When Mee Maw Played With a Calf: Intro to Box 301

I’ve been getting so many new photos lately.  They are not actually new photos, because some of them are very old.  But many of them are new to me, so they’re giving me all kinds of ideas for future posts for this family history blog.  A few weeks before I got these photos from three different sources, I was having some difficulty in thinking of topics on my Thursday nights.  First I got some old Patureau photos that included some photos of my dad as well as older photos of cousins from that line.  Then my mom’s sister sent me some photos of the family that I’d never seen before.  That’s always a plus.  The most recent photos came from cousins on my dad’s side of the family.  They included photos of my paternal grandmother and grandfather.  Some of these photos were obviously from the same date as other photos I have written about.  But more exciting to me were the new photos of Mee Maw’s dad’s family.  One of them was an old tin type that wasn’t labeled.  That didn’t stop me from figuring out who it was.

As wonderful as those photos are, they will have to wait for another time.  Except for this one of Mee Maw with a calf.  It called to me too strongly to ignore, similar to a previous photo taken on the same day did to me in 2016.  It’s probably because it’s another sweet photo of my paternal grandmother around the time that she became engaged to be married.  Maybe she is just happier than usual.

I keep referring to her as Mee Maw, but back in 1921 she was known as Erie Patureau.  It would only be later that she would get married and my dad (Robert Joseph “Bob” Landry, Jr.) would be born.  Another photo from that day makes me think that the photos were taken in hopes of having an engagement photo.  That one was used for the post “Erie Alone” in 2018.  It was a somewhat serious photo, and her hand with her ring were on clear display.

But this photo is definitely not serious!  Erie’s sister Zita looks like she’s whispering in one of the calf’s ears, while Erie is holding the other one.  I suppose their friend Clifford Clements is helping to keep the calf posed for the photo.  Maybe Zita was humming to the calf to calm it.  As I’ve always heard, music soothes the savage beast.  Not that this calf looks savage in the least.  I’m sure she was very sweet.

At the time that this photo was taken, both Erie and Zita were schoolteachers in Lafayette.  Their dad Max had moved there with the family in 1912, where he set up a veterinary practice.  A few of the daughters went to college at SLI and became teachers.  There are a lot of teachers in the Patureau family.  In fact, Max Patureau’s great grandfather Leobon Patureau had been a schoolteacher in France in the 1780s.  He probably wasn’t the first, and I hear of more schoolteachers in the family from time to time.

I wonder if this calf was one of their dad’s patients.  I’m sure they must have treated it very well.  They wouldn’t want to mar their father’s reputation.  After all, I’m thinking they were Daddy’s girls.  Their mother (Marie Therese Landry) had died somewhat young (41 years old in 1909), so he was the one who was their primary caregiver.  And from all of the wonderful photos of Grampa Max that I’ve seen from Mee Maw’s collection of photos, I would think that Erie was a Daddy’s girl.

PS.  The latest collection of photos is being called Box 301.  That’s because they were in a box, and the box had the number 301 written on it.  It sounds rather obvious, but I thought I’d explain it anyway.  It was found in the same attic that had the Tin Can Collection – my dad’s sister Wana must have gotten them from their mother.  Their sister Germaine passed her photos down to her daughter Daphne, and that group of photos is called the Secret Collection.  I won’t mention all of the collections here.

You will definitely be seeing more images from Box 301.