A Big Landry Family Reunion

I posted a video of our family singing last week.  The previous post was a post about the Landry side of my family.  Since my family name is Landry, it would seem that last week was another Landry post.  But technically it wasn’t.  Because my mom was a Bucklin and we are just as much Bucklin as Landry.  Plus in the video, a brother of each of my parents showed up.  But to break the Landry-Bucklin tie, my mom’s brother Austin had one of his granddaughters with him.  Little Violet broke the tie, making it a Bucklin post after all.  That clears the way to post another Landry-related story this week.

I want to make a Landry post because of a comment on Facebook about the video.  A distant Landry cousin suggested that I bring my guitar to the big Landry Family Reunion during the Great Acadian Awakening event coming up next month.  It is also known as the Grand Reveil Acadien and it is held every few years in southern Louisiana.  This year it is from Oct. 11-19 and it has events in Lafayette, Broussard, St. Martinville, Abbeville, Loreauville, and more.  There are grand ceremonies, workshops, presentations, masses in French, French Tables, music, food, and more.  Part of that more is a big Landry Reunion on October 16 from 5:00-9:00PM in Lafayette.   More information can be found at louisiane-acadie.com.   Anyone with the Landry name in their family tree is invited to attend the reunion.  

Since I was writing about Landry family members getting together, I thought it would be appropriate to use these photos from 1991.  I have been looking at them a while and thinking it was time to use them in one of my posts.  Especially since they include some Landry family members getting together.  It wasn’t a family reunion, though.  I think it was a gathering of a few cousins who were interested in family history.  I have used information from three of them pretty extensively in my posts about the Landry family.

Of course, most of that information came from my dad. In case you don’t know him, Robert Joseph “Bob” Landry, Jr. is the man shown on the far left of the first photo.  He spent about forty years tracing his lines back to the founders of Acadie.  At the time of the photo, he was only 62 and had spent about 20 years researching.  I have all of his research and collected photos that he had.  I think he got some of them from these cousins.  Next to my dad is Bernadine Haydell Landry, the wife of Tommy Landry.  Landry was her married name.  

In the middle of the photo is Alice Naomi “Sis” Landry Vincent.  She was my dad’s first cousin.  Daddy’s father was Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry, Sr. and Sis’s father was Louis Joseph Peter Landry.  Rob and Louis were the sons of Simon Alcide Landry and Marie Celeste Leveque Landry.  Sis collected a lot of old Landry photos and Daddy made a video of her around the time of this photo.  In the video she talked about the history of their shared Landry family.  It has so much great family information about the Landrys of that generation.  Even though she is Daddy’s first cousin, she was twenty years older than him.  That’s because Rob (my Pee Paw) was the baby of the family.  In 1991, Sis was my dad’s only paternal first cousin that was still alive.  She died in 1996.  I don’t remember ever meeting her.  I’m sure she was at some family get togethers I went to.  

The man wearing the tie is Tommy Landry, the husband of Bernadine.  Our connection to Tommy is through my grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  Erie was known to us grandchildren as Mee Maw.  Tommy and Erie were first cousins because Erie’s mother (Marie Therese Landry Patureau) was the sister of Tommy’s father (Thomas Belisaire Landry).  Therese and Thomas were the children of Trasimond Landry and Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol Landry Babin.  Tommy did a lot of research about his family and one of the books that he put together was about Trasimond Landry.  I refer to that book all of the time.  He lived here in Baton Rouge, and I remember meeting him once.  It was before my interest in family history, so I didn’t thank him for writing that wonderful book of family information.  He died in 2005.

The woman on the far right is Myrtle “Myrt” Amelie Landry Cazes.  She was also a grandchild of Trasimond and Belite, so therefore a first cousin of Tommy and my grandmother Erie.  She was also the mother of Lew Cazes, who can be seen in the red shirt in the second photo. 

In Tommy’s book, he says that Lew had the biggest collection of information or memorabilia about Trasimond Landry.  Or was that Thomas Richey who said it in his book about Trasimond?  Somebody said it and I believed it.  I’ve gotten together with some of Myrt and Lew’s family, and they’ve shared some great photos with me, including these two.

But I don’t believe everything Tommy says in his book.  He has a photo of himself with Sis and Myrt.  Above the photo it says that they are the grandchildren of Trasimond Landry.  But Sis is not a granddaughter of Trasimond.  She is a granddaughter of Belite Bujol and Belite’s second husband Maglorie Babin.  Sis is a half-first cousin to Tommy and Myrt.  But she also has a Landry connection.  Belite and Magloire’s daughter Clemence Babin was married to Louis Landry.  They are Sis’s parents.  Louis was the son of Alcide Landry, who was the younger brother of Trasimond.  So, Sis is also a second cousin to Tommy and Myrt.  She is also a half first cousin once removed to my dad.

I tried to make that as clear as I could, but when I got to that last sentence, I realized I had failed in the attempt.  Whether it is accurate or not is beside the point.  When I have photos of my dad with his cousins, it gets complicated quickly.  I didn’t even talk about the fact that Marie Celeste Leveque’s mother was a Landry also.  That adds more connections to these people.  Because Belite’s mother and Marie Celeste’s mother were Landry sisters.  So, if you are related to these people, you may want to attend that Landry family reunion.