Family History

My parents Betty and Bob Landry were the longest-lived couples in my ancestry. This is a photo of them in 2011 in Galveston, Texas, at a family gathering.

If you read my post last week, you’ll know that this is a continuation of that one.  Again I will be discussing the longevity of my ancestors.  I looked through six generations (up to 4X great grandparents) and figured out as closely as I could the exact age they were at their death.  The most interesting thing I noticed was that both of my parents were in the top 10 for longevity.  I definitely got to benefit from that.

Last week the focus was on my mom’s side, so this week the focus is on my dad.  The amazing thing is that my dad outlived most of my other ancestors.  Only three ancestors outlived him.  When I was younger, I would have never agreed with anyone if they would have suggested that that would happen.  Both of his parents died from heart issues, and he had heart issues for a while.  

He’s like Nadal in the tennis world.  Everyone said that his aggressive style of tennis would take an early toll on his body and he wouldn’t last long.  He ended up having one of the longest careers of elite tennis players and has set many records.  My dad may not have set any world records, but I have been told that he is a legend!

The two longest-lived ancestors were on my mom’s side of the family.  The longest-lived ancestor from his side of the family made it the age of 90.  So she lived a year longer than he did.  That was accomplished by Marie Magdelena Babin, who lived two hundred years earlier.  She lived from 1725 to 1814, and Daddy lived from 1929 to 2017.  She was born in Acadie, married Augustin Landry around 1752 (my parents married in 1952), and ended up in Louisiana after being exiled by the English during the Grand Derangement.   What tales she could have told.

I find it interesting that the three ancestors who outlived all the rest did it against the odds.  All three of them survived events that took the lives of many of their contemporaries.  And they weren’t just any old event.  They each had an Event with a Capital Letter.  Like I mentioned last week, Samuel Charles Phenice (the oldest) survived being injured during the Civil War.  That was a war with many casualties.  The next oldest was Edward McGrath who was from Ireland.  And he wasn’t just an immigrant from Ireland, he survived the Irish Potato Famine.  That happened during the 1840s and about a million people perished from the Great Hunger.  Edward and his wife Ettadosia brought their children to the United States and settled in Massachusetts.  And now we see that one of those long-lived ancestors was a survivor of the Great Expulsion of the Acadians.  We are all descendants of survivors, and these were the long-lived ones.

On the other end of the spectrum were a few ancestors who lived only long enough to produce one offspring.  Most of my ancestors had large families.  That was true for both sides of my family.  And likewise each side of the family had a short-lived ancestor that only produced one offspring.  I’ll start with the runner up.  Can an ancestor who lived the shortest amount of time be considered the winner?  Hey, at least we are talking about him all these years later.  The winner and the runner up both lived about 200 years ago.  They were alive at the same time as Marie Magdelena Babin Landry.  The runner up was on my mom’s side of the family.  Peter Hine was her great great great grandfather.  He died on July 22, 1819, at the age of 24 years, 8 months, 12 days.  He died from consumption less than two months before the birth of his son.  He never knew his only child.

The winner of the Shortest Lived Ancestor goes to Simon Hebert.  He died on April 17, 1802, at the age of 24 years, 6 months.  It was a close contest – only two months separated the two.  The main difference between the two is that Simon was able to meet his only child.  Marie Carmelite Hebert was born two months before her father died.  Simon’s wife Marie Martha Hernandez would go on to marry a second time and have more children.  But she did not live very long herself.  In fact, she had the third-shortest lifespan of my ancestors.  She died on Dec. 22, 1814, at the age of 33 years, 11 months, 9 days.  So they are definitely the couple with the fewest years when looking at their combined ages.

In fact, I’ve outlived their combined age of 58 years and some months.  I’ve outlived almost forty of my ancestors.  I mentioned Augustin Landry earlier.  He lived 62 years and some days.  I’m a few months older than that.  His great granddaughter Emma Landry Patureau (my great great grandmother) died in 1892 at the age of 62 years, 2 months, 14 days.  She is the most recent of my ancestors that I have outlived.  My sister Karen outlived our ancestor Pierre Bruneteau who lived to the age of 63.  She did not outlive his daughter Celeste Bruneteau Landry who lived to 63 years, 5 months, 29 days.  Karen lived to 63 years, 5 months, 6 days.  My brother Al has outlived Karen and Celeste.  He will soon outlive Henry Keys (63 years, 10 months, 24 days).  My brother Rob has gone on to further outlive nine more of our ancestors, including our Pee Paw – Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. (64 years, 7 months, 19 days)

I plan to touch on this topic again in the future.  Possibly in 10 months, 25 days.  But who’s really counting?

Members of the Landry family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1946.

This is the second week in a row that I’m posting a blurry photo.  Have I run out of clear, sharp images?  No, of course not.  Though after posting over 400 photos, my choices have gotten smaller and smaller.  I have many photos that are sharper, but this is the one that called out to me this week.  Or maybe I should say that it resonated with something inside me.  The content of the photo is much more important than the quality of the photo.  But it’s nice when I can have both. 

I tried to sharpen it up a bit with some software, but the results weren’t accurate.  There isn’t enough information in the photo to guide the software to show what the people really looked like.  Some small feature may have been accurate – like droopy eyes – but the overall results didn’t look like the people I remember.  I wasn’t around back then, but I have other photos of them and know that the software images didn’t have enough to work with.  In the future, the software will be able to look at all of the other photos of the people, gather the information about their facial structure, and make an image clear enough to represent their faces from back then.  But in the meantime, we’ll just have to make do with the image we have.

This is a photo of my paternal grandparents.  They are on the left side of this photo.  Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry and Germain Erie Patureau were married in 1921.  Rob and Erie began having children in 1923 and ended up with eight altogether – Marie, A. J., Hubert, Germaine, Bob (my dad), Wana, Framay, and Johnny.  Standing with Rob and Erie is their son Hubert with his new wife Mildred Sutherlin Landry.  I think this photo was taken on the day of their marriage, which was on July 20, 1946.  It is a sweet photo of a young married couple with the parents of the groom.

But when I look at this photo, I think of the things to come.  Though they were not the first of Rob and Erie’s children to marry – older sister Marie married Malloy Reeves on the first day of October in 1945 – they would be the first to provide them with a grandchild.  So they weren’t known as Mee Maw and Pee Paw at this point, but that would be changing soon when my godmother shows up.  She would make them grandparents.  When you think about it that way, it is an honor.  And my godmother doesn’t let anyone forget it.  No matter how many times we say it just makes her the oldest, she doesn’t care.  She was, is, and always will be The First.  She wears that designation like a tiara, and she wears it well.

Another thing that I think about is that I never knew Aunt Mildred when she was a cute, young, and ambulatory.  Of course I wouldn’t know her when she was young, because she was born almost forty years before I was.  But she also had polio, so she wasn’t able to walk on her own when I knew her.  My mom always spoke very highly of Hubert and Mildred.  She talked about their positive approach to dealing with her difficulties and his devotion to continually working with her to provide as much mobility as possible.  When our family was performing at Shakey’s in the late 1970s, they showed up more frequently than anyone else.  Uncle Hubert would play harmonica on many of the songs, so we got to visit with Aunt Mildred quite a bit.  She was a sweet lady.

But this photo mainly makes me regret that I never knew these grandparents as a couple.  They look very pleased to pose with their son and his wife.  I never saw that because my grandfather died before I was born.  I never got to call him Pee Paw.  I’ve heard many good things about him and from all accounts he and my grandmother were happily married.  So it must have been a profound change in my grandmother’s life when he died.  She was my age (62) when she became a widow.  I have friends who have lost their partners and it is a difficult transition.  

I didn’t mean for this post to be so tinted with sadness.  It’s a sweet photo from a very happy moment in their lives.  It gives me a bittersweet smile.

Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in the second grade circa 1935 in Lake Charles, Louisiana

Not feeling too wordy tonight.  That’s alright, though, because this photo doesn’t really need many words.  It is a photo of my dad when he was about six years old.  I’m pretty sure it is a school photo.  I’m saying that he was in the second grade, but would that be right?  He was born on January 31, 1929, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  He was named after his father obviously.  But he wasn’t the oldest son.  He was the third son, like I am.

I always think that the first-born son is the one who usually gets named after the father.  Is that the tradition?  My oldest brother is named after my dad.  I think my other brother was named after my dad’s grandfather and my mom’s father.  So Alcide and Fred come together to form Alfred.  I wasn’t named after anybody.  Not that I know of.  

My dad was named Robert Joseph, but back then he was known as Bobbie.  And it was always spelled B-O-B-B-I-E.  It’s how he was known by his family for the rest of his life, even though everyone else referred to him as Bob.  If I have the date correct, the family that called him that were his parents Rob and Erie Landry, and siblings Marie, A. J., Hubert, Germaine, and younger sisters Wana and Frances.  They would be joined in 1936 by the youngest of them all, little Johnny.  He grew up in the middle of a large Catholic family in the 30s and 40s in a growing Southern town.

He looks like a happy little boy, doesn’t he?

Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. circa 1920 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Earlier today, I was wondering what I would end up writing about tonight.  I didn’t really have anything in mind.  I wasn’t too concerned, because I usually find something to write about.  But really, after sharing around 400 photos on this blog, you would think that I’d run out of photos!  Not that 400 photos are that many photos.  Right now, I’ve got 1, 874 photos on my phone.  Not that they are all worthy of something to write about, but it’s still a lot more than 400.  And I clean out my photos somewhat regularly.  I’m sure there are people reading this who have photos numbering in the thousands on their phones.  Am I right?

When I was walking home from work, I thought that maybe I’d title my post “Photos of Dead People.”  While not everyone in my photos have died (myself included), many of the subjects in the old photos I post have.  And I was not planning on posting photos of people who were dead in the photo.  There is a history of people photographing the dead to preserve their memory.  That was back in the day when photographs were relatively rare.  But the tradition has carried on in my dad’s side of the family.  

My paternal grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau Landry died in 1973 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  I remember going to Mee Maw’s funeral.  I have a few memories of that day.  My brother-in-law at the time gave me a piece of polished smoky quartz that I cherished for many years.  Not because of who gave it to me, but I have always liked rocks and minerals.  I haven’t seen that piece of quartz for a while now.  I also remember going to the restroom and my belt buckle fell off and fell into the toilet!  I wasn’t about to fish that thing out, and I hoped that no one would notice it was missing.  Nobody noticed and I think I’ve only told one person that story.  Now everyone knows the secret.

It was at Mee Maw’s funeral that I saw my dad crying for the first time that I recall.  For some reason that seemed like such a big thing to young pre-teen Van.  I don’t remember my grandmother or her coffin or that much of anything else.  But I do remember that afterwards, my dad was given or sent a photo of her in her coffin.  He kept it in the top dresser drawer in my parents’ bedroom.  I know that, because I remember looking through that drawer from time to time and looking at the photo.  I was just a little curious.  When my sister Jodie died in 1989, one of my cousins gave me a photo of her in the coffin.  I have the photo, but I never look at it.  After my parents died in 2017, similar photos were offered to me, but I politely declined.  

Because really, wouldn’t you prefer to have a picture like this one I’m sharing?  Of course, you would!  This is a photo of my paternal grandfather Rober Joseph Landry, Sr. from around 1920.  I always title posts about him using the name that his grandchildren called him – Pee Paw.  He went by Rob or Bob or Pappy.  But when I think of Rob Landry, I think of my brother.  And Bob Landry was my father, and all of his grandchildren called him Pappy.  So Pee Paw is the only name he went by that doesn’t confuse the issue for me.  He, of course, was married to my Mee Maw.  They actually got married around the time that this photo was taken.

I estimated that this photo was taken in 1920.  Rob Landry married Erie Patureau on November 21, 1921.  He was 28 years old at the time and she was 26.  That’s a little older than I would have thought, because they ended up having 8 children together.  That was over a period of 14 years, so Mee Maw was 40 years old when she had her last child.  My mom had her last child when she was 29.  It’s interesting how our idea of ‘normal’ is what we grew up with.  Though that is not always true.

And some of you are probably happy about that.  Because, like I said, I grew up in a family that takes pictures of dead people.  And while I do share photos of people who are no longer with us, they were very much alive when the photos were taken.  Just like this photo of Pee Paw with a big smile on his face.  You can’t do that with a dead person, and I wouldn’t want to see anyone try.

The Landry family on July 24, 1975, in College Station, Texas

This photo has been calling to me for a while now.  I really like the photo, but it is just another photo of my family from the 1970s.  I almost used this photo as the theme of last week’s post, but I thought I was being lazy.  It doesn’t take much research to write about something from you own life.  Yet this photo is from almost fifty years ago and I’m not exactly sure of where it was taken.  But it still calls to me, so I’m not ignoring it.  

I got this photo from my brother Rob about five years ago.  I wasn’t familiar with it at the time.  Of course, I had to crop it, clean it up a little, and sharpen it some.  I didn’t really have to, but I thought it would look better with a freshening up.  I suppose Rob told me the date on the photo, because I wouldn’t put a specific date unless I remembered it or had it written down.  The date July 24 is my brother Al’s birthday.  That may be why the date is known.

I’ve pretty much convinced myself that this was taken in College Station, Texas.  The date and the place bring back a lot of memories for me.  My oldest sister Jodie was married to Dennis Franklin and it was around this time that they moved from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to College Station.  They had met at McNeese when they were in college.  When Dennis graduated from McNeese, he was accepted into the graduate program in botany at Texas A&M University.  So that was their impetus to move.  It also explains why Jodie did not perform with the family much when we started singing at Shakey’s the following year.  She was living in Texas.

And once they were living in Texas, the rest of the family had to go see what it was all about!  I remember riding around the campus and looking at the scenes.  We went into the School of Botany (or Plant Biology?) and saw some of the experiments taking place in the lab.  After that, we stopped to look at the golf course.  (My dad was driving.  He was a golf fan.)  While we were watching, a guy shot a hole in one!  That’s the only time I’ve ever seen that in person.  It was such a surprise.  I’d like to say that I remember the family celebrating Al’s birthday, but I don’t.  Maybe he can remind me of something that happened.  We’ll see.

One of the things we did was to take this photo.  My ex-brother-in-law (yes, her first marriage did not last.)  Dennis took the photo.  Not that I remember that.  It’s just that there is another photo that shows Jodie and Dennis together in it.  So he was there that day and he’s not in this photo.  If someone else had been there to take the photo, he would have been in it, too.  So let me identify those of us who are in the photo.  Starting on the left, you see my father Robert Joseph “Bob” Landry, Jr.  He was 46 years old at the time.  He was so young!  At the time I didn’t think that.  He seemed so old to me.  Now it’s me that’s so old!

Standing in the front are my sisters Jodie, Karen, and Jamie.  Jodie was 21 years old at the time.  Karen had just graduated from Jennings High Schol that May of ’75.  She would be starting college at McNeese in a few months.  Jamie was in junior high school and would be starting the 8th grade. The day before this, Jamie was 13, I was 14, and Al was 15.  Our ages are consecutive like that for only a few weeks a year.   Standing behind the girls and next to my dad is my mom.  Betty Lou Bucklin Landry was 42 years old in this photo.  Parents really do grow up with their children.  Particularly so when they get married and have children at a young age.  My mom had six children by the time she was 29.  

Standing in the back are the boys.  The birthday boy Al is the tallest one.  It was his 16th birthday that day.  All four of his children are older than that now.  Time is zooming by!  The next person is 14-year-old Van.  I think I look kinda cute in this photo.  That’s kinda funny because the absolute worst photo of me was taken earlier this same month.  I have no plans of ever posting that photo.  I’m pretty sure it will never call to me!  On the far right is my brother Rob.  He was getting ready for his third year of college at Louisiana Tech in Ruston.  One of his interests in college was photography.  Since the photo came from him, it was probably taken with his old Minolta camera.

So we can thank Rob for the photo.  I hope you all like it.