Category: Bujol

Marie Amelie Belite Bujol was the daughter of Amedee Bujol.

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.

Selfie I took with Amedee’s grave in December of 2017 in the Brusly cemetery.

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.

July 8, 1857, newspaper article about Amedee’s death. The Daily Advocate of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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!

1850 Brusly Census page shows some family. It starts in the middle of the page with Adele’s parents Emmanuel and Celeste Landry, followed by Amedee and Adele’s family, then the family of Joseph Auguste Leveque and (Marguerite) Basilde Landry Leveque, and lastly Manette Bujol’s household. Manette was another name for Marie Francoise Leveque Bujol.

I couldn’t think of anything to write about tonight.  Earlier I had an idea about posting a second photo of our family at NASA in 1969, since they just launched a manned spaceship to fly around the moon for the first time in over fifty years.  But when I got back home, I realized I had already posted that second photo.  So I jettisoned that idea.  When Chuck saw me struggling for an idea, he suggested I revisit a post from ten years ago.  That sounded fine to me.  I looked back ten years ago to the beginning of April, and I saw an old photo of my great great grandmother Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol Landry Babin.

I couldn’t use that one, because I had only recently updated that photo with a newer version that I got from Box 301 in June of 2024.  At least I thought I had.  When I searched through the photos of Belite on my blog, there wasn’t a post with the new photo.  I had already edited the photo nicely and thought about posting it many times.  But evidently, I never did post it.  It’s a good thing I can search through my posts rather easily, because obviously I can’t remember every detail of every post I’ve written.  That’s actually one of the main reasons I write them, because I know I can’t remember all of the details that I discover.  And soon I need to get serious about putting some books together.

Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol circa 1915.

This is the new and improved version of the old photo of Grandma Belite.  I’ve had three versions of the photo.  The first one I had must have been a Xerox copy of the old photo.  The second version was a washed-out looking scan with small, splattered spots across part of her face.  Those are hard to remove and keep the face looking accurate.  The end result was pretty good, but there weren’t as many details as there are on the newest version.

The newest version is so much better because I was able to scan an original old photo from Box 301.  That was an old box full of treasures stored in my Aunt Wana’s house.  Look at the details on this one.  You can see the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead.  The shape of her mouth is much clearer as well.  Both of her shoulders show up on this version of the cropped photo.  I had created a shoulder on the left side of the old photo to try to balance it.  It always looked fake to me, but the photo was unbalanced without it.  

You can also tell that she has either buttons or pinheads on her collar.  With all of the scratches and spots on the older photos, I got rid of them because I thought they didn’t belong there.  This photo shows that they did belong there.  It also shows her hair clearer.  You can see the gray hairs mixed in with the darker ones.  You can also see that her hair is not draping down her back.  It must be up in a bun, and behind her there is a shadow on the wall that at first glance looks like hair on her shoulder and back.  You can also see more details in the cloth of her clothes.  It is a much better photo all around.

Trasimond Landry circa 1861 in Brusly, Louisiana.

I still wonder what she looked like when she was younger.  In a description in a book about the Civil War, she was referred to as one of the beautiful daughters of the Veuve Bujol.  That would be Anne Adele Landry, the widow of Amedee Bujol.  Amedee had died in 1857, and Adele died in 1899.  Soon after the Civil War, Belite married the Brusly war hero Trasimond Landry.  Trasimond and Adele were half first cousins.  They had a common grandfather – Joseph Ignace Landry.  I only have one photo of Trasimond, and it is from 1861 when he joined the military.  He was just a young man.  He and Belite were married in1867 and I have never seen a photo of the wedding.  

So, I have several photos of Belite when she was older and only one of Trasimond when he was young.  But the technology of reverse-aging photos is just starting.  Now, it usually takes one photo and shows an interpretation of that photo with the person at a younger age.  Soon, it will take into account several photos of the person to get more accurate estimate of what that person would have looked like at a younger age.  Then I would be able to create a wedding photo of Trasimond and Belite!  Would that be wrong?  My answer is, “Yes, it is, but I’d still like to see it!”  

In the meantime, I’d prefer it if an old forgotten photo of that wedding would be discovered in someone’s attic.  It could happen.  Just look at this photo.

I’ve decided to write about Marie Magdeleine Granger again.  I first wrote about her in my “From Acadian to Cajun” series and she was just one person in family group that I was talking about.  But her story really touched me.  She endured so much tragedy, yet her story was relegated to one paragraph in a longer story about a bigger event.  So when I discovered a couple of other facts about her life at the time, I decided to write again.  I could have just written a short little Follow-Up to my blog, but decided to write a separate post just for her.  I think she deserves it.   Plus the 262nd anniversary of one of those tragedies occurred this week.

Birth record for Marie Magdeleine and Anne Granger in 1731.

Marie Magdeleine Granger was born on May 2, 1731, in Grand Pre, Acadie.  She was baptized the same day.  She had a twin sister named Anne.  They were the 5th and 6th children of Joseph Granger and Anne Richard.  Anne and Marie Magdeleine were right in the middle of the family.  Besides having four older siblings, they had four younger ones as well.  All of them were born in Acadie before the Grand Derangement.  That was the period from 1755 to 1763 when the English were deporting the Acadians and sending them to various ports.

We know the date of Marie Magdeleine’s birth because some records survived.  Besides deporting the Acadians, burning their homes, and slaughtering their livestock, the English also destroyed a lot of the records of the Acadian people.  But somehow some of the Acadians took records from their church with them and hid them from the English.  They made it through twelve years of Exile and ended up in Louisiana.  The St. Gabriel Catholic Church preserved those records, and they are available today.  The marriage entry for Joseph and Anne survived, as did the entries for all ten of their children.

Marie Magdeleine was one of the last generation to spend their whole childhood growing up in Acadie before the Great Upheaval. It wasn’t a completely stress-free time.  They were under English rule and there were many conflicts between England and France. When she was 19 years old, she married Alain Bujol.  In July 1752 they relocated to Ile St. Jean, an island northeast of Acadie which was still under French rule at the time.  The Census of August 1752 in Riviere-du-Moulin-a-Scie on Ile St. Jean shows Marie Magdeleine with husband Alain Bujol (Allain Bugeauld, ploughman) and a nine-month-old son (Simon, born about November 1751).  It reports that they had been on the island for only one month.  Alain Bujol’s parents lived close by with nine of their children.  They had been there for a year.  Marie Magdeleine and Alain must have relocated to Ile St. Jean to be close to them.

While Marie Magdeleine and Alain were trying to find a safe place to raise a family free from conflict, we know that that was not to be.  They had a house and a farm and a little son, but trouble was brewing.  When the deportations began in 1755 in Acadie, those living in Ile St Jean had a period of respite.  During that time, Marie Magdeleine gave birth to her second child – a daughter named Marie Louise born in 1756.  They even had two years at their farm in Ile St. Jean after Marie Louise was born.

And then Tragedy began. For Marie Magdeleine, her year of losses started off with less personal ones such as their home and livestock and progressed to much more personal ones.   It began on July 26, 1758, when Fort Louisbourg fell to the English.  On Aug. 17, 1758, Ile St. Jean capitulated to the English as well.  The English started rounding up the Acadians for deportation.  So two weeks after Ile St. Jean fell, the Acadians were removed from their homes and sent to Fort Louisbourg where they arrived on September 4.  So now Marie Mageleine, Alain, Simon, and Marie Louise were living the life of prisoners.  Other Acadians who had escaped the round up were hunted down “to prevent the vermin from escaping.”

And now it gets more personal.  During their three months as prisoners at Fort Louisbourg, many Acadians were being carried off to England and France on various ships.  Marie Magdeleine’s family was on one of five ships that departed Nov. 25, 1758 and arrived in St. Malo on Jan. 23, 1759.  They were not on the Mary, the Duke William, or the Violet.  The Mary ran into foul conditions and only half of her passengers survived.  The Duke William and the Violet both sank with only four survivors from the Duke William.  It was a terrible time of loss for the Acadians, including Alain Bujol.  Both of his parents and possibly nine of his siblings died when the Duke William went down.  He had another sister who was married that made it onto a ship that made it to France, but she did not survive the journey.  Marie Magdeleine suffered her first major loss on the passage to France.  Her 2-year-old daughter Marie Louise did not survive the journey. 

Once they arrived in St. Malo, France, the Acadians were moved to different locations to settle.  Marie Magdeleine ended up in St. Servan with her husband and son.  Less than a month after arriving in France, 31-year-old Alain Bujol died.  He died on Feb. 19, 1759.  His widow and 8-year-old son Simon buried him the following day.  What a difficult time for Marie Magdeleine.  It was one tragedy after the other.  And it didn’t stop there.  Less than a month after her husband died, Marie Magdeleine was burying Simon as well.  He died and was buried on March 17, 1759.

“Wait!” you’re saying, “but you said she had a year of tragedies and it’s only March.  She still has four months left of her year of losses.  What more could she lose?”

Correct!  You’ve been paying attention.  I mentioned in a follow-up story that Marie Magdeleine found out at some point during her first year in France that her father had died.  That was another loss.  But there was something more I discovered.  I found out that when she and her family were being deported to France, Marie Magdeleine was in the early stages of pregnancy!  I wonder at what point did she become aware of her pregnancy?  Around the time of being loaded into a cramped vessel to take her away from her home?  When Marie Louise died?  When Alain died?  When Simon died?  What a storm of emotions she must have been going through.

Copy of original birth record of Thomas Henry Servan Bijou in Pleurtuit, France.

Copy of original death record of T. H. S. B. from Pleurtuit, France

And just like you, she might have been holding onto hope that things would get better for her.  But not just yet.  She may have found a glimpse of joy at the birth of her son Thomas Henri Servan Bujol on July 14, 1759.  But she only had him a week.  He died on July 21, 1759.  I wonder if you could see any life in her eyes that day she buried her little newborn son?

Copy of original marriage record for the wedding of Marie Magdeleine Granger and Joseph Bourg.

I don’t know how some people find the strength to carry on from some tragedies.  But she did, thankfully, or I wouldn’t be here.  In June of 1760 she married Pierre Bourg in Pleurtuit, Ile-et-Vilaine, France.  They were 2nd cousins – their maternal grandmothers were Landry sisters.  His first wife had died on the deportation voyage to France.  I descend from the marriage of Marie Magdeleine and Pierre Bourg.  She would give birth to all of their children in France, but later they made their way to Louisiana in 1785.  She died in Louisiana.  I don’t know if there is a headstone anywhere.  There should be.  I want more people to know the name Marie Magdeleine Granger.