Max Patureau Family Circa 1953

This photo was taken in June of 1953 in Duson, Louisiana.  My Mee Maw is in the photo.  Can you find her?  She was my paternal grandmother and her name was Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  She was born in Crescent (Plaquemine), Louisiana, to Vincent Maximilian “Max” Patureau and Marie Therese Landry on August 6, 1895.  So she was almost 58 years old in this photo.  Younger than I am now.

I call it the Max Patureau family because that’s what they were referred as in newspaper articles thru the years.  Marie Therese died at the age of 41 in 1909 and I don’t have a lot of information about her.  She wasn’t in a lot of photos and didn’t talk about her activities to newspaper journalists like her husband seems to have done.  She spent a lot of time rearing her nine surviving children (she lost 6 in infancy) in Plaquemine, Louisiana.

But at the time of this photo only seven of those children were still alive.  Like I said, Marie Therese died in 1909.  Then in 1935 Max died.  Two years later Romuald Patureau and Marie Therese “Bee” Patureau Schafer passed away as well.  I don’t know why I never noticed before tonight that Mee Maw had lost two siblings in the same year.  It must have been a hard year for her, though she was quite busy taking care of her own eight young children.

This photo was taken when the family got together for a celebration in honor of Mee Maw’s oldest sibling Emma was honored for writing a book about the history of Duson.  Mee Maw and all of her surviving siblings are in the photo, as well as some of their children.  My dad wasn’t there because he and my mom were in California living on the Air Force base and getting ready to have their first child a few months later.

In the front row from left to right we have Syl Schafer, Therese “Tez” Mouton, Therese “Sis” Schafer (Syl and Sis were the daughters of Marie Therese “Bee” Patureau Schafer and were raised by their Aunt Zita), Dolores Mouton, Sylvie Patureau Marionneaux, and Effie Clements Patureau (wife of Vincent Patureau, Jr.).

In the back row from left to right are Toby Mouton (husband of Emma and father of Tez, Mona Mel, and Dolores), Zita Patureau Schafer, Lydwin “Win” Patureau, Emma Patureau Mouton, Mona Mel Mouton, Lorena Patureau Cary, Mee Maw (Erie Patureau Landry), and Vincent Patureau, Jr.