Patureau Brothers: Before They Were Doctors

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. 

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.

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.