Category: Landry

I went to a genealogical society meeting last weekend and ran into a cousin that I didn’t know.  That’s not really difficult to do when I go to the genealogical meetings in West Baton Rouge Parish.  Our Landry ancestors have been in southern Louisiana since 1767.  They started out in St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish, then 100 years later they were in Brusly in West Baton Rouge Parish.  Another 100 years later my family was in Lake Charles and Jennings. 

When I met this cousin, Jocelyn from Addis, I found out that we were related through two different Landry lines.  My great great grandfather Narcisse Landry had an older brother named Elie that Jocelyn descends from.  (I also descend from their brothers Elie Onezime and Joseph Emmanuel.)  Narcisse’s father Joseph Ignatius had a brother named Mathurin that Jocelyn also descends from.  All of this made me think of the topic of brothers.

There have been a lot of Landry brothers through the years.  How else would we get all of these Landrys in southern Louisiana?  A good many of them descend from Rene Landry (b. 1634) who was from France and was a founder of Acadie.  He had eight sons (I descend from three of them) and seven daughters (I descend from two or three of them as well).  I get my last name from the first son born to him in 1660, Antoine.

Antoine had six sons and six daughters.  I only descend from one of his sons – Pierre, who was born in 1690.  I descend from two of the daughters – Anne and Francoise.  Pierre had three sons, including Augustin who was born in 1719.  He was the father of Joseph Ignatius and Mathurin that I mentioned earlier.  They also had a brother named Francois and a half brother named Joseph Marie.

Joseph Ignatius was really special.  I wrote a post about him and the five lines of descent from him to me.  I descend from three of his eight sons.  That would be Narcisse, Onezime, and Manuel that I mentioned earlier.  Narcisse had four sons and I descend from his youngest two – Trasimond and Alcide.  They are the first generation that I have photos of.  Though I have a photo of Alcide when he was older, he was actually the younger of the two.

Alcide was my great grandfather along my paternal line.  He had seven sons and the youngest of those was my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.  He was known as Rob, Uncle Rob, Papa, Pappy, or Pee Paw by the family, depending on your relationship to him.  He married his cousin, but so did his brothers Seb and Louis.

Uncle Joe did not marry a close cousin, but he did marry a woman with the last name of Landry.  That’s my inside joke when I talk about all of the cousin marriages in my family line.  I always say, “At least they didn’t marry someone with the same last name.”  That doesn’t seem to convince anyone of the normalcy of cousins marrying cousins.

But thankfully, my dad and his siblings turned out all right.  (Though we often wonder about the youngest one!)  Rob was the father of Alcide Joseph (Uncle A. J.), Hubert Joseph (Uncle Hubert), Robert Joseph, Jr. (my dad, known as Bob or Pluto), and John Alfred Xavier (Uncle Johnny  – the youngest).  Uncle Hubert and Uncle Johnny both had more than one son, so there are more Landry brothers out there.

Now that takes us down to my generation.  I have two brothers named Rob and Al.  You can see us in the first photo that I posted that was taken in 1965.  I don’t have any children and neither does my brother Rob.  My brother Al has four children – two boys and two girls.  So there is yet another generation of Landry brothers in my family.

And since this is Throwback Thursday, I’ll use a photo from way back when for those young brothers.  It didn’t seem that long ago to me, but it is from December of 2006.  And look!  There’s newfangled color and it’s a digital photo.  I’m not used to dealing with those kinds of photos on my blog!

So that brings us through 300 years of Landry brothers in my family line.  I very much appreciate my brothers and it gives me a satisfaction that my ancestors had some of the same experiences.  I don’t know the history before Rene Landry, nor do I know what the future will bring.  Maybe this chronicle will be updated by someone at some future date.  If so, thank you.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today.  There aren’t any 100 or 200 year anniversaries in my family that I am aware of.  So I just decided to look through my old photos and see if anything jumped out.  I had been thinking of an old photo of my dad today, since it is his side of the family’s turn for a posting.  I looked at that old photo of my dad as an infant, but it didn’t inspire me.  So I kept looking through my folder.

And then I saw this photo.  I’m pretty sure that no one in my family is familiar with this photo.  I know it was in a group of photos of my dad from his school days.  When I was in high school or so I put together a family photo album that included a few old photos.  For me back then, it meant including a few photos of my parents’ grandparents and some photos of their own childhood. 

Since class photos were the big thing back then, I included my mom’s and dad’s school photos.  This is one of those that I included of my dad, but it didn’t really stand out.  It’s a small black and white photo that gets lost on a page full of other photos.  So when you scan it, it comes out looking much larger and you can notice more details.

Even though this one is a bit blurry, it’s a nice photo.  He looks like a sweet, cute kid.  I did clean the photo up a bit.  When I zoomed in on the photo to get rid of dust and scratches, the different parts of his face reminded me of childhood photos of me and my brothers.  The eyes reminded me of Rob, the middle of the face reminded me of Al, and the lips reminded me of myself. 

But the earlobes didn’t remind me of anyone else but my dad.  He always had those earlobes.  For some reason I thought they must have grown when he got older.  They probably did, but they started out large from the start.  The reason I noticed this is that my mom had connected earlobes and I inherited that trait.  It’s one of the traits that the DNA companies have learned to identify.  Really, though, all you have to do is look!

So there you have it.  A photo of my dad when he was in about the 3rd grade.  Not a centennial anniversary, but sufficiently in the past.

My younger sister Jamie shared a post this week about preschool. It said that structured learning at a young age was not as beneficial as play. I’m glad to know that. I never went to preschool and when I was young, it seemed like all we did was play. And when you have five brothers and sisters, you always have someone to play with. The photo that represents this topic is this photo of all of us siblings on our old swing set in 1965.

As you can see, there was room for all of us at once. Though Rob isn’t on the swing set, he is in the photo playing with our dog Princess. She was a good dog. I remember that she had at least one litter of puppies while we lived there. I used to crawl under the house to gather up all the puppies so we could play with them!

I am the little boy closest to Rob in the photo. I was only four years old at the time, but I have lots of memories from that old house “out in the country.” It was north of Jennings (about half a mile north of I-10) on Highway 26. We rented the house for two years or so from 1963 to 1965. It was preschool for me, Al (to the right of me), and Jamie (to the right of Al). Rob, Jodie (with the baton), and Karen (on the trapeze) had already started their formal education.

That swing set was lots of fun. It was a little scary at times when we were all swinging at once. If too many were on the same side at the same time, it would start to tump. We liked the way it gave us butterflies when we’d go really high. And we always tried to jump just a little bit further than we did the time before. We learned to hang from our knees and our toes on that old swing set! And sometimes we’d Skin the Cat. But don’t worry, we’d always Bring Him Back.

We also had an old trike that we’d ride around. There was a wagon that could carry a couple of kids with armloads of puppies. I remember being scolded not to touch a baby bird that fell from the fig tree. If we did, the mother would reject it. Nobody wanted that. We had a sand pit that was somewhat fun. I seem to remember my mom saying that the cats used it for other purposes than playing. I do remember there being a wasp nest in it. (It was a round brick structure with a ceiling from what I recall. That sounds rather odd now that I say it. It seems like a sand pit should just be a boxed in area with sand in it. What say you, siblings?)

Toward the back of the yard was an old rusty barn. We’d rub our hands on it and make our palms red. It seemed fun at the time. Inside the barn was the wooden framework of an airplane. I don’t think we were allowed to play in there, but we’d peek in from time to time. We had cats and dogs as well as horses and cows. (some with feathers!) It was great fodder for young developing minds.

But all we were really concerned about was having fun.

I was thinking of naming this post “Joseph Ignatius’s Mother Was a Babin,” but decided to give her a little more prominence than that. I wrote about Joseph Ignatius a few weeks ago to talk about the five ways my tribe and I descend from that ancestor. This week I’m going a generation back to talk about his mother.

The ancestor I’m talking about is my great great great great grandmother Marie Magdelena Babin. She was born in Pisiquit, Acadie, around 1725. She married Augustin Landry some time around 1747. He was a widower and he had two children by his first wife Ann Rivet. Magdelena probably took care of her step-children Maria and Joseph Marie as well as the children that she and Augustin soon started having. Magdelena gave birth to Joseph Ignatius, Mathurin, Marie Madeleine, and Marguerite. There were most likely more children born that did not survive, but the ones I named have documentation.

At some point during this time of child-bearing, Magdelena and Augustin, along with the children born by 1755, were ripped from their homes by the Grand Derangement. The English took over the land that they wanted for their own subjects and sent the Acadians away violently. The Landry family spent about a dozen years in Exile in Maryland where the last of their children were born. I can’t imagine rearing six children during their formative years in a foreign environment where you didn’t feel welcome.

Things changed in 1767 when Spain offered land grants to settlers who wanted to relocate to Louisiana. The Landrys decided to take a chance in Louisiana. They were aboard the ship “The Virgin” that brought a load of ‘French neutrals’ to Louisiana on July 12, 1767. They brought with them all of their worldly possessions. That amounted to two trunks and everything they contained. They were given 8 arpents of land fronting on the Mississippi River.

This was really a huge turning point in the lives of our ancestors. I came to this realization this week when I found the document that inspired me to write the topic of this week. I’m a little reluctant to say that I was a bit touched by this document. The document is titled “Succession Vve. Augustin Landry” and the date is March 25, 1814. “Vve.” is the abbreviation for veuve, the French word for widow. So it is the succession information for our Magdelena. It was written by John Dutton, Judge of the Parish of Iberville.

What was so touching to me was the way Judge Dutton talks about entering the Landry home after Magdelena’s death. He talks about her death being two days previous (on the 23rd), and how he walked into the principal hall and placed a seal on the large armoire (painted red) he found there. It sounds like he was making sure that her legal possessions were not disturbed until there was an inventory a few days later. He proceeds down the hall and puts another seal on a “door of a chamber in the back gallery…”

Judge Dutton also mentions family members that he interacted with and were present at the Landry home. Joseph LeBlanc dit Michel was her son-in-law. He was the husband of Marguerite and son of Michel LeBlanc (hence the dit name). A John Baptiste a gros LeBlanc is mentioned, but I can’t figure out his connection to the family. (See update below.) Two witnesses are named. Aubry Dupuy was the brother to our Magloire Dupuy . Antoine Serrette is another witness and he was the brother of Henriette Serrette, Magloire’s wife. Ten years later, Magloire and Henriette‘s daughter Zerbine would marry Joseph Ignatius’s son Elie Onezime Landry.

It is such a revealing document from over 200 years ago. I was happy to see that this first generation of Acadians in Louisiana were prosperous. This can be seen by the list of their belongings on this and further documents. It included much more than what could be placed in two trunks. I was not happy to see more individuals who had been enslaved by my family. Though it sounds like these individuals were treated considerately, it was still within the confines of slavery.

It also seems like the family was coming together for Magdelena’s funeral. She lived to be almost 90 years old. Oh, what a story she could have told! So by the time of her funeral, her children (natural and step) had children of their own. All but one of the children (Marguerite) had predeceased her. But by the look of the names of witnesses at the bottom of the document, Magdelena’s family had come to her house to mourn or to celebrate her life. Included in that list is Emanuel Landry, one of her three grandsons that I descend from. Other grandsons include Elie, Bellonni LeBlanc, Xavier Landry, Josephe Landry, and Ursin Landry. Pierre Paul LeBlanc was a grandson-in-law.

And now all of us, her great great great grandchildren and beyond, are celebrating her life again.

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April 2, 2021 Update – I recently found the connection to John Baptiste a gros LeBlanc. Marie Magdelena (Widow Landry) had a daughter named Madeleine who married Joseph a gros LeBlanc. (Yes, sister Marguerite married another Joseph LeBlanc, but that one was dit Michel.) Joseph a gros LeBlanc had a brother named Jean Baptiste a gros LeBlanc, who I’m pretty sure is the John Baptiste a gros LeBlanc mentioned in this succession paper.