Family History

Little Bobbie Landry flanked by his older sisters Germaine on the left and Marie on the right circa 1933 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

I don’t think I’ve ever posted this photo before.  I know that I have sat down at the computer a few times and considered using it.  For some reason, I ruled it out previously.  But this week, I’m going for it.  Aren’t you glad about that?  Even though I ruled it out a few times, it wasn’t because I didn’t like the photo.  I kept thinking it was a bit blurry and I could somehow fix it.  But I’ve decided it doesn’t need fixing.  It is quite charming the way it is.

I think the first time I saw this photo was around four years ago.  It is part of the Secret Collection that is curated by my cousin Daphne.  She is the daughter of Germaine Landry Winn, the little blond-haired girl on the left in this photo.  When she was older, she had this photo and she wrote the names and ages of the subjects.  With those ages, I can tell that this photo was taken around 1933 or so.  Thanks, Aunt Germaine, for writing that information and saving this photo for all those years.

But little Germaine was only six years old in this photo.  She was born on April 6, 1927.  She was the fourth child of Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. and Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  While Aunt Germaine was named after her mother Erie, her younger brother (my dad) was named after his father.  He was a Jr. and when he was young, they started calling him Bobbie.  He was known by that name for the rest of his life – mainly by family.  He was more often known as Bob or Pluto by his peers.  But in this photo, he was just little Bobbie with his two older sisters.  There were two brothers born between these two sisters, but somehow they did not make it into the photo.  Neither did younger sister Wana who was born in 1932.

The oldest of all of the siblings was Marie Therese.  We knew her as Aunt Marie.  She is the one standing a head taller than the other two in the photo.  She was born on April 23, 1923.  This was a year and a half after the marriage of Rob and Erie.  No short pregnancies for my Mee Maw!  This photo looks like they are standing next to a field of some type of produce.  Maybe it was before a long day of working in the fields.  Isn’t that what people did back in the day?  Work hard from sunup to sundown.  I don’t think so.  That was definitely not my dad’s style.  If he would have ever had to work the fields when he was a child, I’m sure we would have heard about it.

So I’m not sure what is going on in the photo.  I just know that it is a sweet looking photo of my dad with his older sisters.  Sure the photo is a bit overexposed, a bit blurry, and their feet aren’t showing.  But somehow, I think all of that adds to the charm.  It’s why I’m sharing it with you today.  Behold.

My parents Betty and Bob Landry were the longest-lived couple in my ancestry. This is a photo of them in 2011 in Galveston, Texas, at a family gathering.

If you read my post last week, you’ll know that this is a continuation of that one.  Again I will be discussing the longevity of my ancestors.  I looked through six generations (up to 4X great grandparents) and figured out as closely as I could the exact age they were at their death.  The most interesting thing I noticed was that both of my parents were in the top 10 for longevity.  I definitely got to benefit from that.

Last week the focus was on my mom’s side, so this week the focus is on my dad.  The amazing thing is that my dad outlived most of my other ancestors.  Only three ancestors outlived him.  When I was younger, I would have never agreed with anyone if they would have suggested that that would happen.  Both of his parents died from heart issues, and he had heart issues for a while.  

He’s like Nadal in the tennis world.  Everyone said that his aggressive style of tennis would take an early toll on his body and he wouldn’t last long.  He ended up having one of the longest careers of elite tennis players and has set many records.  My dad may not have set any world records, but I have been told that he is a legend!

The two longest-lived ancestors were on my mom’s side of the family.  The longest-lived ancestor from his side of the family made it the age of 90.  So she lived a year longer than he did.  That was accomplished by Marie Magdelena Babin, who lived two hundred years earlier.  She lived from 1725 to 1814, and Daddy lived from 1929 to 2017.  She was born in Acadie, married Augustin Landry around 1752 (my parents married in 1952), and ended up in Louisiana after being exiled by the English during the Grand Derangement.   What tales she could have told.

I find it interesting that the three ancestors who outlived all the rest did it against the odds.  All three of them survived events that took the lives of many of their contemporaries.  And they weren’t just any old event.  They each had an Event with a Capital Letter.  Like I mentioned last week, Samuel Charles Phenice (the oldest) survived being injured during the Civil War.  That was a war with many casualties.  The next oldest was Edward McGrath who was from Ireland.  And he wasn’t just an immigrant from Ireland, he survived the Irish Potato Famine.  That happened during the 1840s and about a million people perished from the Great Hunger.  Edward and his wife Ettadosia brought their children to the United States and settled in Massachusetts.  And now we see that one of those long-lived ancestors was a survivor of the Great Expulsion of the Acadians.  We are all descendants of survivors, and these were the long-lived ones.

On the other end of the spectrum were a few ancestors who lived only long enough to produce one offspring.  Most of my ancestors had large families.  That was true for both sides of my family.  And likewise each side of the family had a short-lived ancestor that only produced one offspring.  I’ll start with the runner up.  Can an ancestor who lived the shortest amount of time be considered the winner?  Hey, at least we are talking about him all these years later.  The winner and the runner up both lived about 200 years ago.  They were alive at the same time as Marie Magdelena Babin Landry.  The runner up was on my mom’s side of the family.  Peter Hine was her great great great grandfather.  He died on July 22, 1819, at the age of 24 years, 8 months, 12 days.  He died from consumption less than two months before the birth of his son.  He never knew his only child.

The winner of the Shortest Lived Ancestor goes to Simon Hebert.  He died on April 17, 1802, at the age of 24 years, 6 months.  It was a close contest – only two months separated the two.  The main difference between the two is that Simon was able to meet his only child.  Marie Carmelite Hebert was born two months before her father died.  Simon’s wife Marie Martha Hernandez would go on to marry a second time and have more children.  But she did not live very long herself.  In fact, she had the third-shortest lifespan of my ancestors.  She died on Dec. 22, 1814, at the age of 33 years, 11 months, 9 days.  So they are definitely the couple with the fewest years when looking at their combined ages.

In fact, I’ve outlived their combined age of 58 years and some months.  I’ve outlived almost forty of my ancestors.  I mentioned Augustin Landry earlier.  He lived 62 years and some days.  I’m a few months older than that.  His great granddaughter Emma Landry Patureau (my great great grandmother) died in 1892 at the age of 62 years, 2 months, 14 days.  She is the most recent of my ancestors that I have outlived.  My sister Karen outlived our ancestor Pierre Bruneteau who lived to the age of 63.  She did not outlive his daughter Celeste Bruneteau Landry who lived to 63 years, 5 months, 29 days.  Karen lived to 63 years, 4 months, 6 days.  My brother Al has outlived Karen and Celeste.  He will soon outlive Henry Keys (63 years, 10 months, 24 days).  My brother Rob has gone on to further outlive nine more of our ancestors, including our Pee Paw – Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. (64 years, 7 months, 19 days)

I plan to touch on this topic again in the future.  Possibly in 10 months, 25 days.  But who’s really counting?

Members of the Landry family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1946.

This is the second week in a row that I’m posting a blurry photo.  Have I run out of clear, sharp images?  No, of course not.  Though after posting over 400 photos, my choices have gotten smaller and smaller.  I have many photos that are sharper, but this is the one that called out to me this week.  Or maybe I should say that it resonated with something inside me.  The content of the photo is much more important than the quality of the photo.  But it’s nice when I can have both. 

I tried to sharpen it up a bit with some software, but the results weren’t accurate.  There isn’t enough information in the photo to guide the software to show what the people really looked like.  Some small feature may have been accurate – like droopy eyes – but the overall results didn’t look like the people I remember.  I wasn’t around back then, but I have other photos of them and know that the software images didn’t have enough to work with.  In the future, the software will be able to look at all of the other photos of the people, gather the information about their facial structure, and make an image clear enough to represent their faces from back then.  But in the meantime, we’ll just have to make do with the image we have.

This is a photo of my paternal grandparents.  They are on the left side of this photo.  Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry and Germaine Erie Patureau were married in 1921.  Rob and Erie began having children in 1923 and ended up with eight altogether – Marie, A. J., Hubert, Germaine, Bob (my dad), Wana, Framay, and Johnny.  Standing with Rob and Erie is their son Hubert with his new wife Mildred Sutherlin Landry.  I think this photo was taken on the day of their marriage, which was on July 20, 1946.  It is a sweet photo of a young married couple with the parents of the groom.

But when I look at this photo, I think of the things to come.  Though they were not the first of Rob and Erie’s children to marry – older sister Marie married Malloy Reeves on the first day of October in 1945 – they would be the first to provide them with a grandchild.  So they weren’t known as Mee Maw and Pee Paw at this point, but that would be changing soon when my godmother shows up.  She would make them grandparents.  When you think about it that way, it is an honor.  And my godmother doesn’t let anyone forget it.  No matter how many times we say it just makes her the oldest, she doesn’t care.  She was, is, and always will be The First.  She wears that designation like a tiara, and she wears it well.

Another thing that I think about is that I never knew Aunt Mildred when she was a cute, young, and ambulatory.  Of course I wouldn’t know her when she was young, because she was born almost forty years before I was.  But she also had polio, so she wasn’t able to walk on her own when I knew her.  My mom always spoke very highly of Hubert and Mildred.  She talked about their positive approach to dealing with her difficulties and his devotion to continually working with her to provide as much mobility as possible.  When our family was performing at Shakey’s in the late 1970s, they showed up more frequently than anyone else.  Uncle Hubert would play harmonica on many of the songs, so we got to visit with Aunt Mildred quite a bit.  She was a sweet lady.

But this photo mainly makes me regret that I never knew these grandparents as a couple.  They look very pleased to pose with their son and his wife.  I never saw that because my grandfather died before I was born.  I never got to call him Pee Paw.  I’ve heard many good things about him and from all accounts he and my grandmother were happily married.  So it must have been a profound change in my grandmother’s life when he died.  She was my age (62) when she became a widow.  I have friends who have lost their partners and it is a difficult transition.  

I didn’t mean for this post to be so tinted with sadness.  It’s a sweet photo from a very happy moment in their lives.  It gives me a bittersweet smile.

Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in the second grade circa 1935 in Lake Charles, Louisiana

Not feeling too wordy tonight.  That’s alright, though, because this photo doesn’t really need many words.  It is a photo of my dad when he was about six years old.  I’m pretty sure it is a school photo.  I’m saying that he was in the second grade, but would that be right?  He was born on January 31, 1929, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  He was named after his father obviously.  But he wasn’t the oldest son.  He was the third son, like I am.

I always think that the first-born son is the one who usually gets named after the father.  Is that the tradition?  My oldest brother is named after my dad.  I think my other brother was named after my dad’s grandfather and my mom’s father.  So Alcide and Fred come together to form Alfred.  I wasn’t named after anybody.  Not that I know of.  

My dad was named Robert Joseph, but back then he was known as Bobbie.  And it was always spelled B-O-B-B-I-E.  It’s how he was known by his family for the rest of his life, even though everyone else referred to him as Bob.  If I have the date correct, the family that called him that were his parents Rob and Erie Landry, and siblings Marie, A. J., Hubert, Germaine, and younger sisters Wana and Frances.  They would be joined in 1936 by the youngest of them all, little Johnny.  He grew up in the middle of a large Catholic family in the 30s and 40s in a growing Southern town.

He looks like a happy little boy, doesn’t he?