Category: Patureau

If you read the title to this post, you might think that the woman in the photo would be named Rose.  And you would be correct!  But that is just a happy coincidence.  I wasn’t thinking of the name Rose when I thought of that Shakespearean quote, I was thinking of her middle name.

When researching families, it is helpful that many families use some names frequently.  Not too frequently, because then it gets too confusing.  The Patureau family has gotten close to that point with the name Marie Therese.  I’ve talked about that name previously.

This time I’m talking about the name Elisa.  That’s the middle name of Grampa Max’s sister Rose. (Grampa Max is my dad’s mother’s father Vincent Maximilian Patureau)  She was born Rose Elisa Patureau on April 8, 1863.  She was his next older sibling, so they were probably pretty close.  They were the children of Ferdinand Patureau and Emma Landry.

Ferdinand came from France with his parents and siblings in 1840 at the age of 14.  He went back to France on his own shortly afterwards and eventually came back after a year or so.  Some of the details have been lost to the ages, but not all of them.  We do know that there was a yellow fever epidemic in Louisiana in 1842 that had a huge influence on his life.

On October the 12th of that year, his mother and younger sister named Elisa died in Opelousas, Louisiana, of yellow fever.  I don’t know if he had returned from his adventure in France before their death.  Either way, it was a huge impact on the Patureau family that had just recently come to America to live.  We know that his sister’s death affected him because he named one of his daughters in honor of her.  Wait!  I just realized that his mother’s name was Rose!  So his sister was actually named for both of them.  But she actually went by her middle name and her obituary called her Eliza Dupuy.

But Rose Elisa wasn’t the only one named after Ferdinand’s sister Elisa.  He had another sister named Victorine and she named her only daughter Eliza.  I guess it was a good thing that Victorine’s family moved to Texas, otherwise there would have been confusion over the two Elizas.

Cousin Eliza was given the middle name Patureau and her father was Pierre Emile Laulom.  She then married a man named Vicente Crixell in 1864.  Their first child was born in 1865 in Mexico.  Grampa Max was born the same year in the same place because the Ferdinand Patureau family was in the same area due to the turmoil of the Civil War.

Eliza had seven children with Vicente.  He died in 1880, so she remarried in 1884.  All of this just to say that her full name was Eliza Patureau Laulom Crixell Falcon!  Like I said, she was named for her aunt Elisa.

One of the reasons I’m writing about all of this is that I’ve been in contact with one of Eliza’s (E.P.L.C.F.) great grandchildren over the past week.  He is the son of one of Eliza’s granddaughters.  And that granddaughter’s (his mother’s) name was – you guessed it – Elisa.  She, like the other two named for Elisa, lived a full life.  They got married, had children and grandchildren.

Not like that first Elisa.  She was born in France where she lived for 12 years, then moved to America with her family.  Was she angry about leaving friends?  Excited about a new adventure?  Hopeful for an interesting future?  We’ll never know.  She died after just two years of living in her new country.  Poor, poor Elisa.

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To find out more about Eliza Patureau Laulom Crixell Falcon and some of her Crixell offspring, check out this collection of writings and newspaper articles collected by her great grandson:  Eliza’s Crixell Boys in Brownsville.

I thought I’d continue with the theme of the past few weeks, especially since that is the theme I have planned for next week as well.  I’ve been planning the one for next week for quite a while, but then I found all the information about homesteading recently.  I’ve covered several lines with the ‘home’ theme, so this week I thought I’d apply it to my Patureau line.

The reason I picked the Patureau line is because of a couple of great photos that cousin Sis shared with me a while back that featured the old Patureau house. You might even call this post Meet the Patureaus of Patureau Lane – Part II.

This is an edited version of the photo.  It is more edited than I usually do.  Sis was wanting a photo of just the house, so I obliged.  I removed a few people and cleaned up the fence line.  This photo was taken several years after the original Meet the Patureaus post.

As you can see, a dormer has been added to the roof.  The trellis in front of the house is no longer there, but there is a nice white picket fence along the front.  The family is growing up and changing as well.  Grampa Max would have been a widower in his mid to late 40s.  His wife died in 1909, leaving him with nine young children to rear. 

According to a newspaper article, Grampa Max stayed in the Plaquemine area until 1912.  He had started a veterinary practice in Plaquemine, but then decided to move to Lafayette where a few other family members had moved. That worked out well for my grandmother Erie, because she started school at SLI that year.

Here is a copy of the photo before I made the major changes to it.  I only know the identity of one person in the photo.  The girl with her elbow on the mailbox is Zita Patureau.  She was a couple of years younger than Erie and also was a teacher in Lafayette for a time.

I don’t have any photos of their home in Lafayette.  I also don’t have any photos of the family home that Max grew up in.  He grew up in Plaquemine, where his father Ferdinand Pierre Patureau had a sawmill.  Ferdinand died in 1877 at the age of 50 as a result of an accident at his sawmill.  His wife Marie Emma Landry Patureau lived until 1892 and died at the age of 62.  One of these days I will post a photo of her.  I only have one and it is really terrible.  I’m hoping to improve on it somehow.  Maybe I’ll get a better version or I’ll just spend a lot of time improving what I already have.  (Fortunately, I found a better version of that old photo and it was much better of Emma. See post Maman Emma Was a Beauty.)

In the meantime I will leave you with this other photo that shows the old Patureau home in the background.  I haven’t done any editing on it.  I wish I knew who all of the people were in the photo.

I do know one person.  Again it is Zita at the mailbox.  Something makes me think that if she’d have been born into today’s world, she’d be one of those young adults with their eyes glued to their cell phones.

 

After I posted my last blog, I realized that I hadn’t posted a photo/scan of the original document that started all of the discoveries this week.  Plus I found another great document as well.  So I thought I’d give an additional bit of information for you all to peruse.  I’m sure everyone was wanting that, but they were a bit too shy to ask.

This first pic is of that document, which is a passenger list for the Louisiane that traveled from the port of Bordeaux in France to New Orleans in 1857.  As you can see, Piere is listed as a baker.  What business does a baker have that requires him to travel to another country in 1857?  Or was he just visiting family?

I also mentioned the 1856 passport for Piere in the last post and I don’t think I shared it with everyone previously.  So here it is.  Henri Germaine, who was evidently very important because he had been awarded a Legion of Honor title in France, signed this passport that asks that Piere be allowed to pass freely.  This is where Piere is identified as a boulanger, which is French for a baker.  In one place I read, they identified him as a butcher, but that would have been a boucher.  I guess with the old scribbly writing that you can see in these old documents, it could be an honest mistake.

Now for the other document that I found.  I posted the baptismal record for Leobon Patureau.  It was dated Aug. 1, 1768, from Palluaud, Charente, Poitou-Charentes, France, and it listed the parents as Antoine Patureau and Marie Sicaud.  I had found on a distant cousin’s blog that Leobon was the first of six children for Antoine and Marie.

From the research I have done, I notice that in my family the first child is usually born pretty soon after the marriage.  Because that’s what it takes to have a child – a marriage certificate. Mom and dad had Jodie almost a year after they were married.  Mee Maw and Pee Paw had Marie after almost a year and a half.  Grampa Max and Marie Therese had Emma after ten months, and his parents were similar.  It must have been a Patureau tradition.  So I figured that Antoine and Marie probably got married in 1766 or 1767.

Since the online collection that had the baptism was from the Palluaud area and it included marriages and deaths, I figured I might as well check for a marriage record.  They could have gotten married in a different place, but I figured it would be worth checking out.  It was a small area, so a year’s worth of documents was only 5 or so pages.  Yes, it was in French and hand written over 250 years ago, but how bad could it be?

It was a bit straining, but the reward was worth it in the end.  Otherwise there wouldn’t be this post that you are reading!  Sure enough, the wedding was recorded on November of 1767, just nine months prior to Leobon being born.  My hunch paid off and now I have the wedding information for my great, great, great, great, great grandparents.  I also found some birth records for their children.  I found a few death records as well.

Now let’s go back to the time of the Patureau family immigrating to the US.  This is the 1840 passport that they had when they came to Louisiana.  The French authorities request in the name of the King that the United States allow Pierre Patureau, his wife, and their four children to enter freely into the country.  Again, Pierre is called a boulanger.

The family settled in Opelousas, where Anne Rose Machet Patureau (Piere’s wife) and their daughter Elise died in 1842 during a yellow fever epidemic.  The family then moved to the Plaquemine area and lived in Turnerville (northeast part of Plaquemine).

I would like to show you more and probably will in the future.  But for now, I think you may have had enough.  My problem is that when I find something exciting like that, I want to find more.  And if I can find that wonderful old French wedding record that is so difficult to read, I can find anything.  At least that’s what I tell myself while I’m going cross-eyed looking at those blurry documents.  Sometimes I just have to tell myself that it’s time to stop.

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Follow up to my follow up

Just found another old document that needs to be shared.  This one is the marriage record for Leobon Patureau and Jeanne Lanson.  They were married on January 16, 1787, in Bors de Montmoreau, Charente, France.  The great thing about this document is that it gives the Jeanne’s father’s name, which is shown as Francois.  It probably has the mother’s name, but I can’t make it our right now.  Perhaps another time…

PS.  I think Jeanne mother’s name was Jeanne Hivain.  I found the death register for Jeanne (mother and daughter) and it was clearer.  So much out there to see!

I’ve found some really interesting documents online this week.  I’m sure Daddy and Mee Maw would have been excited to see these old documents as well.  Mee Maw (Germaine Erie Patureau Landry shown here with my mom and dad Betty Lou Bucklin and Robert Joseph Landry, Jr.) started researching the Patureau and Landry family lines back in the 1950s.  Daddy probably got interested around the time of this photo, which was in 1971.  He continued with the research for at least another forty years.

This week’s finds started out when I got a notice about someone adding some additional information to the profile for Leobon Patureau on WIKItree.

That is a site that has one world tree that everyone tries to connect to.  It is public and anybody can add to the profiles once you become a member.  The first notice I saw was for a passenger list for Piere Patureau in 1857 on a ship traveling from France to New Orleans.  I have a copy of his passport dated 1856, but didn’t know if he had done any traveling.

Evidently he traveled to France.  And on that passport it lists him as a boulanger.  That is the French word for baker.  I had read somewhere else that he was a butcher, but I’m thinking the baker is more likely since both the passport and passenger list indicate that.

Then original French resources were added for Leobon Patureau, who just happens to be my great, great, great, great grandfather.  I now know that he was born Aug. 1, 1768, in Palluaud, Charente, Poitou-Charentes, France, and he died on Feb. 3, 1851 in LaRoche-Chalais, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France.

I didn’t recognize the name of the person adding the information, so I sent him a note of thanks and inquired if we were related.  We’re not related, but he lives in France and he likes to do research.  And research he did!  As you can see from this copy of a document, it is not easy to read, especially if you do not understand French.  I could barely find the name leobon patureau on this page when I was referred to it, and I knew it had to be on that page!  How would you find something like this if you didn’t know when or where he was born in France?  I will definitely be sending another note of thanks to him.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the document also gives the names of Leobon’s parents, which I didn’t have.  They are listed as Antoine Patureau (a surgeon) and Marie Sicaud.  That would make them my 5x great grandparents.  They lived in the mid 1700s in Palluaud, France.

It didn’t stop with all of that.  Piere Patureau was married to Anne Rose Machet.  Anne was born in 1801, which is documented in this photo from French archives for births.  We already knew her parents’ names, which were Louis Machet and Louise Roux.  But I don’t remember ever seeing his occupation.  He was a chapelier!  In English we would call him a hatter.  Maybe he made his precious little Anne a beautiful hat (or as he would say, a beau chapeau) for special occasions.

We just keep going back further in time!  We can thank our anonymous French researcher for that.  I really like the look of this document.  It is the marriage record for Anne’s parents Louis and Louise.  This one is dated Nov. 6, 1793, and it took place in Mareuil, France.  It lists the parents of Louis as Antoine Machet deslauriers and Anne Chavalarias.  Daddy already had these names from his research, which is amazing to me.  He did a lot of great research that I am grateful for.

One of the interesting things that I learned from this record is that not only was Louis a hatter, but his pater was a hatter.  (Oops, shouldn’t mix Latin with French!)  I’m sure there are other interesting things, but I’ve just started looking at them and haven’t been able to figure out what some of the words are supposed to be or what they would mean.

So if you are able to figure anything out from any of these documents, let me know.  Leave me a comment or send me a note.  I’ll be glad to discuss it.  As you can probably tell by now, I find it all very interesting.

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Further French facts