Addie and Her Youngest

Here is a photo of my great grandmother with the youngest of her 12 children.  That’s right!  She had a dozen children over a 17-year period at the beginning of the 1900s.  The photo is from almost a hundred years ago, but I’ve only known about it for 4 years or so.  I got it from my mom’s cousin who reminds me so much of her.  Their fathers were identical twins from that same group of 12 children.  DNA has proven that the older set of twins were identical.  It was not needed in the case of the youngest two.  Their DNA was obviously not identical because one was a boy, and the other was a girl.

Let me give you some details.  My name is Van Landry and I am the fifth child of Betty Lou Bucklin.  Betty Lou was the second child of Fred D. Bucklin.  Fred was born on October 2, 1907, in Roanoke, Louisiana.  Also born on that day was his twin Clarence Johnathan “CJ” Bucklin. I never knew him, so I don’t know if he preferred to be called Uncle Clarence or Uncle CJ.  They were the 7th and 8th children born to Addie May and her husband Louis Charles Bucklin.  I know that he preferred to be called Lou or Louie, because I’ve seen letters he wrote or received showing as much.  When the twins were born, there were only five older siblings alive – Leo, Mary, Ralph, Carl, and Herbert.  An older brother Paul was born in 1903 and died in 1904.  

Between the two sets of twins were born two more children – Edna and Robert.  The youngest set of twins were named Ruth and Roy and they were born in 1915.  I don’t know the birth order for either set of twins in relation to each other.  Somebody else in the family may know that morsel of information, but not me.  I do know that all of the children were born in Louisiana, most likely in Jefferson Davis Parish.  They were the first generation to be born in the South. 

Louis Bucklin came to Louisiana with his Bucklin family in 1884.  Lou was 11 years old at the time and he had lived those first years of his life in the state of Iowa.  His father James Bucklin’s family had been in Massachusetts for six generations.  His mother Mary Ann McGrath had immigrated from Ireland when she was a young woman.  She met and married James in 1854.  She came down to Louisiana with her family in 1884 and ended up dying in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1900.  She lived long enough to meet the first of Lou and Addie’s children.

Addie Hine came to Louisiana with her Hine family in 1894.  She was a young adult at the time and the first part of her life was spent in Indiana.  Her parents George Henry Hine and Susan Stanbrough were both born in Indiana as well.  I am greeted by Grampa George every morning.  I recently had a canvas print made of a photo of him that I edited nicely.  His face is so angular, and his eyes follow you as you walk by him.  George and Sue lived long enough to know all of their Bucklin grandchildren.