Month: November 2024

Patureau Brothers: Before They Were Doctors

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Vincent Maximilien Patureau & Pierre Oscar Patureau circa 1881 in Louisiana.

Happy Thanksgiving!  If I had to choose one photo that I was most thankful for this year, it would have to be this one.  I got it earlier this year at one of the three Landry family funerals that I went to this year.  That’s too many, especially since they had to do with my godparents and their families.  It’s good to be around family for those situations, but it’s nice when we get together to celebrate something.  We did have one of those, too.

This photo is part of the Box 301 Collection that I’ve talked about before.  It was up in Aunt Wana’s house for years.  When we were going through that box, I was very excited to see this photo, even though I didn’t know who it was at first.  The exciting thing was that it was an old metal tintype, and I thought it might be some Patureau boys.

My dad’s mom was Germaine Erie Patureau Landry and she went by the name Erie.  Though her grandchildren knew her as Mee Maw.  (I think I was her favorite!)  Her father’s name was Vincent Maximilien Patureau and he went by the name Max.  I usually refer to him as Grampa Max.  (Grampa pronounced with accents like the name Santa.)  Grampa Max was the son of Ferdinand Patureau and Emma Landry.  Ferdinand and Emma were the parents of 16 children.  Ten of them grew to adulthood – five girls and five boys.  The last five children were four boys and a girl.

I thought the photo could be of two of the younger Patureau boys.  When we were looking through the photos, I was hurrying to take photos of them and moving on to find the next good one.  I didn’t have time to spend examining them closely.  I would do that later when I was at home and had more time.  There were so many good old photos that I had never seen before.  That is always exciting to me.  I was able to bring several of them home to get good scans, too. 

Pierre Oscar Patureau, Sr. in 1895 in Nashville, Tennessee.

A few days later I looked at the photo closer.  I thought that I recognized the boy standing up as one of the younger Patureau brothers.  I looked through the photos from the Tyrrell Historical Library Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection.  I took photos of the collection when I went to Beaumont in 2021.  Sure enough, there was a photo that was identified as Pierre Oscar Patureau in February of 1895.  The boy standing up was definitely Oscar Patureau.  I also noticed that the teenaged boy sitting in the chair looked slightly older than him.  So I went to my family tree to see which brother was slightly older than him.  And – surprise, surprise – it was my very own Grampa Max!!!  Grampa Max was born in 1865 and Oscar was born in 1866.  They were only a year and a half apart.

The main reason I didn’t recognize him at first was because of the lack of a moustache.  In every other photo of Grampa Max, he is sporting a moustache.  Other than that, he looks just the same as he did in the other early photos of him.  As soon as I figured it out, I went to look at the photo on my phone.  And there it was – my phone’s facial recognition software identified him as Grampa Max, too.  I’m glad I figured it out on my own, but the confirmation with the software was an added bonus.

Max would go on to marry Marie Emma Landry.  They had fifteen children, with nine of them reaching adulthood.  Needless to say, I come from a large family.  Many of Max’s siblings also had large families as well.  There are over a thousand cousins out there.  Oscar only had four children, and as we saw a few weeks ago in a post I wrote, his oldest son committed suicide when he was just 19 years old.  He had no children.  Oscar, Sr.’s third son only had one daughter.  She was married to Alois Maxwell Hirt – better known as the famous New Orleans jazz trumpeter Al Hirt.  According to one of the Patureau cousins, he was friendly and welcoming to the Patureau relatives.

Dr. V. M. Patureau Veterinary Surgeon. His business sign in Lafayette, Louisiana

The other thing about Max and Oscar is that both of them became doctors.  I’ve written a few posts that talk about Grampa Max being a veterinarian.  He began his veterinary career in Plaquemine, Louisiana, but then around 1912 he moved to Lafayette for a bigger practice.  He retired in 1933 when his health began to go down.  The photo of Oscar was taken in Nashville, Tennessee, where he went to dental school at Vanderbilt.  He was a dentist for many years in New Orleans, then moved to Beaumont, Texas, to practice around 1920.  He died in 1926.

Talking about having too many funerals in a short amount of time, 1924-1926 was a difficult time for Grampa Max.  In 1924 his sister Zulma died.  In 1925 Zelica, another sister, died.  Then in 1926 Oscar died, followed by another sister Aline.  I’m sure they had some big Patureau get togethers then, as well.  Like I said, it’s a big family.  They’re good to have around in the good times, but they’re even better when they’re there for you in the bad times.  I do appreciate my family.

Betty Lou at Hathaway High in 1947

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9th grade class at Hathaway High School in 1947 included my mother, Betty Lou Bucklin. Hathaway, Louisiana.

Hathaway High School.  My mom’s alma mater.  The home of the Hornets.  I suppose that since this is a photo of my mom’s ninth grade class, this is the year that she was officially in high school.  I’ve always heard the school called Hathaway High School, even though it had grades 1 thru 12.  At least that’s the way my mom always explained it to me.  It might have changed since then.  It was a long time ago.

In fact, it was in 1947.  At least that’s what the little chalk board says.  Actually it says that this was the photo of the 9th grade class at Hathaway for the school year ’47 + ’48.  From what I can remember about school activities, I seem to recall that the school photos were taken at closer to the beginning of the school year.  So I would think that the photo was taken in the fall of 1947.

Some of you already know that my mom was Betty Lou Bucklin and you’ve already picked her out from the photo.  But others are not so fortunate to be familiar with my dear, sweet mother.  Fourteen-year-old Betty Lou is the second one from the right in the middle row.  She has a nice, big smile on her face.  It’s the first school photo that she is smiling like this.  In previous years she was either not smiling at all or just smiling with a grin.  Part of that could be that she was standing next to her friends.  The girl on the left of her was her best friend Lavelle Krumnow.  On the right of her is Lela Mae Jester, another good friend.  Sitting in front of her was Carol Bryan.  She was a friend, and she also was our next-door neighbor when we moved to Lucy Street in Jennings in 1964.

My mom didn’t name everyone in this photo like she did in some of her other photos, so I’m not going to try and figure them all out.  Not that I’d be able to do that if I tried.  There are probably a few Gary family members and some Cajun names as well.  I don’t know who the teacher is either.  If someone knows it, I’d appreciate the information.  Irregardless, I’m sure you are enjoying this old sepia-tone photo that includes my precious mother in her youth.

Landry Centennials

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Rob Landry & Erie Patureau

Today completes nine full years of writing a weekly blog about family history.  That’s right!  I’ve written at least one post a week for the past nine years.  I’ve had a few weeks where I’ve added a Surplus Sunday or FollowUp Friday to the mix.  With all of that and including this post, I’ll be just four posts short of 500 posts.  Wow, that’s a lot of words and pictures.  The first post I wrote and the one from last week were about my maternal grandmother Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.

So it’s time for something from my Landry side of the family.  You would think with all of these posts I would have covered all of the major milestones in my families’ lives.  But I haven’t.  I’ve missed a few important anniversaries along the way.  So instead of giving a greatest hits recap, I’ll give a recap of a couple of posts that should have been.  

Newspaper article from Nov. 12, 1921, in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The post that I didn’t write in November of 2021 was about the marriage of my paternal grandparents Robert Joseph Landry and Germaine Erie Patureau:  Today is the 100th anniversary of the wedding of my paternal grandparents.  Rob Landry and Erie Patureau were married on November 12, 1921, in Lafayette, Louisiana.  I still find it hard to believe that there are no photos of that wonderful event.  I’ve never seen a single one.  According to the newspaper article, Erie was given away by her father Max Patureau and her sister Therese “attended” her.  There doesn’t seem to be any family disharmony going on.  It even says there was a nice reception with friends and family in attendance.  A few years later Therese was married and there are lots of photos of that event. 

I don’t know the story of their courtship either.  I think they knew each other their whole lives.  Rob Landry was a first cousin of Erie’s mother Marie Therese Landry Patureau.  Even though Rob was born and grew up in Westlake, Louisiana, and Erie was born and grew up in Crescent, Louisiana, the families would have gotten together through their formative years.  Even though I’ve heard that back then marriage between cousins was very common, it wasn’t true on my mom’s side of the family or other family trees I’ve seen.  My dad’s family tree is an entangled mess!  I think a big influence on that was the fact that they were of Cajun and French heritage, and they spoke French.  So there was more of a motivation to marry within your own group.  You could understand each other.  It doesn’t happen as much nowadays, so everyone looks at you oddly when you tell them your grandparents were related as closely as they were.

The other post that I didn’t write at the end of April in 2023 was about my paternal grandparents becoming parents:  Today marks the 100th anniversary of the day that Rob and Erie became parents.  On April 30, 1923, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Rob and Erie Landry welcomed to their household little Marie Therese Landry.  Even though they started their family somewhat late, Rob was 30 and Erie was 27, they went on to have seven more children – ending up with a balanced group of four boys and four girls. 

They grew up in a close family and those siblings were close all of their lives. I’m glad to be part of that close-knit family.

 

 

 

 

 

Myrtle Phenice Bucklin in 1954

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Myrtle Phenice Bucklin in 1954 in Hathaway, Louisiana.

I’ve been wanting to post this photo for a while, so the only problem I had with it was determining the date of it.  I had a date of 1947 for it, and I even started the post with that in the title.  This photo came from my Aunt Loris a few months ago.  She is my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry’s younger sister.  I like this photo so much, so I was wondering why mom didn’t have a copy of it in her possession.  It is a photo of their mother Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin after all. 

So I went to the family photo album that I put together when I was in junior high school to see if I could find it.  There on the first page of the album was a small photo of my grandmother in 1954.  My grandmother was Mrs. Bucklin who taught the 3rd grade at Hathaway High School back in the 1940s through the 60s.  And one of the things they’ve always done at school is take school photos.  There were usually one or two photos to choose from.  The nice thing about those old photos was that they put the year on the bottom of the photos. 

The 1954 photo was taken on the same day as this one.  It seems that Loris liked this version of the photo, while mom liked the other one.  I have to agree with my aunt on this one.  It is a much more striking photo than the other one.  Sure, she is smiling a bit more in the other photo and it shows the date, but this one is just more dramatic.

Myrtle was born in 1906, so she would have been 48 years old in this photo.  When I was growing up, I remember my mom saying that Grandma was known as a “handsome” woman.  Well everybody knows that you’re supposed to call women either pretty or beautiful, and men are known as handsome.  I always took it to mean that she was attractive in a masculine sort of way.  And I went along with it.  After all, she was my grandmother.  That means that she was much older than I was.  My concern was that she was nice to us and she fed us well when we went to visit.  She also had an infectious laugh, especially when her sisters were around.

But now that I’ve been looking through these old photos of her, I notice that she had striking features.  She had high cheekbones, full lips, and really pretty eyes.  She and her sisters were beautiful young women.  And in this photo of her when she was 48, she could still strike a pose.  Come on, vogue!