than a week after he wrote his will, he died at the age of 24.  Two weeks later would have been his first year wedding anniversary.  So we can be assured that he is one man who never forgot his wedding anniversary!  It must have been a sad reminder to Margaret. 

I found myself referring to Margaret as “his wife” when I contemplated these events this week.  That’s like referring to my mom as “my dad’s wife.”  Margaret is just as much my ancestor as Peter was.  Part of that is because I think of it as following my Hine line of the family.  But Margaret was my great great great great grandmother and I very much sympathize with her.  What a tragedy she had to endure.

But endure she did.  A month after that first wedding anniversary, she gave birth to her only Hine child and she named him after his father and grandfather.  John Peter Hine was born on September 3, 1819.  He endured as well and lived to collect on his inheritance.  His mother remarried and he grew up in a family.  Not a Hine family, though.  But he lived with his mom, step-father, and six Wageman siblings and made it to adulthood.

Hine descendants in 1919

I’ve talked about John Peter before.  He married Mary Malina Cox and they had seven children together, including my great great grandfather George Henry Hine.  I wrote about the 100 year anniversary of George’s death earlier this year.  Since that post about his death, I came across this old photo that was shared with me by my cousin Carla.  (Thanks again!) 

I am pretty sure this was taken at the funeral of George Hine in May of 1919.  I see some of his grandchildren, but I also see other Hine family members.  I don’t know for sure who they are, but I’ve seen them in another photo identified as Hine family.  I’m thinking they are the family of George Henry’s brother Allen Larkin Hine. 

Whoever they are, they represent the numerous descendants of Peter Hine.  He never got to meet his son or know if he would make it to adulthood.  He could never have imagined all of the descendants that he had in 1919, much less all of the ones who are alive today.  So let’s give a bit of thanks to the short, yet productive life of Peter Hine.

The Patureau Bakery

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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.” 

Tennis in the Past

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With Wimbledon going on this week, I thought I would go with a tennis theme.  Besides that, I recently came into possession of an old photo of my grandfather on a tennis court and holding a tennis racket.  I had never seen the photo before, so I was excited to see this new image.

Bucklin tennis circa 1924

I got this photo from my cousin Carla.  She let me know that she had some photos that I might be interested in.  I was thinking it was just a few photos.  Boy, was I wrong!  There were dozens of old Bucklin family photos from the 1920s of my grandfather and his siblings.  What a treasure trove!

Carla and mom (Betty Lou Bucklin Landry) were first cousins and their dads were identical twin brothers.  Carla’s dad was Clarence and my grandfather was Fred.  Since neither of us can tell which one is which in the photo, I’m gonna go with Fred being the one on the left and Clarence on the right.  I don’t know who the girl in the middle is. 

The twins were born on October 2, 1907.  The photo was taken around 1924, so they would be teenagers at that time.  That looks about right.  I know that the family played basketball a lot and I did get some photos of that, but evidently they also played tennis.  Being a fan and a player myself, I was excited to find a picture of them in tennis gear from the time.  Those old wooden tennis rackets look so small, but that wouldn’t be changing for another fifty years or so.  They look like the first racket I had in the 1970s.

Betty Lou Bucklin circa 1950

They also look very similar to the one my mom is holding in this photo from around 1950.  Though my mom is holding a tennis racket, she is decidedly not dressed for tennis.  I think the tennis racket is just a prop to hold while modeling her dress.  The intent was probably to show off her dress-making skills, not her tennis ones.

I don’t even know if she ever played tennis.  She was a very serious basketball player all through high school and equally devoted to playing in the band.  But tennis?  Not so much. 

The other thing I realized is that the two photos show both my mom and my grandfather at about the same age.  Even though I played tennis a little bit in high school, there isn’t a photo to prove it.  That’s just as well –  I posted a photo of myself at seventeen years old only two weeks ago.

Tennis anyone?

Landry Family at the Park

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Landry family circa 1952

Here is a nice photo of my dad’s family from around 1952.  This is when the family was growing at a rapid pace.  He and his brothers and sisters were getting married and starting to have children.  As you can see, a few of them have already made their appearance.

My dad was Robert Joseph Landry, Jr.  Most people called him Bob or Pluto, though the family called him Bobbie.  Not me, of course, I called him Daddy.  But I don’t think he was a father at this point.  I’m not even sure if he was married then, either.

Of course I know that my parents were married on November 1, 1952, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  I’m thinking that this photo was taken either at the I-10 Park in Lake Charles or at Sam Houston Park  north of Lake Charles.  I’m judging the year based on who is in the photo.  Of course my godmother Shirley is there.  She is “The First” after all.  The first three were born in  the late 1940s, and that included her younger brother Hubey and cousin Mark. 

Let me identify the people in the photo before I mention any more people.   Starting on the left, you’ll find our dear sweet grandmother.  That’s my dad’s mom.  We called her Mee Maw.  (or Memaw as some like to say)  Her name was Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  She was “Mrs. Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.”  She was very traditional, what can I say?   Standing next to her is my aunt Mildred Sutherlin Landry.  She was the mother of Shirley Landry Shaw, who is standing next to her.  Shirley is standing in front of our aunt Frances Landry (later Raley).  Frances looks like she might be thinking something negative about something she is looking at.  But that couldn’t be possible, because she never had any negative thoughts!  She’s likely just blinking while the camera shutter snaps.

In front of Shirley and Frances is a young boy.  He’s most likely Hubey, because he’s sitting in his father Hubert Landry’s lap.  Behind him are standing the oldest brother A. J. Landry and my dad.  Sitting at the table is my godfather Johnny Landry.  Now the next person definitely looks like she is not happy.  That’s my aunt Marie Landry Reeves.  She was the mother of my cousin Mark.  Maybe she’s upset that she doesn’t have her son in the photo?  Nor her husband.  Or maybe that’s Mark in the photo and Aunt Germaine is holding him.  If that were the case, then shouldn’t that glare be turned toward Germaine.  I suppose I’m reading it all wrong.  I’m sure Aunt Marie was very happy that day.  Anyone can see that!  Right?

So what’s throwing me off about the date of this photo is that when I first saw it, I thought the child on the right was Germaine’s daughter Daphne.  She wasn’t born in the 40s, so it would push the year back a little.  If it is her, there should be more grandchildren in the photo.  Also missing from the photo is Pee Paw, Aunt Wana and Uncle Duffy, Uncle Ross, and Uncle Malloy.  One of them was probably taking the photo.  I’m sure my older cousins will help me out with these uncertainties.

Either way, it is a dreamy picture of some of the Landry family in the early 50s.

40 Year High School Reunions

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Van Landry, a 1979 graduate

This weekend I am going to my 40 year high school reunion.  How can that be?  I don’t feel like I’m 40 years older and I’m sure everybody is thinking that I don’t look old enough for a 40 year reunion from high school.  Right?  In my mind, I am that young guy going to the local photo studio one sunny summer afternoon in the late 70s to have a senior portrait made.

But really, who am I kidding?  It was definitely forty years ago.  My fellow classmates and I put on our caps and gowns on the evening of May 17, 1979, and got ready to head to the stadium.  The girls in the group wore white gowns as the guys wore maroon. That’s because we were the Bulldogs from Jennings High School from Jennings, Louisiana, and those were our school colors.  

Betty, Jamie, Van, and Bob Landry on May 17, 1979.

Before I left for the ceremony, I had to take a few photos with my family.  Here I am with my mom and dad and my younger sister Jamie.  I was the fifth child in my family to graduate from high school and Jamie would graduate the following year.  My mom would be turning 46 a few days later, and my dad was 50 years old. 

I remember thinking my dad was pretty old since I was in junior high, if not earlier.  My mom was no spring chicken herself, yet they still had a few years before their own 40 year high school reunions.  After taking the photos, we headed over to the stadium for the ceremony.

The Jennings High School class of 1979

I’m not going to look up the facts about the situation because using my memory will prove just how old I am!  From what I remember there were 209 graduating seniors in our class.  Supposedly it was the biggest class that there ever was at the time from the school.  I also think that I’ve heard that there was never a larger class.  Perhaps that’s true.  I’m sure I’ll be corrected in the likely situation that I’m wrong.

Can you see me in the group photo?  I’m on the right side of the photo in the maroon gown with a gold collar.  That was another school color.  So maroon, white, and gold were our school colors.  Hmm, I think gray was another one.  Can you have four school colors?  But I think that’s all of them:  maroon, white, gray, and gold.  I won’t bore you with all of the other details from that night, mostly because I can’t remember them all!  Remember?  It was 40 years ago!  Our class song was “The Theme From Mahogany.” 

I was thinking about my reunion all this week.  My classmates have been posting information off and on.  I was looking through my family history information and ran across something interesting.  It is a newspaper article about my grandfather’s 40th year high school anniversary in 1966.   I knew when I saw it that  I was going to have to include it in my post this week.

My mom was Betty Lou Bucklin Landry, and her father is the Fred Bucklin talked about in this article.  He also had four older siblings that  had graduated before him, though his graduating class included his identical twin Clarence and their younger sister Edna.

I am not mentioned by name in the article, but I am one of the grandsons that helped him have more grandchildren than any of his classmates.  I don’t remember my grandfather going to his reunion, but I can remember lots of things in my life from 1966 and before.  And one thing I am quite sure of:  my grandfather was a really old man ever since I was a kid. 

So this brings me to one glaring conclusion – I really am an old fart!  There’s no getting around it.  But that’s okay.  Like I said at the first, I’m not alone in this.  All my classmates are old farts, too!

Reunion update: 

Thank you, Jean Coco, for reminding me that “The Way We Were” was our class song.  I went to my Memories book to confirm this and found a newspaper clipping from the day after our graduation. 

…found another article about my grandfather’s 40th anniversary online…

1966 was the year of my grandfather Fred Bucklin’s 40th year anniversary of graduating Elton High School

The Bucklins in 1950: Color by Betty Lou

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Fred D. and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin family in 1950

This is the best photo of my mom and her family from when she was growing up.  I posted a family photo of them from 1948, but that one didn’t include her parents.  There were several photos taken on the day of this photo, with some of them looking like they were trying to be serious.  But inevitably, one of them was laughing or smiling.

This is the Fred and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin family in 1950.  Fred Bucklin married Myrtle Phenice on March 12, 1930, at the Raymond Methodist Church in Raymond, Louisiana.   The day before their first anniversary, they had their first daughter Sylvia Daisy Bucklin.  She is the dark haired beauty standing on the far left of the photo.  Their next daughter was my mom Betty Lou Bucklin, who was born on May 20, 1933.  She is standing on the far right of the photo.  Their next daughter was Alma Marie, who was born on November 10, 1935.  She is the blond standing next to my mom.  Their fourth and final daughter was Loris Janet, who was born August 31, 1937.  She is the brunette with the inquisitive look standing next to Sylvia.  Then, the day after their 12th wedding anniversary, a little boy finally showed up.  Austin Harry can be seen front and center in the photo.

This photo is actually a composite of two of the photos taken that day.  Most of the photo is from one original photo, but I swapped the part of my mom with another photo that I thought was better of her.  These photos are really difficult to work with.  They are textured and matte finish, which makes them look scaly when they are scanned.  I remember my mom liking the quality of the paper with that particular finish.  She said that it worked really well for tinting photos.  And that’s exactly what she did with one of them.

The colorful Fred and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin family in 1950. Color by Betty Lou.

This is the family photo that she tinted.  It was this photo that was on my mind this week when I was considering my blog post.  I recently joined a group on Facebook that provides free colorizing of old photos.  I submitted one of my dad’s father and it came out nicely. 

When I first started doing any type of photo editing, one of the things that I did was tinting black and white photos.  I later decided to focus on making the photos as clear as possible by removing blemishes and improving the contrast and lighting.

But I’ve seen some really good colorizing that has made me reconsider my view.  Maybe I’ll follow in my mom’s tinted footsteps and you’ll see a future post titled “Color by Van.”

 

Update Dec. 20, 2020 – replace photos with enhanced versions for more detail in the faces

Christmas 1923 With Grandma Amelie

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The first time I remember seeing this photo was shortly after clearing out my parents’ house in January 2016.  I was the one that took all of the old photos and genealogy information for both of my parents.  I was thinking that I was familiar with all of the old photos that they had, but I was wrong.  There were several photos that I had seen online from other relatives that I had hoped to get copies of, and I discovered that I now had those photos.

But there were several others like this one that I didn’t recall seeing anywhere else.  I found this image on a slide that was in a box of many more.  On the border of the slide, it reads “Grandma Amelie + women who spent last Christmas with her 1923.”  (As you can see in the photo I posted.)

I knew who Amelie was.  She is my great great grandmother.  My dad was Bob Landry and his mother was Erie Patureau Landry.  Her mother was Marie Therese Landry Patureau, who was the oldest daughter of Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol Landry Babin.  Boy, that is a mouth-full!  But she was known by simpler names, such as Belite, Amelie, Grandma Amelie, or Grandma Babin. 

But who were all of these women spending Grandma Belite’s last Christmas with her?  My first thought was that it was some kind of women’s retreat that she had gone to.  But really, what 80-year-old woman goes on a retreat a month before she dies?  Not that she knew she was going to die just over a month later (Jan. 28, 1924), but you can see that she seems a bit frail in this photo.  I then considered that some of the women were family members.  I didn’t really give it much more thought, because I didn’t really recognize anyone in the photo.

Van Landry with dad's first cousin Sis Vicknair.

Van Landry with dad’s first cousin Sis Vicknair.

A little over a year later in July 2017, I went to a Landry family reunion in Lake Charles.  Of course there were lots of cousins there.  One of those cousins was my dad’s first cousin Sis, who has been collecting Patureau family information for a while.  When she was sharing her book, I saw this photo again!  And she had the names of everyone in the photo!  After seeing some more of her photos and some of the ones I had, we realized we need to meet up and share.

Amazingly, we actually followed through with that!  Me and my own first cousins haven’t done the same thing, yet.  We’ve been talking about it for a few years.  Someday soon, I say, very soon.

Grandma Amelie + women Christmas 1923

Grandma Amelie + women Christmas 1923

So this is the photo that Sis shared with me.  I’ve edited it to clean it up a bit and now I can tell you who all of those women are.  I should have suspected that they were her grandchildren.  She was referred to as “Grandma Amelie” on the notation after all!   They all descended from her.

On the front row is Emma Patureau Mouton, Hazel Landry, and Wana C. Landry.  The back row is Sylvie Patureau, Naomi “Sis” Landry, Therese Wynhoven “Tez” Mouton (held by Sis), Grandma Belite, Clemence Babin Landry, Lydwin Patureau, Mona Mel Mouton (held by MTP), Marie Therese “Bee” Patureau, and Zita Patureau.

The main thing I don’t like about this photo is that my Mee Maw isn’t in it!  Neither is her sister Lorena.  Their mother Marie Therese Landry Patureau wasn’t in it because she died in 1909, but their sisters Emma, Sylvie, Lydwin, Bee, and Zita were there.  It also includes Emma’s daughters Tez and Mona Mel.  Mee Maw was expecting her first child in a few months, so maybe that’s why she didn’t attend the gathering.  Besides grandchildren and great grandchildren, one of her daughters is in the mix.  Clemence was her daughter by Belite’s marriage to Magloire Babin.  Clemence was married to Louis Joseph Peter Landry, and their daughters were Sis, Hazel, and Wana C.

I was considering explaining all of the other ways that everyone was related to one another, but it got really confusing quickly.  Best just to say that Belite looks like she had a lovely gathering for her final Christmas with her family.

Dec. 17, 2021 – Update

I’ve been looking over some videos that my dad made and noticed some bits of information about this photo.  This photo was taken at Uncle Louie and Aunt Clem’s home on South College Road in Lafayette, Louisiana.  The copy of the photo I had from Daddy was a slide photo.  I think he got that from his first cousin Naomi “Sis” Landry Vincent, the daughter of Louie and Clem.  She put together a slide show of all of her old photos and got together with Daddy to explain who everyone was in those photos.  An extremely helpful slideshow that fills in a lot of gaps that I had.  Thanks again, Daddy and Sis, as well as cousin Tez who shared some of her photos as well.

 

 

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