Amedee Bujol’s Tragic Death

I came across something this week that I had never noticed before.  On the profile for Amedee Bujol on FindaGrave, there was a photo attached of a newspaper article.  It had been there for four years, but I hadn’t noticed it.  I don’t examine every little detail of those profiles on a regular basis, so it can be easy to overlook something.  But this thing wasn’t insignificant!  It was information about how one of my ancestors had died in a rather tragic way.  That always makes a good story, right?

I shouldn’t talk about his death so flippantly, should I?  It’s serious business, especially when the circumstances are tragic.  It’s not the first time that I’ve been flippant about his death, either.  I’ve done it at least twice already.  But before I tell you about those, let me tell you of my connection to Amedee Bujol.  My father’s name was Bob Landry, and he was the son of Erie Patureau Landry.  She was my beloved Mee Maw, and her mother was Marie Therese Landry Patureau.  Marie Therese died at the age of 41 when Mee Maw was just 14 years old.  She was the oldest child of Trasimond Landry and Belite Bujol.  Belite was the daughter of Joseph Hubert Amedee Bujol and Anna Adele Landry.  She was born in 1843 in Brusly, Louisiana.

But Belite wasn’t the only daughter of Amedee and Adele.  Not by a long shot.  She was the third daughter.  She had no older brothers, and it wasn’t until she already had seven more younger sisters when she finally had a brother.  That son was born in May of 1856 and their father died in June of 1857.  I didn’t know how Amedee died, but I did know he died after having eleven children over a period of sixteen years.  So in a previous post I joked that he died the following year from exhaustion.   Anything for laugh at the expense of poor old Amedee.

Then a couple of years later I talked about him in another post.  In that one I suggested that Adele had strangled him when he suggested they try for another son!  She could have blamed it on postpartum depression.  Not really.  That wasn’t a thing back then and if she had killed him, surely we would have heard about that.  Two weeks after that post, someone on FindaGrave shared the information that talked about Amedee’s death.  It’s like they were trying to help me out, but I just didn’t notice.

And now I have.  No more jokes in bad taste about his death.  You can see from the article that he had a tragic death.  It says that he is an old citizen of the parish, but he was only 41 years old at the time of his death.  That’s not old at all.

He lived in Brusly on a plantation on the Mississippi River at the time of his death.  He didn’t own much land, but he worked in combination with Joseph Auguste Leveque, who owned a considerable amount more.  Joseph Auguste was his mother’s (Marie Francoise Leveque) younger brother.  Not only that, at the time he was married to Adele’s younger sister Marguerite Landry.  His first wife had been Adele and Marguerite’s older sister Doralise.  Marguerite married Josephe Auguste after Doralise’s death.  I descend from the second marriage.

The plantation he lived on was to the west of the Mississippi River, and on the other side it led into a marshy area that was formed by Bayou Choctaw.  According to the article, Amedee had gone hunting one Saturday trying to score a deer.  It was probably something he had done all his life.  He was a Cajun living along the bayous of Southern Louisiana.  And usually when you find a deer hunter, they started hunting at a young age and have a passion for it.  They know about guns and ammunition, and in the place that he was living, they would know about boats as well.

But this time something different had happened.  The article doesn’t exactly say all of the details of what went wrong, yet we know that something went tragically wrong.  The 41-year-old father of ten young children drowned in Bayou Choctaw.  Was he alone when it happened?  Were there any hints of foul play?  It doesn’t say.  It just says that his body was recovered the following day and brought to Brusly for interment.  Traditionally that means burying somebody in the ground, but that last statement makes me question that assumption.  “Peace to his ashes.”  Does that mean he was cremated?  I don’t think so.  I think he was buried in that grave in Brusly.

That must have been a terrible shock for Adele, Belite, and the rest of the family.  Belite was a young teenage girl of 13 at the time of her father’s death.  The only grandfather she knew – Emmanuel Landry – had died three years earlier.  She had never known her Bujol grandfather.  Joseph Sylvestre Bujol had died in 1824 at the age of 36.  I don’t know how he died, and I will refrain from saying anything flippant about his death.  I’ll have to see if I can find anything more about any details. 

Belite still had her mom and her grandmother Francoise Leveque Bujol.  I suppose she also had her grandmother’s brother who was her uncle Joseph Auguste and her neighbor as well.  He seemed to play a big part in their lives.  He helped Adele with settling Amedee’s succession.  Their extended family was nearby and I’m sure they were supportive of one another.  It was a Landry family after all!