Month: February 2024

Keys Family Reunion 2024

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2024 Keys Family Reunion

Calling all Keys!  Calling all Keys cousins.  It is time for a reunion!  Definitely time.  The reunion this year will be on June 15, 2024, starting at 10:00.  It will be held in Hathaway (Raymond), Louisiana, at the St. Lawrence Catholic Church.  That’s right.  This year it is at the Catholic church.  The last few times it was at the Methodist Church right across the street.  So if you know how to get to the previous reunion, all you’ll have to do is show up at the place across the street to the south.  The physical address is 5505 Pine Island Highway.  It’s at the crossroads of Pine Island Highway and Raymond Highway.

As you can see by the flyer, the festivities begin at 10:00.  As usual we are encouraged to bring food to share for the covered dish feast.  That will commence around noontime.  The forenoon will be for socializing and sharing old family photos.  Wait!  It doesn’t say that.  But I am.  I want to see any interesting old family photo, especially ones that I don’t have yet.  How can I continue writing posts about old family photos if I run out of them?  We’ve got to keep it going!  You can also bring a door prize.  If enough people bring one, it’ll be like a Christmas gift exchange.

Painting of Martha Cook Keys circa 1865 in England

One thing I wanted to point out is that this is an anniversary year.  It was 130 years ago that Martha Ann Cook Keys had a party at her house for friends and family.  The local Jennings paper reported that the party was a hit and “enjoyed by all present.”  It was just seven years after she had immigrated with her five children to Louisiana.  They came from the London area of England and moved to get away from the increasing crime at the time. Her husband Henry Keys had talked about the family coming to America and was planning on doing just that.  But sadly, he died at just 63 years old.  That’s the same age that I am!  

So it was quite an accomplishment for Martha to follow through with the plan and bring the family to a new place to live.  She was very motivated to come here and it is said that she never regretted her decision.  She loved her new home in America.  I’m not talking about the house she built.  I’m talking about the country that she felt welcomed by.  Perhaps that was the reason for the party in 1894.  She and her five children had made a home in America.  

At that time, none of her children had married yet.  The oldest was only 24 years old.  Martha didn’t live long enough to see any of them marry or have children.  She died in 1896 at the age of 59.  It wasn’t until 1900 that the first one was married.  That was my great grandmother Daisy Keys who married Harry Clifton Phenice.  Her younger sister Ruth followed suit less than a year later.  Eventually, all of the children were married and started having children.  Altogether, the five children had over thirty children between them.

I’m excited about this photo that I put together.  It was just last week that I did the same with my Landry grandfather’s family.  This time it is a grouping of the photos of all five of Henry and Martha’s children – Henry “The Judge” (1870-1950), Leonard (1873-1959), Daisy (1876-1952), Ruth (1879-1967), and Mabel (1881-1962).  I’ve posted a photo of the three sisters together previously.  Those three images come from the same photo.  I got a photo of Leonard from Carolyn, the daughter of Edith Keys Segraves.  Edith was the one who wrote the amazing book about the Cook and Keys family.  

So tonight I was wanting to have all five of the families represented, because I want to encourage descendants of all of them to show up for the reunion.  I didn’t have a good photo of the oldest son “The Judge.”  I was looking through the old book by Edith Segraves and found one of him.  It was a grainy old photo, but I had hopes of improving it with the great software that is available nowadays.  I worked on it a while and I am satisfied with it.  It goes well with the rest of them.  And now I have a group photo of all five of the Keys immigrant children.  The ancestors of all of us Keys relatives who will be attending this reunion.

Behold!

Henry Alfred “The Judge”, Leonard James, Daisy Henrietta Martha, Rosetta “Ruth”, and Mabel Olive Keys circa 1894-1899.

 

Pee Paw’s Landry Family

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I’ve talked about my Landry grandfather many times.  Of course, I have.  I’ve written over 450 posts over the past eight years.  Once a week, every week, through sickness and health.  I should go ahead and skip a week just to get it over with.  There is a bit of pressure I put on myself to keep it going uninterrupted.  Can you feel the stress and concern in my writing?  I hope not.  I was mostly kidding about that.  It’s more enjoyment than work.

Elie, Sebastian, Louis, Joe, and Rob Landry from Westlake, Louisiana, in the early 1900s.

Here is a photo of my grandfather and his brothers.  I’ve shared a similar grouping before, but it was missing the oldest brother Elie.  He is the one on the far left.  I got it from a photo of him with his wife Gussie Parker and their son Joseph Sylvester Landry.  It’s a very blurry photo and I spent a bit of time working on it from time to time.  It’s not as good as the other photos, but those other photos were better quality.  I’m thinking that it was taken in 1903 when their son Joseph was a toddler.

Part of my motivation was a cousin Katherine who I discovered through a DNA matching website.  I didn’t know what the connection was when I first saw her name on my list.  But she was a strong match.  I had as much common DNA with her as what I shared with first cousins of my parents.  Who was she?  I sent her messages at first, but she didn’t respond.  (Contrary to popular belief, not all Landrys are nice people.  Her experiences with her Landry people were not pleasant.  We’ll fix that!)  Her tree showed Joseph Stalin Landry, but I didn’t know anyone with that name.  

Marie Marguerite Carmelite “Lily” Landry circa 1888.

Then I watched the video that my dad made with cousin Sis.  Her given name was Naomi Landry and she was the oldest daughter of Pee Paw’s brother Louis.  In the video Sis talked about all of the siblings of that family.  First, she started with their parents Alcide Landry and Celest Leveque, then went on to talk about all of their children and their families.  The oldest in the family was Lily Landry who was born in 1870 in Brusly, Louisiana.  That’s where the oldest children were born.  Sometime in the 1880’s the family moved to Westlake to work with the railroad.  Lily did not have a family, because she died when she was still a teenager.

The next child was Elie, who had little Joseph with his wife Gussie.  When Sis talked about this family in that amazing video, she talked about a daughter named “Cheryl K.”  That matched the tree that cousin Katherine had.  Her “Joseph Stalin” was our Joseph Sylvester!  No wonder she is such a strong DNA match – she’s a second cousin.  Her family group lost touch with our Landry family group because Elie died at a young age in 1913 in a railroad yard accident.  He was crushed between two rail cars.  One of the brothers was with him when he died.  After that death, there was less and less contact with the Landry family through the years.  A visit here, a postcard there, then it all stopped.  Now we have started to reconnect.

That is a very different story than the next son in line had.  Sebastien married his first cousin Marie Manette Landry in 1902.  In 1904 Marie Manette gave birth to a little daughter who was also called Marie Manette.  But the older Marie Manette died from complications.  After that happened Sebastien and his daughter went back to live with Alcide and Celeste.  So little Marie Manette was almost like a younger sister to Sebastien’s younger brothers.  Those families have remained close.

After Sebastien was Louis.  He was the father of Sis and five other children.  Like the family I grew up in, there were three boys and three girls.  His wife was Clemence Babin, who was the half-sister of Marie Manette Landry.  Clem was also his second cousin through the Landry family.  At least he wasn’t like the next brother, who married somebody with the same last name!  Joe married Azema Landry.  They were only 3rd cousins through the Hebert name.  They also shared common Landry ancestors.  Uncle Joe and Aunt Zim did not have any children.

Marie Therese Landry circa 1900

There were three other sons born to Alcide and Celeste, but they didn’t live very long.  I’m not sure of their ages when they died.  None of them lived to the age of 10.  Their names were Sam (1879 – twin of Louis), Sam (1882), and Alcide (1885).  The next child born was Marie Therese.  She lived only to the age of 20 and she did not have any children.  And then, finally, at the age of 43 Marie Celeste Leveque Landry gave birth to her tenth and final child.  That would be my Pee Paw!  Robert Joseph Landry, who went by Bob, Rob or Pappy, was born on January 9, 1893, in Westlake, Louisiana. 

He would go on to marry my grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau.  Erie’s mother was a Landry and Rob’s first cousin!  So three of the brothers married Landry cousins at the first or second cousin level.  Another one married another Landry who was a little more distantly related.  I don’t know about the wife of Elie, Gussie Parker.  I haven’t been able to find anything about her ancestry.  But it wouldn’t surprise me if she was related to the family. 

Then again, he may have been an early adopter of the practice of marrying outside the family.  There are still more family mysteries to discover.

 

More Early American Immigrants – Smith & Chickering

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At Thanksgiving I wrote a post about some of my Bucklin family’s early American Immigrants.  They are part of a group of immigrants that came to America in the early to mid 1600s for religious freedom.  Some people have called it the Puritan Great Migration and it includes people who immigrated from 1621-1640.  I talked about the family names of Bucklin, Bosworth, Yeales, Whipple, Allen, and Frye.  As I was writing it, I realized that there were more immigrants in those lines than I had thought.  I wrote the post, but figured I’d end up doing a follow-up to that.

I ended up doing a spreadsheet to list all of the different family lines and keep track of them.  I’m not a spreadsheet fanatic, but I do use them from time to time.  With all of the names that I come across in my research, it might be more helpful to use them more often.  But that would be too much like work.  I rely on my tree-building software to keep track of most of it.  Those are indispensable.  I can just add as many details as I want.  

So while looking into the immigrants in my family, I came across an interesting group.  That group is the group of ancestors of Sarah Smith, my 7x great grandmother who lived her life in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.  She was born there in 1670.  She married Jathniel Peck there in 1688.  She had all of her twelve children there from 1689 to 1712.  She died there in 1717.  Kinda sad that she died at only 46 years of age when her youngest child was only five years old.  I’ve mentioned Sarah in a previous post – not because she had a dozen children, but because of her connection to the Bucklin family.

Sarah was not an immigrant, but her family was.  Her father was Daniel Smith and he was born in 1634 in Hingham, England.  His parents were Henry Smith (1593-1647) and Judith Ray (1596-1650).  In 1638 Henry and Judith decided to bring their five children, three men servants, and two maid servants to the New World.  They arrived on the Diligent and originally settled in Hingham, Massachusetts.  In 1643 they moved to Rehoboth and spent the rest of their lives there.

Daniel grew up and married Esther Chickering.  Esther’s family immigrated earlier than Daniel’s and she was born in 1643, so she wasn’t an immigrant.  She was born in Dedham, Massachusetts.  Her parents were Francis Chickering (1606-1658) and Anne Fiske (1610-1649).  They were from Suffolk, England.  They were married around 1630 and had one child by the year 1637, which is the year that they immigrated.  Both Francis and Anne had widowed mothers.  Francis’s mother was Mary Austin Chickering.  Anne’s mother was Anne Lawter Fiske.  (Her husband John Fiske had been her second cousin.)  So when Francis and Anne decided to head off to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with their young daughter, both of their mothers decided to join them on their journey.

This was a great undertaking back then.  These were new settlements with none of the luxuries that we have become accustomed to.  You know, luxuries like running water, sewerage management, electricity, and air conditioning.  So the decision to go was not taken lightly.  I’m sure they had high hopes, though.  They had a strong belief that things would be better in this new place they were relocating to.  It would have been exciting to reach the shores of America after their long journey.  But a sad occurrence happened along the way.  The oldest member of the group – Anne Lawter Fiske – died during the voyage.  She was only 52 years old at the time.  She was likely buried at sea.

The rest of the family settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, which is where Esther Chickering was born.  Even though her family lived in Dedham, she somehow met Daniel Smith.  They were married in Rehoboth in 1659.  As I said earlier, their daughter was Sarah Smith, who married Jathniel Peck.  They had a son named Jathniel, Jr.  He was the father of Mary Peck, who married to James Bucklin (1709-1780).  Oh, no!  We’re still back in the 1700s and I want to bring this to the present.  Let me get going with a bunch of begetting.  James (1709) begat John Bucklin (1747-1795).  John (1747) begat John Bucklin (1792-1850).  John (1792) begat James Bucklin (1821-1890).  James begat Louis Charles Bucklin (1873-1927).  Louis begat Fred Bucklin (1907-1984).  Fred begat Betty Lou Bucklin, who was my mom.

Whew!  There, it’s done.  That’s my connection to the Smith and Chickering immigrants.

Family tree of my 7x great grandmother Sarah Smith

 

 

Ferdinand Pierre Patureau Circa 1860

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Ferdinand Patureau circa 1860

Here is a new photo of Ferdinand Patureau.  I guess I can’t really call it new when it was taken around 1860 or so.  I first saw it in the Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection at the Tyrrell Historical Library in Beaumont, Texas, on November 15, 2021.  I’ve never seen it anywhere else, either.  It’s nice to discover an old photo like that.  It was a bonus treat when I went searching for photos at that collection.  The collection was not disappointing, since it had great versions of photos that I had been aware of previously. 

So in case you don’t know, Ferdinand Patureau was my great great grandfather.  He emigrated from France in 1840 with his parents and siblings.  My father was Bob Landry, the famed band director of Jennings, Louisiana.  His mother was Erie Patureau Landry, my link to the Patureau family.  Erie was the daughter of Vincent Maximilian Patureau, one of the sons of Ferdinand Patureau.

Ferdinand was born on October 27, 1826, in LaRoche-Chalais, France.  His birth certificate called him Pierre Patureau, the son of Pierre Patureau, boulanger, aged 26 and Anne Machet.  Even though the father and the son were named Pierre in older documents, they are consistently known as Pierre Ferdinand Patureau and Ferdinand Pierre Patureau.  Instead of calling one a Sr. and the other a Jr., it was decided that the father would be Pierre Ferdinand and the son would be Ferdinand Pierre.  It worked for them.  It works for me.

Ferdinand spent his childhood in France.  Then, in 1840, when the family was living in Riberac, they to immigrate to the United States.  Ferdinand was only 14 years old when the family arrived in Louisiana and settled in Opelousas.  Ferdinand must not have been too happy with this move, because he took off on his own to go back to France.  For six to eight months the rest of the family didn’t know where he was.  According to the collection in Beaumont, Ferdinand spent some of that time working at a sugar plantation in Cuba to make money.  One report said that there was a document to support that claim, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Ferdinand didn’t stay in France for too long.  He came back to Louisiana after a year and a half or so.  I’m not sure of the motivation.  Perhaps he missed his family.  Sadly his mother Anne Machet and his younger sister Elisa both died in 1842 in Opelousas during a cholera epidemic.  Maybe that was motivation to move back, or he was already back before they died.  The details are not that clear.

A few years after returning to Louisiana he met Louisiana native Marie Emma Landry.  Three sets of her great grandparents were Exiles from Acadie (with names like Landry, Dupuy, Braud, Hebert, and LeBlanc), while the other set were French immigrants (Serrette and Sigur).  They were all French speakers.  When Ferdinand married Emma in 1847, he was 20 years old and she was only 17.

It didn’t take long for the family to start growing.  The first two years brought two daughters – Zulma and Aline.  I think they were born in Brusly, Louisiana.  In 1850 the family was living in Baton Rouge.  A few more years brought Louis Leobon and Marie Valentine.  After that the family was in Plaquemine with Pierre Patureau living with the family there.

So when this picture was taken, Ferdinand was a young father of several children.  I’m not exactly sure when the photo was taken, so it’s hard to know the exact number.  With births and deaths through those years, the number was changing often.  It was also in 1860 that Pierre died, leaving 33-year-old Ferdinand as the Patureau patriarch in Louisiana.  So it’s nice to have this “new” photo of Ferdinand from this particular part of his life.

Enjoy it.

Was Daisy Feeling a Little Unwell?

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My dear sweet English great grandmother Daisy Keys Phenice circa 1950, bless her.

I have been sick all week.  Sick, sick, sick.  And I’m sick of it!  My head feels like it’s in a fog most of the time and I don’t have much energy.  But I still wanted to do my family history blog post, right?  I can’t miss that.  It would let down my peeps.  With what I have planned for tonight, I still may disappoint some.

I was starting to look for something to post, and I thought about something musical.  Maybe I have another little ditty by Great Grandpa H. C. on his fiddle?  So I went searching for those recordings I got a few years ago.  I always think I’m so organized, but I find myself frustrated more often than I like when I’m looking for something specific.  Having a foggy head today wasn’t a help.  I finally found “Soldier’s Joy” and “The Irish Washerwoman.”  But I didn’t see another fiddly jig.  But then something else entered my foggy brain.

In my semi-demented stated, I thought of just the song recording that would represent how I’ve been feeling this week.  It’s a song from the same group of recordings as those others, but it wasn’t something that resonated with me until today.  Anytime I’m asked a question this week, I don’t want to answer with much effort.  It can set off coughing.  You also know I’m from a musical family.  I tend to relate things around me to certain songs, which I will start singing at random.  But with a scratchy throat and not much energy, I don’t really try for the correct pitch, and I really don’t care.  Like I said:  I’m sick, sick, sick!

So this is a recording of my mom’s maternal grandparents Harry Clifton Phenice and Daisy Keys.  Daisy is singing and playing the piano, while H. C. is accompanying her on his fiddle.  It’s a bit discordant.  It’s bit off key.  It’s exactly how I felt inside my head this week.  I wonder if Daisy was a bit unwell back then?  Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.