Van | Family History

Bobbie in 1941

April 10, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in 1941 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Since I shared a photo of my mom from the early forties last week, I thought I’d do the same thing this week for my dad. So I found this old school photo of him from 1941. I remember this photo from way back when. I put it in an old photo album for the family when I was in junior high school. I’m so glad all those old photos were saved.

I think I may be a little spoiled. Some people talk like they don’t have so many old family photos. Either they didn’t take photos for one reason or another, or the photos were destroyed or thrown away. Things happen. Fires, flood, and hurricane winds happen and can destroy entire homes. Fortunately, my family has fared well through the years. At least where photos are concerned. So I do my best to share them with the rest of the family.

My dad was Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. and he was known as Bobbie at this time. People might have started calling him Pluto by then. He was born to Rob and Erie Patureau Landry in 1929 in Lake Charles. He was the 3rd son and the fifth child. I was also the 3rd son and the fifth child in my family. He had three younger siblings, while I only had one. I don’t know much about the school that he attended. The school year 1941-42 was spent at First Ward. Was that considered an elementary school or junior high school?

I know that he would spend the next four years at Landry Memorial High School. They graduated in the 11th grade back then, so I think that puts this photo as a 7th grade portrait. The year 1941 was a notable one. That was the year that the United States became involved with World War II. It was only a couple of years since the ending of the Great Depression. It must have been a scary time, but young Bobbie didn’t have to worry too much about it. He was too young to fight in that war. Nobody would have known it at the time because it was just starting for them. He might have been worried for his older brothers, but they all survived the turmoil.

The school photo also reminds me of when I did a DNA test on my dad. When I told the family about the ethnicity results, some of my nieces were surprised that he was 100% European. “Really?” they asked, “He doesn’t have any sub–Saharan African?” I told them that there was never any suggestion of that in the family tree that my dad had worked on. It all pointed back to France. And they responded, “But those pictures of him when he was younger (seemed to point to a mixed heritage).” They may have got the idea from a photo in an encyclopedia or Book of Knowledge in my parents’ house. It showed an African man and my mom had labeled it “Pluto man.” She thought the man resembled Daddy. They seemed a little disappointed.

We are what we are.

Landry

Betty Lou in 1942

April 3, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Betty Lou Bucklin was a fourth-grade student at Hathaway High School in the fall of 1942.

Here is a photo of my mom in 1942. She was just a young girl living in Hathaway, Louisiana, with her parents, her three sisters, and her younger brother. I’m pretty sure it is a school photo, though it doesn’t have the usual school’s name and year below it like most of the other ones I have of her. But what else could it be? She’s posed like your standard school portrait.

I was about to say that this was one of the two times that she tried out the hair style where she doesn’t have bangs. I was thinking that it occurred at the time of this photo and then she tried it again in 1948, and all of the other years she had bangs. But in looking back at the old photos, I realized I was wrong. She had her hair pulled to the side from around 1941 all the way through to 1948. That’s most of her school years! How do I not notice these things?

It makes me wonder what other things I overlook when I read letters, Censuses, and old records about my ancestors. It’s difficult to soak in all of the information when you look through so much information. But I’m thinking I might have to revisit some of those documents I haven’t looked at in a while. They might be a source for some good material for these family history posts. I’m getting a little short on new photos to use. I could always reuse some of the really good ones along with new discoveries about the subjects of the photos.

I’ve actually done that a few times already. I’m surprised that it’s taken ten years to get low on new photos to share for the first time. I know there are “new” photos out there that I haven’t seen yet. I’ll definitely keep looking. I do still have some good photos to share, like this one of 9-year-old Betty Lou Bucklin. She went by Betty Lou all her life. She said that when she started school, there were several Bettys around – Betty Jo Koll, Betty Stagg, Betty Fruge – so they all called her Betty Lou. Though her family always called her that, too.

This was around the time that her interest in music was starting to grow. I shared a photo of her in her Rhythm Band at school from the same year. In her memory book, she said that she started playing piano around this time, too. The family was musical. Grandma Bucklin – Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin – used to sing and play the piano and organ. She learned that from her own mother – Daisy Henrietta Keys Phenice. If you remember the musical recordings that I’ve shared, you’ll notice that Myrtle had a beautiful singing voice and had perfect pitch. Daisy not so much. She did provide wonderful accompaniment to her husband Harry Clifton Phenice on the recordings of him playing the fiddle. Like I said, the family was musical.

Bucklin

The Mother of US Patureaus

March 27, 2025 Van Leave a comment

As you all know, I take a lot of time to work out the best title for my posts. Maybe you don’t know that, and maybe I don’t really spend all that much time doing it. But I do put some thought into it. I’m not exactly pleased with this title, but it does have the message that I wanted to say. Marie Emma Landry Patureau is the matriarch of the Patureau family in the United States. I usually make sure to not word it this way so I can avoid the use of the plural form for Patureau. But I wanted a short title, and technically Patureaus is correct. I thought of using the French manner of pluralizing words ending in -eau. They add an -x to the word, so we would end up with Patureaux. But like I said, we’re talking about the American Patureau family.

Marie Emma Landry Patureau circa 1880.

More important than the title is the fact that I’m posting another photo of Marie Emma Landry Patureau. I think I’ll just refer to her as Maman Emma. That’s what I called her when I shared that first photo of her back in 2021. That photo was a crop of her from a family photo from 1864. She was younger in that photo, which means that she had given birth to fewer children and had experienced fewer deaths of her children. Those things can definitely change a person.

I’ve estimated that the photo was taken around 1880, which would mean that she was a widow. Her husband Ferdinand Pierre Patureau died in 1877 after having an accident in the family sawmill business. I’m pretty sure she was a witness to this accident, though I can’t find that bit of information presently. What I did find in my search was a news report that a storm blew through Plaquemine in August of 1879 – The Great Storm of 1879 – and the Patureau sawmill was leveled. That Maman Emma went through a lot. I won’t talk about the attempted burglary of her home – that happened a few years after this photo was taken.

Framed print of Emma Patureau (unedited)

In 1880 she was 50 years old, and she had ten living children. She had given birth to six more children who had died at various ages. She also had the first three of her many grandchildren. I descend from her second oldest surviving son Vincent Maximilian Patureau. We call him Grampa Max. His daughter Germaine Erie Patureau Landry was the mother of my father Robert Joseph Landry, Jr.

I got this photo in November of 2021. That’s the same time that I got the other photo of Maman Emma. It’s from the Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Papers at the Tyrrell Historic Library in Beaumont, Texas. I had seen the other one before, but this one was new to me. I was very excited for both of the photos. This one looks like an original photo, but it is in poor shape. There is a lot of cracking all over the photo. I worked on it a bit when I first got the photo but wasn’t too pleased with it. I finally got around to doing a bit more tonight.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better. I’m posting the unedited version of it so you can see what it looked like. I also like the matt they used for the photo. Another great thing about it is that someone labeled the photo, so we know with absolute certainty that it is Maman Emma. Since the Collection in Beaumont was started by Emma’s daughter Victorine and continued by Victorine’s daughter Katherine Winnie “Kitty” Cropper, I would think that Kitty was the one that we can thank for that.

So her name was Emma Landry Patureau. Her husband Ferdinand Patureau was a French immigrant that came to America with his family. He had one brother who came here also, but Abel had no children. Ferdinand was the only one to carry on the Patureau name here in the United States. And he did that with his Landry wife. As I once said, “I Am a Patureau,” since my grandmother was a Patureau. In the same manner, any Patureau in the US can say, “I Am a Landry.” Isn’t that something that everyone wished they could say? Well, maybe they don’t. But a Patureau descendant can. I’d like all of you to say it at least once, in honor of Maman Emma.

Here, I’ll get you started. I am a Landry!

Bob and Betty Began The Band

March 20, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Bob and Betty Landry playing for an event circa 1975.

Of course I’m talking about the Landry Family Band. The band consisted of my parents, Bob and Betty Landry, and all of their kids – Jodie, Rob, Karen, Al, Van (me), and Jamie. But it didn’t really begin that way. The germ of it started in 1950, when young Betty Lou Bucklin went to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for Solo and Ensemble Festival. She was a junior in high school, and she was a baritone player. She was from the small town of Hathaway, Louisiana, and was unfamiliar with her new surroundings. She decided to ask someone for directions, and that someone was Bob Landry from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

My dad was in college at LSU at the time. He was four years older than my mom. When Betty Lou graduated from high school the following year, she went to McNeese in Lake Charles. It just so happened that Bob had decided to return to McNeese because it had become a four-year university. So they met again and went out on a date almost immediately. They both played baritone in the band, so they started playing music together then. They were married in 1952 and children followed.

My dad was a band director and chorus instructor. He taught at LaGrange in Lake Charles, at Elton High School, and at Northside Junior High in Jennings. We grew up with music all around us. We all learned how to play the ukulele at a very young age and then transitioned over to the guitar when we were older. My mom was a piano player, and we always had a piano in the house. One of the songs that she’d play for us when we were small is “Boop Boop Did’m Dad’m Waddam Choo!” She went to town singing about those three little fishies swimming over that dam! It is a crying shame that there is not a recording of her singing that song. She played it for all of her grandchildren, as well. Surely they must have fond memories of that. What say you, niblings?

In the early to mid 1970s Mama and Daddy started playing together at events. I suppose part of the reason was to make some extra money, but for some reason I always thought that they were mainly doing it because they liked to sing and entertain people. Our family would sometimes sing together at mass at the big Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church in Jennings. But we kids didn’t sing with them when they had those first gigs. Jodie went off to college in 1971 and got married in 1973. She and her husband lived in Lake Charles at the married student housing. Rob was off to Louisiana Tech in 1973, and Karen was graduating from Jennings High School in 1975. The rest of us were in high school and junior high.

That’s about the time that this photo was taken. I don’t know where it was taken or who took it. I don’t think any of us kids were there. I don’t know how people knew about my parents being available to hire for events. It’s not like they were able to post this photo online anywhere. That wouldn’t come around for several years. It must have been by word of mouth. Then somehow my dad connected with Bill Spreafico, who was the manager for the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Lake Charles. That led to the family becoming the entertainment there beginning in June of 1976. At first we played Wednesday through Saturday nights every week. After about a year, it was changed to just Friday and Saturday nights. We had a lot of pizzas that first year! They were pepperoni and mushroom for me. We also had the Super Spuds pretty often, too.

But we didn’t all sing along at first. We started out a bit shy. My mom coaxed me into singing “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” by offering me a one-dollar bill. That was in addition to the five dollars they would give us for playing along and helping to set things up. It wasn’t too long before we all had our own repertoire of songs that we’d sing. We all got along really well, so there was no fighting over who gets to sing when. We would take our turns when we could. It was all for fun anyway! At least that’s the way I remember it.

I can’t go without commenting about the additional creatures in this photo. Are those real squirrels that I see climbing in that tree to the left? And what are they doing? It looks like they’re trying to carry away the cords for the microphone that Daddy is singing in. I don’t even think he noticed them. Or maybe they are just decorations in the tree? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

There was another thing I wanted to say about this photo. It was taken in 1975. It’s amazing that that was fifty years ago! When I think about that, I always tell myself that I’m living in the future. Am I right?

Landry
Music

Grampa Max Was Born 160 Years Ago

March 13, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Vincent Maximilien Patureau circa 1887 in New Orleans, Louisiana

That’s right. Vincent Maximilien Patureau was born 160 years ago today. On March 13, 1865, Marie Emma Landry Patureau gave birth to her 12th child. I’m sure she was hoping that he would survive longer than her last three male offspring had. None of them had reached their 4th birthday. When Max was a child, he had one surviving older brother and six surviving older sisters. Max fulfilled those maternal hopes and outlived his mother for many years.

He was the son of Ferdinand Pierre Patureau, who was an immigrant from France. The Patureau family had come from Riberac (near LaRoche-Chalais) in 1840 and settled in Louisiana. Ferdinand’s mother Anne Rose Machet and his younger sister Elisa did not live long once arriving in North America. Ferdinand and Marie Emma were married in 1847 and started their family shortly thereafter. They settled in Plaquemine, Louisiana, in 1853 and Ferdinand’s father Pierre Ferdinand Patureau went to live with them. Pierre died in 1860.

In 1864 Ferdinand and Emma brought their family to Bagdad, Matamoros, Mexico. It was during the time of the Civil War, and Southern Louisiana wasn’t a particularly safe place to be. I’m not sure if that’s the reason they moved there or not. There are suggestions of the family moving there because of business opportunities in Mexico during the time of French control of the area. And besides, Ferdinand’s sister Victorine Patureau Laulom had a daughter named Eliza Laulom Crixell who lived in Matamoros. Eliza had a son named Emilio in 1865 as well. Even though Max and Emilio were born the same year, Max was a first cousin to Emilio’s mother. Max and Emilio might have been close like brothers if the Patureau family stayed in Mexico. But that was not to be. The family moved back to Plaquemine with their new baby boy at the end of 1865.

So Max spent his childhood in Plaquemine and became an enterprising young man. He worked at his father’s sawmill. He may have been there that day in 1877 when Ferdinand had his terrible accident. The doctor amputated his leg in his attempt to save him, but Ferdinand died as a result of the accident. The family had the sawmill for a few years more, but that must not have been Max’s interest. He had odd jobs of installing lightning rods and delivering groceries. He was described as a go getter.

The photo I posted is from around 1887 when he was about 22 years old. The back of the photo shows that it was taken in New Orleans, Louisiana. I got this copy last year from Box 301. That’s the collection that was in my Aunt Wana’s attic for many years unbeknownst to the rest of the world. It was discovered and shared by my Duffy cousins in 2024. I already had a version of this photo, but it wasn’t as good as this one. This one is an original photo and sharper than what I had. I also edited it a bit to improve it. I think it is a really nice photo of him. He looks slightly younger than he does in his 1888 wedding photos. He would marry Marie Therese Landry, and they had a daughter named Erie. Erie was my dad’s mom – my dear sweet Mee Maw.

I know that Max kept in touch with his relatives in Texas and Mexico. I’ve posted a newspaper article from 1904 that talks about a visit that he made to that area. There may have been more, but we just don’t have the wonderful evidence that the news article provided. There is another hint of that from an article about his death in 1935.

This article was from the May 5, 1935, edition of the Brownsville Herald Sun. Brownsville, Texas, is just across the border from Matamoros, Mexico. The article refers to Grampa Max as a Matamoros native. It also says that he had resided in Louisiana for a “number of years.” That sounds a little off, since he only lived there a few months and then spent the rest of his life in Louisiana. But’s it’s sweet that they wanted to claim him as one of their own. Very sweet.

The article was obviously provided by Mrs. Henry Krausse. They refer to him as her uncle. That’s not exactly true either. Henry Krausse was the husband of Otila Crixell. Oh, no! You don’t know who Otila Crixell is! I thought for sure I might have posted a photo of her before. But it doesn’t look like I did. It’s a great old photo of her when she and two other Crixell cousins were children. Otila was the daughter of Joseph Crixell. I’ve mentioned him before. He was murdered by a former Texas Ranger in 1912. Joseph was the brother of Emilio Crixell that I mentioned earlier. Emilio was born in the same place and the same year as Grampa Max. That would make Otila the first cousin twice removed of Max. But if she thought of him like a brother to her father, she might have referred to him as Uncle Max.

Crixell cousins in 1908 in south Texas.

Even though I think this photo will get all of the attention when I post this, I’m going to post it anyway. It’s my way of thanking cousin Otila for getting that news report put into the paper in honor of Grampa Max. Otila is the girl representing the daisy on the left. She was the daughter of Joseph Crixell. On top is Isabel Crixell, who portrayed a fairy. She was the daughter of Teofilo Crixell. Elvira Crixell is the girl on the right and she represented the lily. She was the daughter of Louis Crixell. Eliza Laulom Crixell must have been very proud of her young granddaughters during this 1908 presentation. After this floral presentation, the girls performed a piece on the piano called “A Gallop of Six Hands.” Very proud indeed.

Patureau

An S. C. Phenice Incident

March 6, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Samuel Charles Phenice circa 1935

Getting a little late start today. I knew that would happen, so I planned a little bit ahead. At least I know what I’m writing about. This post is about an incident that showed up in the local newspaper in Almena, Kansas. That is in northern Kansas, just south of Nebraska. That’s near the area that my Phenice ancestors lived around the turn of the century when the 1900s began.

Samuel Charles Phenice was born in Pennsylvania and that’s where he spent his boyhood. When he became an adult, he went off to war in the Civil War. He only fought in one battle that I know of – the Battle of the Wilderness in Spotsylvania, Virginia. He was injured during that battle, and he became part of the Invalid Corps. It was during the time with that group that he ended up being assigned to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, during that pivotal point in American History. He was a witness to the Lincoln Assassination. I know that he talked about it to anyone who would listen, and several newspaper articles were written about it.

After the war he married Cathrine Foster in their home state of Pennsylvania. They started their family in Pennsylvania, had their second child in Tennessee, then moved back to Pennsylvania for the births of their next three children. The family then moved to Nebraska in 1880 or so and had their last three children in that state. They started off in Milford, moved on to Hitchcock, but ended up in Beaver City in Furnas County.

If you were familiar with the area, you would know that Beaver City, Nebraska is just a short trip from Almena, Kansas. I only know this because I’ve studied the area that my ancestors lived in and I’ve been there once. Beaver City (and Precept) is in the southernmost part of Nebraska, just north of Almena. I don’t think there are any major roads that go directly from one to the other. The most direct route are some old farm roads. Along that road is the graveyard that Samuel and Cathrine are buried in.

Almena, Kansas, article about Samuel Phenice from Oct. 1, 1931

But this story happened between the deaths of Cathrine and Samuel. Cathrine had her accident at the end of 1920, and then she died at the beginning of 1921. Samuel was a widower for almost 20 years. He probably lived by himself for the first years, but when he got older, he went to stay with his daughter Lola Mrytle who lived in Almena. One day they decided to go to town and do a little shopping. They were going from one shop to another and then all of the sudden – BLAM – Samuel walked into a plate glass window and it shattered everywhere.

Old Samuel was 87 years old at the time, but he sounds like he was pretty sturdy. He ran into the plate glass window thinking it was the entrance. His head hit the window and broke it. Samuel fell back against the other side of the entrance, but he reported that he was fine. He did have some cuts on his hands. This is the second article about Samuel that talks about an incident that happened, and the results were injuries to his hands. When Cathrine’s clothes caught fire, he tried to help her out and he burned his hands as a result of his actions.

But this article reports less serious events than previous incidents. He was shot during the Battle of the Wilderness, Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, and his wife died as a result of her clothes catching fire. This was just a little tumble in a small Kansas downtown and all he had were a few cuts on his hands. But somehow it still made the news. Otherwise, we would not know about that particular outing back on September 26, 1931, in Almena, Kansas.

I’m glad to know that he was all right and that people cared about his welfare. He lived a long, interesting life.

Phenice

A Fortunate Young Gentleman

February 27, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Congratulatory letter from 1921 sent to Erie Patureau before her marriage later that month.

The main thing I’m sharing today is a letter that I saw for the first time last year. It was in Box 301 in my Aunt Wana’s attic. I’ve shared a few wonderful photos that were hiding away in that box, and there are still a few more to come. There were a few other documents in there as well. They mostly were associated with the Patureau family name, which is the family of my paternal grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau. This is a letter that was addressed to her, but in some way it was directed to my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.

If you look at the head of the letter (which I just did), you’ll see that it is from the desk of Edwin L. Stephens, who was the president of Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the time. He addressed her as Erie and identified himself as her friend. Young Erie had left Plaquemine, Louisiana, in 1912 after finishing high school. Her father Max Patureau moved the whole family to Lafayette that year because he was starting a veterinarian practice in the Lafayette area. Her maternal grandmother had moved there a few years previous.

That worked out well for Erie because she started at SLI that year. I think she took three years to get her teaching certificate and started teaching in Lafayette subsequently. She was teaching elementary school children, so I don’t think she was associated with SLI in any professional way. In the 1920 Census she is shown in the household of her aunt Clemence Babin Landry. Clemence was the half-sister of Erie’s mother Marie Therese Landry Patureau, who had died in 1909. Clemence and Marie Therese were two of the daughters of Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol Landry Babin. Grandma Belite was also in this 1920 household. Her second husband had died the year before. I descend from her and her first husband, who was Trasimond Landry. Her second husband was Magloire Babin.

I don’t know why my grandmother was in the household of Clemence and her husband Louis Landry. I think her dad was living in Lafayette at the time, but I have yet to be able to find Max Patureau in the 1920 Census. Where was he? Maybe I haven’t searched with all the possible ways of spelling the name Patureau by various people over the years: Pattero, Paturo, Pacherou, Patterow, Pattercan, Pastureau. Sometimes you have to get really creative with your spelling to find someone.

Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. circa 1918 during World War I

If I didn’t know my family, I would think that she might have met her husband-to-be because Rob Landry was the youngest brother of Louis Landry. But he wasn’t just her aunt’s brother-in-law, he was the first cousin of Erie’s deceased mother. So she didn’t meet him during that time, but she may have seen him more and heard about his comings and goings from his brother.

During her time in Lafayette, Rob had been involved with semi-professional baseball and also joined the military. He went off to training in Virginia. He never actually saw any action because the war ended and he was discharged. I don’t know when their courtship began or when they decided to get married. I have some photos from July 1921 that look like they might be engagement photos, but they could have been engaged for a while.

But when the president of SLI heard about the engagement, he felt a need to send Erie a note of congratulations to the fortunate young gentleman in winning such a fine girl. I’ve always heard that it was improper to congratulate a woman on hearing of an engagement. It is appropriate, however, to offer her best wishes. And that’s what he did – he wished them both long life and happiness.

So they tried with the best of their abilities to make his wish come true.

Louis Charles Bucklin Circa 1882

February 20, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Louis Charles Bucklin circa 1882 in Iowa.

This is a difficult photo. I have two versions of the original photo, but neither of them is very good. Both of them are really grainy, faded, and blurry. That’s the good part. One of them has holes all over it, like it had been chewed on by a rat at some point. It also has some tracing on it like someone tried to define some of the edges on it. Like I said, this is a difficult photo.

But that’s no reason to ignore it over and over again! I decided it was time to work at making it look a little better. And, yes, this is the final result as of now. I think it looks relatively good now. Maybe one day with software improvements, we’ll get something better. But in doing so, we will probably lose a lot of the charm of the photo. There is something charming about these old photos that LOOK like old photos. The graininess – the faded light – the sepia color – It all adds to the charm. Then again, some photos that have charm are also really sharp. I prefer those.

This is a photo of my great grandfather Louis Charles Bucklin. His son Fred was the father of my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry. Louis was born in Masonville, Iowa, on April 11, 1873. His father was James A. Bucklin, whose family hails from Massachusetts for many generations. His mother was Mary Ann McGrath, who had immigrated to the United States in the mid 1800s during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. I wish I knew the year that they came to America, but I’m sure the family had been in Ireland for generations.

His parents had such distinctly different backgrounds. That is so different to my dad’s family where cousins married cousins through the years. His DNA is French, and I can’t even tell which side of his family many of my DNA matches come from. It’s easy with people who are related to me through Louis Bucklin. If their family was from Massachusetts, they were connected to the Bucklin lines. If their family was from Ireland, I connect to them through the McGrath and Mooney lines.

But Louis’s family was no longer stationary. James and Mary Ann were married in 1854 in Springfield, Massachusetts, but they didn’t stay there. They moved on to Iowa in 1864 and then to Louisiana in 1884. They settled in Hathaway, Louisiana, and didn’t move away again. Maybe they were planning on moving every 20 years, but they just didn’t live long enough! James died at age 69 in 1890, and Mary Ann died at age 66 in 1900.

Louis was just a little older than he is in the photo when he moved to Louisiana. His teenage years were spent in Louisiana. I know he had a childhood sweetheart name May Ausman, but that relationship didn’t last. When Louis went off to Ohio Normal University in Ohio in 1893, he received a letter from May breaking it off. It was a traumatic time for him, because his older sister Jennie died shortly after that. Louis returned home and dedicated himself to the family farm. When his mother needed some help around the house, she called on a local girl to help out. That girl was young Addie Hine. I should say young woman. She was 18 years old when her family moved down to Louisiana from Indiana in 1894.

Louis must have found Addie attractive. Or maybe he liked the way she cleaned the house. The attraction was mutual, and the young couple got married on June 12, 1898, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. They set up home in Hathaway, Louisiana, and they lived happily ever after.

Valentine Jodie in 1955

February 13, 2025 Van Leave a comment

Jodie Lou Landry on Feb. 14, 1955, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I like to have posts associated with family get togethers for various holidays. I’ve done several posts about Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. It’s usually pretty easy because there were photos taken at these occasions. Other holidays were not as big and didn’t get much photographic documentation. Valentine’s Day is one of those. I did write a post about it six years ago with a weird fishy Valentine card from 80 years ago.

So today when I was going through my photos to look for something to write about, I came across this sweet old photo. It’s perfect! This was taken on Valentine’s Day in 1955 when my family was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was from before I was born. I was the fifth child and at the time of this photo, there was only one child and another on the way.

My parents were Bob Landry and Betty Lou Bucklin. They got married on All Saint’s Day in 1952. Just under a year later, they welcomed into the world little Jodie Lou on October 14, 1953, in California. My dad was in the Air Force at the time, and he was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base. It was at or near the Mojave Desert. After living there two years, they moved to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

This setup looks like something my mom would have done to surprise my dad. It’s such a cute photo of Jodie with her little heart and Cupid’s arrow. I’m sure my dad really appreciated it. I’m not embarrassing anyone by posting this photo. Jodie is no longer with us, but I don’t think she would have minded me using this photo to for a Valentine blog.

So with a ‘card’ that is 70 years in the making, my mom, my sister, and I wish you a happy Valentine’s Day!

Landry

Erie Patureau Circa 1910

February 6, 2025 Van One comment

Germaine Erie Patureau circa 1910 in Plaquemine, Louisiana.

Here is a photo of my paternal grandmother when she was around 14 or 15 years old. You remember her, right? Her grandchildren all knew her as Mee Maw and they all think that they’re her favorite. I found something my dad wrote years ago, and it said that she tried to make sure that we all felt that way. It must have worked.

Her name was Germaine Erie Patureau and she was born on August 6, 1895, in Crescent, Louisiana. That is a small community just west of Plaquemine, Louisiana, along the Bayou Road. She was the second generation of the French Patureau family that was born in the United States. Her grandfather Ferdinand Patureau was born in France, but he died in 1877 after a tragic accident in his sawmill.

Her father was Max Patureau who was born in Mexico in 1865 when the family moved there temporarily during the American Civil War. The family came back to Plaquemine later in 1865 and that’s where Max grew up. It was a large family, and they spoke both English and French. Max’s mother was Marie Emma Landry. When he got married in 1888, he married Marie Therese Landry. Marie Therese’s father was Trasimond Landry, who was a first cousin of Max’s mother Emma.

Max and Therese had a large family as well, and Erie was the fourth child. After her birth, Therese gave birth to ten more children over the next fourteen years. Her mom didn’t have much of a break during that time. On top of that, not all of those children survived. A set of twins born in 1900 only lived for a few days. In 1904 Therese’s sister Manette died after giving birth to a daughter with the same name. Therese and Max’s last three children were born in 1906, 1907, and 1909. Then they died in 1908, 1908, and 1909, respectively. Sadly, Therese died in 1909 as well. She gave birth to a daughter on September 28th, she died on October 4th, and the newborn daughter died on October 9th.

This must have been a really tough time for our Erie. This photo was taken some time around then. She was a young high school girl growing up in a Cajun/French household in southern Louisiana and she just lost her mother. If you think of that when you look at this photo, you might see some sadness in her eyes. Or that could just be the characteristic shape of her eyes that has been passed down to many of her grandchildren. (I’ve always thought of them as droopy eyes.)

My line of the family didn’t stay in Plaquemine much longer. Erie would finish high school in 1912. At around the same time, Max decided to move the family to Lafayette to build a larger veterinarian practice. Erie would enter higher education at Southwest Louisiana Institute (SLI) to study to become a teacher. She taught first grade in Lafayette a few years but then decided to marry a Landry of her own. She married Rob Landry on November 12, 1921, at St. John’s Cathedral in Lafayette. They then made their home in Lake Charles and lived happily ever after.

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