Month: October 2021

Passionate for Patureau

Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about Patureau history this week, so I think it is appropriate to write about that line of my family this week.  It’s interesting that there have been a lot of family members who have been passionate about Patureau family history through the years.  When I was growing up, I knew about my grandmother being a Patureau and looking into family history.  Later on, I’d hear my dad talking family history and would refer to the Patureau Family Records.

In his papers about the family, those records were abbreviated as PFR.  I think they were mainly records that were gathered by my Mee Maw (Germaine Erie Patureau) and her sister Zita – Aint Zita to the family.  Or was it Aint Lorena?  (I just looked it up.  It was Aunt Lorena.)  It wasn’t until 2019 that I realized how much she had collected.  It must have been divided up in 1973 when Mee Maw died (her sister Lorena died in 1972).  But the cousins brought some of it back together and I took photos of them and have shared them on different blog posts.  The most recent thing I’ve shared was the death notice of Emma Landry Patureau, who was the wife of Ferdinand Patureau.  They were the forebears of all of the Patureau family in southern Louisiana.

I erroneously thought that she was the only one that was doing that kind of research in the Patureau family.  I’ve discovered quite a few more.  I suppose I’ll first mention those in my line – the line of Vincent Maximilian Patureau.  After Mee Maw and Lorena, there would be cousin Sis.  She is the daughter of their sister Marie Therese Patureau Schafer.  She has collected a lot of Patureau information through the years and has graciously shared it with me.  Two of the daughters of Sylvie Patureau – Melwyn and Patricia – were also interested in Patureau family history and lived in Plaquemine where the Patureau family first settled in the US.  Then there is Syvie’s son Rhett’s son Wade who has spent much time exploring the family history.  And then there’s me.

But it wasn’t just in our line.  Going back to Grampa Max’s generation, there was his younger sister Victorine Patureau Cropper (called “Aunt Beb” or “Aunt Vic” by family) who settled in Beaumont.  I just recently found out that she started collecting family history information back in the 1890s and continued until her death in 1937.  It was passed on to her daughter Kitty Rush.  Somehow, some or all of her research is now at a library in Beaumont, Texas.  I’d like to see that someday. (I saw it. It’s called the Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Papers.)  Max’s sister Eliza had a son named Joseph Lawrence Dupuy and I’ve heard that he also was into Patureau genealogy.  Then there is Gary G. who is a grandson of Max’s brother Abel.  He has a family tree online that was very helpful when I first started looking at Patureau history more intensely.  He has a cousin named Suzi who also shares the passion for Patureau information.

And then there is the Leobon Patureau line.  His granddaughter Linda Cansler was instrumental in bringing together Patureau cousins in the 1990s for Patureau reunions at the home of Pat and Lora Patureau.  Linda collected lots of information and photos and I heard that she was going to write a book about the family.  I don’t think that happened and I recently found out that she passed away in 2019.  I don’t know how I missed hearing about her death.  I thought I was keeping up with the goings on of the Patureau family.  Obviously I do not know it all.  I know that Misty and Dana in that family line are interested in family history, but there could be many more.  There are so many cousins out there!

In the generation before Max and his siblings, there was his father Ferdinand and Ferdinand’s sister Anne Victorine Patureau Laulom.  Max went to visit these cousins in the Brownsville and Corpus Christie areas, but for the most part the families have lost touch.  I have found a couple of them who are interested in the Patureau family history.  I don’t think there is as much of a connection to the Patureau name after so many generations without the surname present. 

Death record for Marie Sicaud, wife of Antoine Patureau in 1794 in Palluaud, France.

And now I’m taking you back a few generations to the family of Pierre Patureau’s grandparents.  Pierre was born in 1800 in LaRoche-Chalais, France, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1840.  He died in 1860 and was buried in Plaquemine, Louisiana.  His father was Leobon Patureau (1768-1851), who was the son of Antoine Patureau and Marie Sicaud. 

Antoine and Marie were married Nov. 3, 1767, in Palluaud, France.  I posted their wedding record before.  It shows that Antoine was a surgeon at the time.  Nine months later Leobon was born.  That seems to be a tradition with the Patureau family.  Leobon was the first of at least eight children for Antoine and Marie.  Three of those children died as infants.

We know that Leobon has many descendants.  I know of at least a thousand from his grandson Pierre.  I would be surprised if any of his siblings had more than that.  But I do know that the next child after Leobon also has descendants.  His name was Francois Patureau Laborie (1769-1840).  The reason I know that is that one of his descendants (Nellie who lives in France) has a blog that she writes and sometimes she writes about her Patureau line.   She is a sixth cousin or so and she is interested in Patureau ancestry.  La passion!

Another interesting fact about this family is that the son Pierre Patureau (1774-1827) fought under Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th Century.  He took part in the Battle in Castel-Nuovo, Znaim, in 1809.  He was injured in both of his legs at some point and in 1814 he was awarded the Legion of Honor award.   Leobon must have been fond of his brother because he named his son after him.

One of the reasons for this post was that I just found the death record for Marie Sicaud from 1794.  She was only 64 when she died and her youngest children were just teenagers at the time.  Her son Leobon had gotten married to Jeanne Lanson in 1787 and started a family a year later.  Since Pierre was born in 1800, he never knew his Patureau grandmother.  Antoine died in 1802, so Pierre probably didn’t have any memory of him.  His Lanson grandparents had died in the 1780s, so he didn’t know them either.  He didn’t even have photos of them to see what they had looked like.  When I discover things like that, it makes me appreciate the time that I had with my own grandparents. 

So now we can return to modern day America.  But don’t forget about those we visited in the past.  You might want to think about Antoine and Marie next Wednesday.  November 3, 2021, will be the 254th anniversary of their marriage.  Oh, how the years go by.

Betty Lou in Grade Two

Leave a comment

Betty Lou Bucklin in 1940 in Hathaway, Louisiana.

Here is a photo of my mom from 1940.  It is the second grade school photo from the 1940-41 school year when Betty Lou Bucklin was a student at Hathaway High School.  Was it called Hathaway High School even though you were going there in the second grade?  That just sounds weird.  But I’ve never heard it called anything but Hathaway High School.

I like this photo of her, but I always wonder why she wasn’t smiling.  She was halfway smiling in her first grade photo.  Now that I say that, I realize the same thing about my own first and second grade photos.  I was smiling in the first grade and not in the second.  I never really wondered why I wasn’t smiling, even though I have no idea why.  Is second grade a difficult year for people?  But then again, my mom wasn’t smiling in her photos for the next few school years .  Lately I haven’t minded, because they work much better for animated photos that freak people out.

My mom was a blond back then, as were her younger sisters.  I think she got that from the Hine line of her family.  Her father was Fred Bucklin.  Fred was the son of Addie May Hine.  The photos of Grandpa when he was a child showed that he had the blond hair as a child also.  He would have been called towheaded. Like most towheaded children, their hair darkens as they get older.  In other photos that I’ve posted, you can see that the trait was common with his Hine cousins as well.

When you look at old photos of Addie, you can see that her brothers had light hair as children and it got darker as they got older.  So I say that the trait has been passed down by the Hine line of the family.  But I guess it might have come from the Stanbrough side.  Addie’s parents were George Hine and Sue Stanbrough.  I only have photos of them as adults and I don’t have many photos of their siblings.  But I still tend to think that the trait came from our German Hine line.

Even though her hair got darker as she got older, my mom said that her hair would lighten when she would be out in the sun.  She had brown eyes, but they weren’t dark brown.  They were light brown and when she had highlights in her hair from the sun, people used to tell her that she had golden eyes.  I have to admit that I did edit this photo and one of the things I did was to lighten her eyes.  They looked so much darker than what I remember her eyes looking like.  So I think it reflects what she really looked like back then.  I hope you like it.

Jodie in 1970 – A First Date

Leave a comment

Jodie Landry circa 1970

I thought I’d write a story about my sister Jodie since today is her birthday.  She was born 68 years ago today, but only lived for 36 years.  When I realized that it was her birthday, I decided to write a post about her.  I then remembered this photo that I had worked on a few weeks ago.  It’s a fun photo of her from 1970 and it brings up so many memories for me.

It’s a photo of her playing the guitar in the den of our house at 758 Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana.  The guitar was my dad’s and it usually would hang on the back wall next to the ukulele that you can see behind her.  She’s sitting on a rattan chair that we had back then.  On the other side of the room was a matching couch.  In the middle of the room was the pool table, which you can see the edge of in the photo.

It was around this time that things were changing in the Landry household.  Before this time, the family consisted of Bob, Betty (nee Bucklin), Jodie, Rob, Karen, Al, Van (me), and Jamie Landry.  We all lived together in a three bedroom house with one small bathroom.  Around this time we started to accept others into our circle.  Mainly I was thinking about Jodie’s boyfriend at the time.  She started dating him sometime around her junior year in high school.  I call this post “A First Date” because I remember her first date with him.  But I don’t think it was her first date ever.  Since her boyfriend at the time is still alive and I don’t have permission to identify him, I’ll just refer to him as FD (First Date).

Let me set up the scene.  Before this first date occurred with FD, there had been a thunderstorm or heavy rain in the area.  The only reason I know that is because of what happened when we had heavy rains on our street.  We had a ditch across the front of the yard and it would be full of water after a rain.  So I used to go out and play in the ditch and catch little crawfish.  I had two hard, clear plastic containers that we had gotten at Christmas time.  They were just the packaging for gyroscopes that Al and I had bought each other without the other one knowing about it.  They worked perfectly for keeping crawfish.  So I had a few crawfish in  the two containers and I left them at the end of the sidewalk at our house.  The sidewalk was from the front door to about six feet from the edge of the road.

This was on the day of the first date.  I must have known about it because Jodie was getting ready for it and we all knew what was going on in our house.  So FD came to our house to pick up Jodie.  He must have come in the house and talked to my parents.  Then he walked Jodie out of the house through the side door.  At least that’s what I picture now.  And then something got into me to say something encouraging to the departing couple.  So I opened the front door, leaned out, and shouted, “Y’all kiss!”

I never really knew what Jodie or FD thought about this.  I’m sure my sister was somewhat embarrassed that her bratty younger brother would do such a thing.  I probably thought it was funny at the time, and it still makes me laugh to this day.  Maybe it helped them break the ice if there was any ice occurring.  Funnily enough, it didn’t scare him away.  I would think it would be intimidating to meet a family of eight people who are a tight knit family that aren’t used to “intruders.”  Maybe he didn’t see it that way.  We weren’t scary people, after all.

Anyway, at the end of the first date I wasn’t there to grill them or inquire about details.  I was probably asleep in bed or something.  So I woke up the next morning and decided to go check up on my crawfish.  Can you imagine my disappointment when I discovered that they were gone?  Gone!  And the containers that they had been kept in were broken!  Why would someone do such a horrible thing to a young innocent boy in the small town of Jennings?  It was criminal!

I went and told my mom about it and she let me know that it wasn’t done maliciously.  When FD had brought Jodie home from their first date, he walked her from his car to the house on the sidewalk.  And we all know what was sitting at the end of the sidewalk – my crawfish.  He didn’t see them in the dark and stepped on them and sent my crawfish scattering.  At least that’s what I’ve always told myself.  I never looked too closely to see if there were any little carcasses from any injured crawfish trying to crawl to safety.   So the crawfish fled back to their little crawfish families and I got over the loss of their company.

So Jodie and FD started dating and I think he may have even taken this photo.  He was a guitar player and a singer, so he got along well with the rest of us.  I remember a lot of singing, fishing, and making ice cream with the family during that time.  It was the first step in the move to a wider family group.  They didn’t stay together, but it was the start of a change that led to brother-in-laws, sister-in-laws, nieces, nephews, and more.

Mee Maw and Her Cousins

Leave a comment

Germain Erie Patureau in the center. Behind her is her sister Zita. On the left is her first cousin Joseph Earnest Cropper. On the right is Clifford Clements and I don’t know if he is a cousin. The boy sitting on the ground is a half cousin Henry Louis Landry. Photo taken in 1921.

I’ve been thinking of writing this post for about a month or so.  I was going to write it on Sept. 2, but then I changed my mind.  But this time I’m not going to let that happen.  Besides I’ve found some other information that will make the whole topic more interesting.  At least I think so.  This photo is a photo of my grandmother with some of her cousins.  Not the cousins I plan to talk about in this post, but they do represent her cousins.  I’ve used this photo before, but it’s one worth reusing.  I thought it fit with the theme.

The topic is about step-families.  Or I guess in this case it’s about about a step-grandfather, half cousins, and step cousins.  I notice that in my writings I tend to discount step-family members.  And I also have a tendency to overlook half siblings.  I’ve tried to remedy that because sometimes you can find lots of family information from everyone connected to your ancestors.  I think I do this because I grew up in a nuclear family that didn’t have a nuclear explosion.  We stayed together and I never had any step family or half siblings.

But in my paternal grandmother Mee Maw’s case, a step grandfather was the only grandfather she ever knew.  Mee Maw was born in 1895 with the name Germaine Erie Patureau given to her by her parents Vincent Maximilian Patureau and Marie Therese Landry.  Max Patureau’s father Ferdinand died in 1877 as a result of a sawmill accident.  I wrote about that in a previous post.  I recently wrote about Max’s mother dying in 1892.  Marie Therese’s father Trasimond Landry died in 1879 as a result of yellow fever.

So when Erie was born, her maternal grandmother Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol Landry Babin was her only living grandparent.  And she had been remarried since April of 1880 to Pierre Magloire “Mack” Babin.  That’s why she was always known as Mrs. P. M. Babin.  So for all practical purposes, Mack Babin was Erie’s grandfather.  They were all very close.  In the early 1900s Max and Mack went in together as owners of a general store in Plaquemine, Louisiana.  I’ve written about that previously as well.  How did I write all of these stories and never realize the connections before?  I probably should have titled this post “Mack Babin Was Mee Maw’s Grandfather.”

June 11, 1923, The Daily Advertiser newspaper from Lafayette, Louisiana. This talks about some visitors to the V. M. Patureau household.

But the reason I didn’t call it that has to do with some things I just discovered this past weekend.  I had saved several clippings from newspapers a couple of years ago.  I was looking through some of them and came across this one.  I noticed that the first four little blurbs on the page are about the V. M. Patureau family – Grampa Max and his children.  Zita (she is in the first photo I posted) and Therese are mentioned, as well as Lidwin, Sylvia, and Emma (Mrs. A. J. Mouton).

But they also mention cousins of the family – S. J. Babin and Edward Bourg.  There are Babin and Bourg cousins all over the place in my family tree, but when I searched for those names I didn’t find anything.  With my growing awareness of the family of Mack Babin being the family of my grandmother, I decided to find out more about the branches of this particular Babin family.

It didn’t take me long to find a Schley Joseph Babin and a Louis Edward Bourg who were the same ages as Therese and Erie Patureau, respectively.  They were grandchildren of Mack Babin’s siblings.  So technically they were step second cousins, but to Mee Maw and her sisters they were just cousins that they motored to Baton Rouge with.  Although technically they didn’t all go to Baton Rouge.  It was only Zita and Therese that went to Baton Rouge with their cousins.  Emma, Lidwin, and Sylvia went to Lake Charles, presumably to visit their sister Erie.

I found those cousins names with the help of a family tree on Ancestry.  It wasn’t just anyone’s tree, though.  It was the tree of my step fourth cousin.  That’s right, she was the granddaughter of Edward Bourg.  When I was looking at her tree, I decided to click on the name of the owner of the tree.  When you do that on Ancestry and you have taken a DNA test, it will show you if you are a DNA match to that person.  I know that most step fourth cousins don’t have any common DNA.  Step siblings don’t usually share DNA.  But I noticed lots of Cajun surnames in her tree that are in our tree, so I had to check.  And sure enough, we share common DNA.  She also shares common DNA with my cousin (and godmother) and my dad’s cousin Sis who is the daughter of Therese Patureau.

So Mee Maw wasn’t just step cousins to Edward and S. J., they were really cousins with matching DNA.  But more importantly, they were family.   And everybody that knew my Mee Maw knew that family was important to her.  Mee Maw loved her family and we loved her back.