Category: Patureau

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.

Recently a Patureau cousin sent me some old family photos.  (Thanks, again Craig!)  Most of the photos were of second or third cousins from the various Patureau family lines.  I talk about the Patureau family frequently on these blog posts.  That’s because there’s so much information available about them.  Maybe it’s because there are so many of us around.  They have traditionally had large families and there have been one or two serious family researchers in every generation of the family.  Maybe not in every family line, but there have been a few.  

The Patureau family came from Riberac, France, in 1840.  It consisted of the 40-year- old Pierre Ferdinand Patureau (born in LaRoche-Chalais), his 39-year-old wife Anne Rose Machet (born in Mareuil), their 16-year-old daughter Victorine, their 14- year-old son Ferdinand, their 13-year-old son Abel, and 12-year-old Elisa. 

It was only the two oldest that had any children.  Victorine ended up settling in east Texas, while Ferdinand had his family in Plaquemine, Louisiana.  Through eight of their fifteen or so children, he and his wife Emma Landry had at least 75 grandchildren.  And many of those grandchildren had large families as well.  There are well over a thousand descendants of Ferdinand and Emma.

So it makes sense that they’d want to have a Patureau reunion every once in a while.  I know that I went to one in the 1970s in Duson, Louisiana.  I don’t know if it was for all of Ferdinand and Emma’s descendants or if it was just through their son Vincent Maximilian.  I descend from him and he was known as Grampa Max, though he is my great grandfather.  My dad was Bob Landry and he was the son of Max’s daughter Erie Patureau Landry. 

Max’s daughter Emma had a daughter named Therese Mouton, and she was the one that had the get together in Duson.  I’d like to see photos of that reunion.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen any.  I’m glad that one of the new photos I recently acquired was a photo of Therese – our family called her Tez – with some of her Patureau cousins.  She was good about visiting cousins all across southern Louisiana.  She made quite an impression and the stories about those visits are still being told today.

I also went to a Patureau reunion in 1993 at the home of Pat and Lora Patureau in Baton Rouge.  Tez was at that reunion, too.  I didn’t hang around her too much, because it seemed like I was cramping her style.  She treated me like I was the strange one!  There had been a 1992 reunion, but I don’t think any of the Max Patureau line was there.  I don’t think I went to any other Patureau reunion in the 1990s.  I don’t even remember hearing about them.  There were several more that I heard about that happened in Bayou L’Ourse.  I heard about them from Craig and Byron and Dana, some cousins I keep in touch with.  

So when I got that big batch of photos a few weeks ago, I went through them looking for anyone familiar.  Fortunately, many of them were labeled with people’s names.   Very nice.  I recognized many of the names, though I didn’t know them personally.  When I saw some photos of Patureau reunions in the 1990s, I looked at those closely. 

I didn’t know if my dad had gone to any of them, but he was very interested in family history.  It makes sense that he would have gone to them.  And sure enough, I found him in three different photos at two of the Patureau reunions.  Besides liking to visit with family and have a good time with them, he also enjoyed all of the history of the Patureau family.  I can see his family history book in his lap that he brought to any family get together.  I’m sure he enjoyed talking with Linda Cansler who was another Patureau researcher.  Why wouldn’t he?  He was a Patureau!

This is the second photo of Grampa Max that I’ve shared from this particular visit to Beaumont.  I shared that photo in a blog post from over eight years ago.  Eight years!  It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing these weekly posts for that long.  Do you remember that first photo that I shared from that visit?  The name of the blog post was “Patureau Brothers” and it was a photo of Grampa Max with his older brother Leobon.  The woman that you see was also in that first photo.  When I first shared that photo, I thought it might have been taken in Lafayette.  I’m pretty sure now that the photo was taken in Beaumont, Texas.

My great grandfather’s given name was Vincent Maximilian Patureau, but everyone knew him as Max.  He was born in 1865 in Matamoras, Mexico.  His parents were Ferdinand Pierre Patureau and Marie Emma Landry.  Ferdinand was born in France and he came to Louisiana with his parents and siblings in 1840.  Emma was a Cajun from Brusly, Louisiana.  The Landry family had settled in Louisiana in 1767 after being Exiled from Acadie in 1755. 

Max grew up in Plaquemine, Louisiana, and when he was of marrying age, he got married to a Landry of his own.  His wife – my great grandmother – was Marie Therese Landry.  Her father Trasimond Landry was the first cousin of Max’s mom Emma.  Max and Marie Therese had fifteen children together, including my grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau.  She, too, married another Landry.  My grandfather was Robert Joseph Landry.  He was the son of Alcide Landry, the brother of Trasimond.  Erie and Rob had eight children, and one of them was my dad who was known as Bob Landry.  As I often like to say, he married outside of the family.  There’s not a single Cajun to be found in Betty Lou Bucklin’s family tree!

Like I said before, this is a photo of my Grampa Max.  He’s actually my great grandfather and he died long before I was born.  The woman in the photo is Gertrude Brammer Patureau.   She was married to Max’s nephew Arthur Mitchell Patureau.  Arthur was the son of Max’s brother Louis Leobon Patureau and he lived in Beaumont.  When I posted the first photo all those years ago, I didn’t realize the strong connection that the Patureau family had with Beaumont.  Arthur and Gertrude were both from Plaquemine, but they were living in Beaumont by the time of the birth of their first child Albert Leobon in 1912.  They lived there for the rest of their lives.

But they weren’t the only members of the Patureau family living there.  Max and Louis’s youngest sister Marie Victorine “Aunt Bebe” Patureau Cropper moved to Beaumont with her family in 1903 and stayed.  Aunt Bebe was the Patureau family historian of that generation.  She started an amazing collection of photos, letters, and other memorabilia relating to the family.  That collection is now in the Tyrrell Historical Library in Beaumont.  She also had the amazing bed that the Patureau family brought to the US from France.  I now have that bed.  I like to do my French lessons while I lie in that bed.  This often leads to me having a “Pat” nap. 

But back then it was in Beaumont.  I know that Grampa Max visited Beaumont from time to time.  It’s likely that he would have stayed at his sister’s house.  They probably shared meals there as well.  And in my family, there is a tradition after big family meals.  And that tradition is taking naps.  I’m sure Grampa Max knew the history of that old Patureau bed and would have wanted to use that for his own “Pat” naps.  Right?  And I’m sure that Aunt Bebe would have been willing to let that happen.  She got to keep the bed in her house after all.

It’s what I would do.  That’s right!  Any of you Patureau relatives out there that want to come visit are welcome.  Maybe we could share a meal.  And then maybe, just maybe, you too can have a “Pat” nap!

Here is a photo of my paternal grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau.  I’ve always known her as Mee Maw.  I saw the first version of the photo in 2019.  It was in the Tin Can Collection that originally belonged to my Aunt Wana.  It has since been taken over by her children Tricia and perhaps Tim.  Both of them have shared photos from the Collection, but it’s usually Tricia.  She’s the one who showed me the image in 2019 when a few of the cousins got together.  Wow.  It’s almost five years now.  I took a photo of the photo because I liked it.

It wasn’t until tonight that I realized that I had two versions of this photo.  I discovered this improved version in 2021, when I looked closer at some of the things that I took from my parents’ home when we moved them to Assisted Living.  As I looked through the old photos and such, I found an old packet of negatives.  Some of them were really old.  Those were from the 1930s when my dad was a kid.  Then there were others like this one that look like they came from the 1950s.

So I scanned those old negatives, and this was one of them.  I didn’t recognize it from two years earlier, but I did like it.  I like discovering new photos of my grandmother who hasn’t been around for over fifty years.  I had to guess the approximate year the photo was taken.  I compared it to known photos of her through the years and decided it looked like some time in the early 1950s.  Does that sound about right?  She was born in 1895, so that would put her in her mid to late fifties.  Hmmm.  Maybe it was taken earlier.

And I’m not even sure where the photo was taken.  I had thought about calling it “Mee Maw In the Back Yard,” but I wasn’t sure I was correct about that assessment.  I don’t remember the house that she lived in back then.  I recognize the back of the house because there are several photos of the family taken there.  But this area does look like a back yard with fig trees and other plantings.  I can tell that it was probably winter, based on the bare branches of the fig tree.  The bare arms of my grandmother say that it wasn’t a particularly cold winter day.  If I knew the color of her dress, I would have used that in the title of this post.  But I’m not familiar with the dress and don’t remember seeing it.

I don’t know much about the photo, it would seem.  Yet I am still drawn to it.  I like her determined pose and the way she’s standing firm.  Most of the photos of her from this time period are group photos.  She’s either with her husband and her eight children, or she’s with a gaggle of grandkids.  There were new ones appearing every year.  So to have a nice, sharp photo of her all by herself is a gift. 

I share it with you.

Here is a new photo of Ferdinand Patureau.  I guess I can’t really call it new when it was taken around 1860 or so.  I first saw it in the Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection at the Tyrrell Historical Library in Beaumont, Texas, on November 15, 2021.  I’ve never seen it anywhere else, either.  It’s nice to discover an old photo like that.  It was a bonus treat when I went searching for photos at that collection.  The collection was not disappointing, since it had great versions of photos that I had been aware of previously. 

So in case you don’t know, Ferdinand Patureau was my great great grandfather.  He emigrated from France in 1840 with his parents and siblings.  My father was Bob Landry, the famed band director of Jennings, Louisiana.  His mother was Erie Patureau Landry, my link to the Patureau family.  Erie was the daughter of Vincent Maximilian Patureau, one of the sons of Ferdinand Patureau.

Ferdinand was born on October 27, 1826, in LaRoche-Chalais, France.  His birth certificate called him Pierre Patureau, the son of Pierre Patureau, boulanger, aged 26 and Anne Machet.  Even though the father and the son were named Pierre in older documents, they are consistently known as Pierre Ferdinand Patureau and Ferdinand Pierre Patureau.  Instead of calling one a Sr. and the other a Jr., it was decided that the father would be Pierre Ferdinand and the son would be Ferdinand Pierre.  It worked for them.  It works for me.

Ferdinand spent his childhood in France.  Then, in 1840, when the family was living in Riberac, they to immigrate to the United States.  Ferdinand was only 14 years old when the family arrived in Louisiana and settled in Opelousas.  Ferdinand must not have been too happy with this move, because he took off on his own to go back to France.  For six to eight months the rest of the family didn’t know where he was.  According to the collection in Beaumont, Ferdinand spent some of that time working at a sugar plantation in Cuba to make money.  One report said that there was a document to support that claim, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Ferdinand didn’t stay in France for too long.  He came back to Louisiana after a year and a half or so.  I’m not sure of the motivation.  Perhaps he missed his family.  Sadly his mother Anne Machet and his younger sister Elisa both died in 1842 in Opelousas during a cholera epidemic.  Maybe that was motivation to move back, or he was already back before they died.  The details are not that clear.

A few years after returning to Louisiana he met Louisiana native Marie Emma Landry.  Three sets of her great grandparents were Exiles from Acadie (with names like Landry, Dupuy, Braud, Hebert, and LeBlanc), while the other set were French immigrants (Serrette and Sigur).  They were all French speakers.  When Ferdinand married Emma in 1847, he was 20 years old and she was only 17.

It didn’t take long for the family to start growing.  The first two years brought two daughters – Zulma and Aline.  I think they were born in Brusly, Louisiana.  In 1850 the family was living in Baton Rouge.  A few more years brought Louis Leobon and Marie Valentine.  After that the family was in Plaquemine with Pierre Patureau living with the family there.

So when this picture was taken, Ferdinand was a young father of several children.  I’m not exactly sure when the photo was taken, so it’s hard to know the exact number.  With births and deaths through those years, the number was changing often.  It was also in 1860 that Pierre died, leaving 33-year-old Ferdinand as the Patureau patriarch in Louisiana.  So it’s nice to have this “new” photo of Ferdinand from this particular part of his life.

Enjoy it.