HC and Daisy’s 50 Year Anniversary

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Daisy and Harry Phenice at their Golden Wedding anniversary in December 1950.

I could have sworn that I wrote about this before, but I find no evidence of it.  I know I posted a photo of Harry Clifton Phenice and his wife Daisy Henrietta Martha Keys Phenice at some point, but it must not have been on a Throwback Thursday.  The other photo is the one I think of in association with their celebration of their 50 years of marriage, but this one is the one that I’d rather think of from now on.

Isn’t this a great photo of that sweet old couple?  The other photo is a formal sitting at a studio and this one looks like a more casual photo taken in their home.  I’m pretty sure it was taken at the event celebrating their anniversary. 

For those of you who don’t know, Daisy and HC were my mom’s maternal grandparents.  My mom was Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  Her mother was Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin, the daughter of this celebrated couple.

Newspaper article about the marriage of Daisy and H. C. that was in my mom’s collection of family heirlooms. I suppose it was her that drew the heart.

Daisy and Harry were married on December 27, 1900, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  A newspaper article about the event stated that it took place “in the parlors of the Walker House” in Lake Charles.  It was a local hotel that was used for marriages and such at the beginning of the 20th century.  The article says that the couple was held in high esteem.

The 1950 article about their Golden Anniversary doesn’t state that fact, but I’m sure it was still the case.  The photo for the article was taken on the same day as the first photo I posted, but is slightly different.  I wonder why they chose this one, because I think I prefer the first one.

I have to point out something I discovered through my years of researching my Phenice family line.  They all seemed to live rather long lives, and when they got married, they tended to stay together.  Daisy and HC were not the first ones to celebrate their 50th anniversary.  They weren’t even the second. 

From what I have found, they are at least the fourth couple in a row to celebrate 50 years together.  His parents Samuel and Kate celebrated 54 years together before she died in 1921.  His grandparents Daniel and Susan were in their 50th year of marriage when she died.  (Not sure of the date of her death.)  His great grandparents John and Margaret were married for around 58 years when he died.

More recently, my grandparents Myrtle and Fred Bucklin celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1980 at my parents’ home.  They lived another four years together until Grandpa’s death.  My parents have the record.  They were happily married for 64 years until they died five days apart in January 2017.  

One more thing before I go.  The other thing about the first photo I posted – Daisy’s dress reminds me of a dress that my mom liked to wear in the 70s.  The style is similar and I’m pretty sure they both had embroidery that was done by each of them.  (I was informed by my younger sister Jamie that the dress my mom had was made and stitched by my older sister Jodie.  Thanks Jamie!)  Daisy’s had a stylized flower design, while my mom’s had birds perched on branches.  I wonder if my mom ever thought of grandmother Daisy when she wore that dress.

I know that I’m going to think of great grandpa HC the next time I wear my pin wale corduroy shirt.  It’s actually one of my favorite shirts to wear in cool weather.  Doesn’t his shirt look warm and comfortable?

I could go on.  There are other things I’d like to say, but they can wait for another time.  You may commence to commenting now.

Our Erie the Student Revisited

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I posted a few photos five months ago pertaining to my paternal grandmother’s school days.  The photos were somewhat grainy because they had been taken from school programs or newspapers and they were over 100 years old.  I’m revisiting that topic because I got an improved photo this past weekend.  My cousins and I actually got together and looked through some old photos and memorabilia!  We had been talking about it for a while and it came together at the last minute.

The SLI Class of 1915 included my grandmother Erie Patureau Landry.

This is one of the photos that I had seen a previous version of before.    The difference between my first version and this one is vast.  A wrinkled up school program just isn’t quite as good as an original 5 x 7 photo.  You can actually make out people’s faces and facial expressions.  It’s a really nice photo, which is why I wanted to share it with everyone.

That and the fact that my grandmother is in it.  Since you already read the title, you know that it is about my grandmother Erie.  Her given name was Germaine Erie Patureau.  She was born in Crescent, Louisiana, (near Plaquemine) in 1895.

This photo was taken shortly before March 29, 1915, in Lafayette, Louisiana.  That date is the issue date for the Vermilion, which was the school newspaper for SLI.  It was a special issue for the Class of 1915.  Erie can be seen in the first row, second from the right.  Once she graduated from SLI, she taught in Lafayette for a number of years before she got married in 1921 to my grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Jr.  They had eight children who grew up and had children of their own.

All through that time, she held on to this old photo.  When meeting with my cousins, I realized she held on to many more photos as well.  Plus there were newspaper clippings and death notices.  They were all relating to ancestors, children, grandchildren, and relatives.  That didn’t include all the things that I had gotten from my dad.  He also had her “Patureau Family Papers,” which was the genealogical information that she collected through the years.  You could tell that all the things she collected had been divided among her children .  Of course this must have been when she died in 1973.  A few of those things got back together this past weekend.

You could also tell that she had an appreciation for her family.  I think she passed that down as well.

Surprise! Addie’s Parents Were Cousins!!!

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I know.  Some of you are saying, “So what?  I’ve heard this so many times already.”  But this time it’s different.  I’m not talking about the Landry side of the family, I’m talking about the Bucklin side of the family.  More specifically, I’m talking about the Hine line of my family. 

My mom was Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  She was the daughter of Fred D. Bucklin.  His mother was Addie Mae Hine Bucklin.  She was born in Noblesville, Indiana, but lived her adult life in southern Louisiana.  She was alive when I was born, but she died a few weeks later.  So I have no personal memories of her.  Maybe some of my older siblings or cousins may have some memories of her.  I’ve posted several photos of her in the past and have given her a hard time about all the times that she was scowling in the photos.  Even in this photo she’s not really smiling.

Addie Mae Hine Bucklin (on the right) with her parents Susan G. Stanbrough Hine and George Henry Hine in Hathaway, Louisiana, circa 1919.

Maybe it was because she found out that her parents were related!  I doubt it, though.  She probably wasn’t even aware of the fact, because they were not very closely related.  But from what I’ve been able to figure out, they were definitely cousins.

I discovered this connection shortly after I found out the maiden name of George Henry Hine’s mother.  Her name was Mary Malina Cox.  She was the daughter of Benjamin Cox and Jemima Vestal Cox.  That name was very familiar to me.  It was not because of any association with pancakes, either. 

It had to do with Susan Stanbrough’s ancestry.  I had found the Vestal name in her family tree a few years ago.  When I started looking at relatives in that family group, I found a few Jemima Vestals.  It seemed to have been a common family name at some point, but its usage has declined.  Though my sister Jamie’s name is close.  All you’d have to do is add a second ‘m’ and rearrange the letters.  It wouldn’t really work, though.  “Jemima crack corn” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Jamie crack corn.”  Sorry, Jamie, I couldn’t resist!

So Susan’s ancestry goes like this:  Susan’s mother was Lydia Jane Mills.  Susan’s grandfather was James Mills.  Her great grandmother was Lydia Jay.  Her great great grandmother was Mary Elizabeth Vestal (there it is!).  And her great great great grandparents were William Vestal and Elizabeth Mercer.  This was a pretty long time ago – they were born in the late 1600s.   Elizabeth was born in Great Britain, but William and Mary Elizabeth were born in Pennsylvania.

On George’s side I’ve already told you his grandmother’s name.  His great grandfather was Jesse Vestal and his great great grandfather was Thomas Curren Vestal.  Thomas Current Vestal was the younger brother of Mary Elizabeth Vestal.  That would mean that William Vestal and Elizabeth Mercer were also the great great great grandparents of George Hine.  So he and his wife Susan were fourth cousins through their Vestal connection.

Fourth cousins sounds pretty far when you first hear it, but it’s interesting to see it in association with this same family.  Two of Addie’s sons were Ralph and Fred Bucklin.  Ralph’s daughter was Helen and Fred’s daughter was Betty Lou, my mom.  Helen and mom were first cousins.  Helen’s son and my sister Karen are second cousins.  Their children are third cousins and their grandchildren are fourth cousins.

So what have we learned?  George and Sue were fourth cousins.  I was alive at the same time as their daughter Addie.  At present, there are descendants of Addie who are fourth cousins to each other.  All of this together indicates that I’m getting old.  Yet it doesn’t make me feel old.  It makes me feel like I’m learning perspective.

But you can call me old if you want too.

Aint Zita’s 1939 Visit

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I know this photo has been posted before on Facebook.  I had a version of the photo from my dad, but it was not a good quality, even with a good scan.  I fixed it up as good as I could and shared it, too.  But it was not a blog post.  I got a better quality photo from cousin Sis a while back, with intentions to get it looking better to share.

And here it is!  Ain’t it grand?  I really like this old photo from around 1939.  I think it was taken in Lake Charles at my grandparents’ home when my grandmother’s sister Zita came for a visit.  Hence the title.  Or course, the title doesn’t actually say “Aunt Zita.”  I spelled the title the way I’ve heard the name ever since I can remember.  And for some reason I hear the other ones’ names pronounced like “ant,” but for Zita I always hear the “Aint.”  Say it!  It’s got a nice ring to it. 

The grandmother I’m talking about is my  paternal grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  My generation always called her “Mee Maw.”  She was a sweetie.  She was married to Robert Joseph Landry, Sr., who we called Pee Paw.  At least all of the cousins who were born before he died called him that. 

Now that I’ve introduced those three from the older generation of Patureau kin in this photo, I’ll point out which ones they are.  Zita Patureau Schafer is the woman standing on the far left.  Next to her is Pee Paw, with Mee Maw looking over his shoulder.  All of the others in the photo are from the next generation in the Patureau line.  Nobody from that generation of our Patureau line had Patureau for a last name.  Maybe someone from our Patureau line should marry a cousin with the Patureau last name?  Just a thought!

Seven of the eight children of Mee Maw and Pee Paw are in the photo.  Their oldest son A. J. is not in it.  Next to Mee Maw we have Marie, Hubert, Germaine, and Bobbie – my dad.  The front row has my dad’s younger siblings along with Aunt Zita’s daughters.  They are actually the daughters of Erie and Zita’s sister Marie Therese “Bee”, who died shortly after the birth of her younger daughter.  Zita married Bee’s widower Clarence Shafer and raised the daughters Sis and Syl as her own.

Sitting in the front is my dad’s brother Johnny, cousin Sis, cousin Syl, sister Frances, and sister Wana.  They all look so sweet and cute.  Hey!  Didn’t I say that about last week’s photo?  Oh, well.  It’s true again this week.  But last week I was working with a photo of my great aunts and uncles, and this week was with my aunts and uncles.  One generation makes a big difference in commonalities in facial features.  While I did see some common features in my own grandmother last week, I didn’t notice as much with my grandfather’s siblings. 

This week I saw many more common features that brought to mind many of my cousins.  So I spent a little time with my sisters Karen and Jamie, my godmother Shirley and her daughter Chelleen, my cousins Colleen, Paula, Jeanne, and Tricia as I worked on the photo.  I had an enjoyable time.  I hope you do, too.

 

Sweet Myrtle With the Bucklins

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Myrtle and the gang circa 1927.

Isn’t this the cutest photo?  Such a great casual photo from over 90 years ago.  Not only was it taken before me or my siblings were born, it was taken before either of my parents were born as well.  And the best thing about it is that my maternal grandmother Myrtle Sylvia Phenice is looking so sweet and cute front and center of the photo.  Then again, everyone else in the photo looks like they are having a good time.

I’ve seen and posted other photos taken at this same location, but most of the other ones were decidedly more formal than this one.  Most of those photos were of the Hine family standing in front of this house in the Hathaway/China area of Jefferson Davis Parish in southern Louisiana.  My grandfather was Fred Bucklin and his parents were Louis Bucklin and Addie Hine.  The house in the background was either their house, or the house of Addie’s parents George Hine and Susan Stanbrough.  George had died in 1919 and Grandma Sue was getting pretty elderly.

I estimated this photo to be from around 1927.  This is another photo that I got from my cousin Carla this summer.  Along with the photo I posted of my grandfather with a tennis racket, this photo was a photo that I had never seen before.  It has quickly become one of my favorite photos of Grandma.  Wait, I can’t refer to that cute young girl as Grandma!  I’ll have to call her Myrtle.  I usually don’t want to have the original photos of the ones I scan, but those two were exceptions.  The one of Fred with the tennis racket had a duplicate, so that was an easy call.  This photo was the only copy Carla had, but she was gracious enough to let me have it.  Thanks again, Carla!

The other great thing about it is that everyone in the photo is a family member.  I’m pretty sure that is her husband to be Fred next to her on the right in this photo.  It looks like him and who else would it be?  Sure, he has an identical twin brother Clarence, but it’s more likely to be Fred next to Myrtle.  The rest of the people in the photo are Fred’s siblings.  Let me tell you who is who.

On each end of the group are the twins Ruth and Roy Bucklin.  Ruth and Roy were fraternal twins born in 1915.  They were the youngest of the 12 children born to Lou and Addie.  In case you can’t figure out which one is which, Ruth is the girl on the far left and Roy is the boy on the far right.  Next to Ruth is an older Bucklin brother.  I’m thinking this is Robert, who was born in 1911 and would be about 16 in this photo.  To the right of him is Edna, the next older Bucklin sibling.  She was born in 1909 and she is the main reason we have this photo.  She had an early interest in photography.  She had a camera and took many of the photos of the family that are around today.  (No this is not a selfie!  They didn’t do selfies back then.  But if she had, you would have seen her arm!) 

Continuing on… Like I said, I think the boy to the right of Myrtle was Fred.  They both would have been around 20 years old.  In a couple of years they would be married and starting a family of their own.  The last unidentified boy in the photo is a little more questionable.  But I’m pretty sure this is Fred’s older brother Carl.  He was only a few years older than Fred and somehow developmentally delayed.  From other photos I’ve seen of him, I think it is him.  And again, who else would it be?  The photo shows the younger siblings of Fred.  He doesn’t look like Herbert Bucklin.  I’m open to any corrections or discussions.

Isn’t it great that we have this photo?  I’m sure all of my siblings, niblings, and cousins will really like it.  And with all of the other photos and postcards I scanned, there will be many more to come.

Landry Brothers – 356 Years and Counting

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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. 

Al, Rob, and Van Landry in 1965 on Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana. 

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.

Landry brothers Alcide (in 1890) and Trasimond (in 1861). I descend from both of them.

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.

Landry brothers of the 1910s – Sebastien, Louis, Joe, and Rob (my grandfather) were sons of Alcide.

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.

My grandfather Rob Landry with his sons A. J., Hubert, Bob, and Johnny in 1955.

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.

Van, Ryan, Luc, and Bob Landry in Jennings on December 31, 2006.

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.

Finding Cathrine Foster’s Family

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Cathrine Foster Phenice circa 1910

Have I done it?!  I think I have.  The pieces all seem to add up.  I am very excited about it, since members of the family have been trying to find evidence of Cathrine Foster Phenice’s family for at least the last 50 years.  DNA was helpful in this case, but so was time spent looking.  Let me see if I can explain it for those who are interested.

My mother’s name was Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  Her mother was Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  Grandma’s father was Harry Clifton Phenice.  His parents were Samuel Charles Phenice (witness to the Lincoln Assassination) and Cathrine Jane Foster (died as a result of terrible burns).  We knew some of the ancestry of Samuel, but not of Kate.  The one thing we knew for certain was that she was born in 1848 in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. 

I wanted to find out more, so I decided to use my newest tool for researching.  I did a search on newspapers.com for Phenice and Kansas.  I had already done a search for Phenice and Nebraska.  I found some interesting items, but nothing led me in the direction of Kate’s Foster family.  I had to be open to the chance that her last name was not originally Foster.  It’s possible she could have been married before or possibly adopted.  There was rumor that the Foster name came about because she had grown up in a foster family.  If that had been the case, the title of this post would be “Finding Cathrine’s Foster Family” and it isn’t.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My search for Phenice and Kansas came up with one particularly juicy morsel.  It reads, “Mr. W. E. Phenice, of Trenton, Nebraska, who has been at Perry, Okla., is visiting at Chalk Mound at present.  Mr. Phenice is a nephew of A. E. Millison.”  (The Eskridge Tribune Star and Eskridge Independent, August 30, 1894)

I know who W. E. Phenice is.  Samuel and Kate had an older son named William Emory (b. 1871) and they homesteaded in Trenton, Nebraska, from 1886 to 1889.  So that part fits just right.  But neither Samuel nor Kate had a sibling by the name of A. E. Millison, because that’s the only way he could be a nephew. 

I didn’t really think about it much and then went to look at one of the sites that I have my DNA matches.  And can you guess what I found?  I found a DNA match with the last name Millison.  It really stood out since I had just seen this newspaper article with the same surname identified as a relative.  So I had to check it out a little.  I looked to see who else in the family was a DNA match to this Millison person.  My mom and both of her siblings matched him at the same point on Chromosome 9.  None of their first cousins were a match, but one of their second cousins were.  And…drumroll, please…it was our cousin Mona Q. who also descends from Samuel and Kate Phenice.  And it wasn’t just any other random DNA matching segment, it was the same exact spot on Chromosome 9. 

So I sent off a note to that DNA match to ask what he knows about the Millison name.  I was also wondering how he might be connected to this A. E. Millison.  And if he did know who he was, was either he or his wife from somewhere around Mercer County, Pennsylvania.

After I sent the note, I looked him up on 23andMe, which is where he tested.  On his profile he showed that his great grandparents lived in Council Grove, Kansas, which is the same area as Chalk Mound.  So he looked like he was from the same family.  Then I found an obituary for a Uba Millison at newspapers.com.  There was no information in that article, but the name is so unusual that I figured I could search for it on Find A Grave.  It worked!  I found Alexander E. Millison who died in Wabaunsee, Kansas, which is where William Emery Phenice lived in 1895.  But more importantly, I found out that A. E. Millison was born in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, the same place that Cathrine Foster was born.

Of course A. E. Millison was married to someone and she could have been born in Mercer County, too.  Kate and Samuel were both born there.  Amazingly enough, I heard back right away from my Millison DNA match.  That’s practically unheard of.  He was able to provide a few quick links for some family information.  I was able to determine that A. E. Millison was married to Phoebe Cummings who had been born  in Quebec.  So the common DNA came through A. E. Millison.  The name is also spelled Milliron and Milleson.  The family originated in Germany.

I did some research on the family and wasn’t able to find a connection to Kate right away.  A. E. did have a daughter named Orra, which is the middle name of Kate’s daughter Emma (Mona’s grandmother).  He also had sisters by the name of Catherine and Susannah, both of which are family names in the Phenice line.  But the Catherine that was his sister had a well-documented family that did not match our Cathrine.  Where was the connection?

1850 Census record from Venango, Pennsylvania. The first complete household shows Moore, Ann Magdelene, James, Emory, Catharine, and Thos Foster.

I found another tree that had the Millison family documented on it.  I thought I would try a different approach.  I searched for the last name Foster to see if that was in the tree.  Sure enough it was.  And there it was – a Catherine Foster born in 1848.  I went to check out her page and saw that her mother was listed as Anne Magdeleen Milliron, born in Mercer County, Pennsylvania.  She was the sister to A. E. Millison.  There was a brother of Cathrine with the name of Emery, another name to tie it all together.

When I saw that her father’s name was listed as Morris Foster, I thought it looked familiar.  In the beginning of 2018 I had come across a Census record from Venango, Pennsylvania, in 1850.   There was a two-year-old daughter in the household named Catharine.  She had a brother named Emory, a mom named Ann Magdelene, and a father named Moore Foster.  I had saved this but was never able to find any other information on this household.

Maybe if I had been searching for Morris Foster I would have had better luck.   The other problem is that Morris Foster died in 1852.  Ann Magdelene soon married George Rihel and the first of their nine children together was born in 1854.  So little Kate Foster grew up in a household of Rihels after that point.  She was a Foster child, but in name only. 

Catherine Foster in the Rihel household in 1860

So the relationship to A. E. Millison stated in the article was slightly inaccurate.  Kate was his niece (not his sister) and William Emory Phenice was his grand nephew.  They must have had a close family connection for them to visit like they did.   Yet that article was instrumental in making a great connection.  I am going to have to pay close attention to those old newspaper blurbs about family visiting family because you never know what little morsel of information can lead to a great discovery.

And a great discovery it is.  For Kate’s father’s side, I only have his name so far.  But for Anne Magdeleen, she is the first of four generations found.  The family was in Pennsylvania for a long time.  Most of them were from Germany, and one of our ancestors was born on the voyage to the US.  Another was a Revolutionary War soldier who died in the Battle of the Wabash at the age of 36.

Now that I’ve updated my family tree with these new names, I’ve been able to identify many DNA matches who also have these names.  I had suspected that they were connections through Cathrine Foster and now I have enough information to make the connection. 

Now that I have walked my way through all of this information, I’m starting to believe it a bit more. 

Cathrine Jane Foster Phenice family tree

Bobbie Circa 1937

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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.

Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1937. (Photo edit by Van Landry

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.

Becoming a Father Posthumously – A Hine Story

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Two hundred years ago a young man named Peter Hine decided to write his will.  He was only twenty-four years old and less than a year married.  And though I’m sure he must have had plenty of dreams for a future, he also must have realized that those dreams were not to be.

Peter Hine was born October 10, 1794, to German-born immigrant Johannes Hein and first generation American Juliana Catherina Schneider.  He was the first American-born Hine in my line of the Hine family, though he was not the first one born in his immediate family.  Actually he was the tenth of eleven children.  He was not the first child of John and Catherine to die, either.  He had an older brother named Phillip that died in 1815 and another older brother named John that died earlier in 1819.  There also had been a first-born daughter that died at birth.

Marriage contract of Peter Hine and Margaret Miller

So Peter came from a large family and may have thought that he would follow suit with that tradition.  At the time it was also traditional to get married first, and that’s what he did.  On August 4, 1818, he married his 18-year-old sweetheart Margaret Miller.  His brother Henry signed as a witness.  Henry was almost exactly two years older than Peter.  His birthday was on October 9th, so they may have celebrated together and were close.  He actually was the only surviving brother that Peter had in July 1819.

I wonder if Peter knew he was ill at the time of his marriage?  Or if he knew he was ill when he found out that his newlywed wife would soon be expecting a child?  All I know is that he had consumption and that was not a good thing back in the 1800s.  Margaret gave birth in September of 1819, and you can tell from the title that Peter did not survive to meet his bouncing baby boy.  In July of 1819 Peter must have begun to have some serious problems with his disease, because on July 17th of that year he wrote down his final requests.

July 1819 will of Peter Hine

It is a very bittersweet thing to read.  He writes, “My beloved wife Margaret being pregnant, I give and bequeath unto the child of her body that tract or parcel of land…Twenty one acres…and interest in a certain undivided tract of land lying in Stokes County.  In case my beloved wife should be delivered of more than one child, the children are to possess equal rights to the above mentioned tracts of land.”  He leaves his other belongings to his beloved wife.

He tried to cover all circumstances as best he could.  One child?  Two?  They didn’t have ultrasound back then.  He also could not take it for granted that the child would even survive to adulthood.  That is never a given and there were lots of things that could happen to prevent that from happening.  But the main point was this:  his wife was going to live on and give birth to their child without him being around.  He would not be there to hold his child.  He didn’t even know what the sex of the child would be.

And he wasn’t exaggerating.  As the 1819 diary from Bethebara, North Carolina states, “July 22.  This morning the married Br. Peter Hein died of consumption.”  So less than a week after he wrote his will, he died at the age of 24.  Two weeks later would have been his first year wedding anniversary.  So we can be assured that he is one man who never forgot his wedding anniversary!  It must have been a sad reminder to Margaret. 

I found myself referring to Margaret as “his wife” when I contemplated these events this week.  That’s like referring to my mom as “my dad’s wife.”  Margaret is just as much my ancestor as Peter was.  Part of that is because I think of it as following my Hine line of the family.  But Margaret was my great great great great grandmother and I very much sympathize with her.  What a tragedy she had to endure.

But endure she did.  A month after that first wedding anniversary, she gave birth to her only Hine child and she named him after his father and grandfather.  John Peter Hine was born on September 3, 1819.  He endured as well and lived to collect on his inheritance.  His mother remarried and he grew up in a family.  Not a Hine family, though.  But he lived with his mom, step-father, and six Wageman siblings and made it to adulthood.

Hine descendants in 1919

I’ve talked about John Peter before.  He married Mary Malina Cox and they had seven children together, including my great great grandfather George Henry Hine.  I wrote about the 100 year anniversary of George’s death earlier this year.  Since that post about his death, I came across this old photo that was shared with me by my cousin Carla.  (Thanks again!) 

I am pretty sure this was taken at the funeral of George Hine in May of 1919.  I see some of his grandchildren, but I also see other Hine family members.  I don’t know for sure who they are, but I’ve seen them in another photo identified as Hine family.  I’m thinking they are the family of George Henry’s brother Allen Larkin Hine. 

Whoever they are, they represent the numerous descendants of Peter Hine.  He never got to meet his son or know if he would make it to adulthood.  He could never have imagined all of the descendants that he had in 1919, much less all of the ones who are alive today.  So let’s give a bit of thanks to the short, yet productive life of Peter Hine.

The Patureau Bakery

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Have you ever heard of the Patureau Bakery?  I hadn’t heard anything about it before I found a reference to it this week.  Granted, it was a long time ago that we’re talking about, but with all the research that my dad and grandmother did, it seems like it would have come up.  Maybe they knew about it and I wasn’t listening.  There are lots of things that I wish I could ask them.  Now I have to rely on old newspapers and other documents in one place or another.

So this is what I found.  It’s a newspaper article from the Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet on Feb. 14, 1858.  The title of the article is “The Staff of Life” and I’m not sure what that means.  It talks about a man named Jules Bonnecaze that purchased the Bakery of P. Patureau.

Now it doesn’t say that the baker was Pierre Patureau or that the bakery was in Plaquemine, but I’m pretty sure that’s who they were talking about.  Even though I hadn’t heard about a bakery owned by the Patureau family in Plaquemine, I had wondered  if there had been one.

Pierre Patureau was born August 29, 1800, in LaRoche-Chalais, Dordogne, France.  He was married to Anne Rose Machet on July 24, 1820, at the same place.  Rose was born Aug. 19, 1801, in Mareuil, Charante, Poitou-Charantes, France.   They had five children (including my great great grandfather Ferdinand Pierre Patureau) and then in 1840 they immigrated to the United States.  The passport names Pierre Patureau and lists his wife and four children.  (There was an older daughter named Jeanne who either died or stayed behind in France.) 

On the 1840 passport, as well as the 1856 passport, Pierre is identified as a boulanger.  Boulanger is the French word for baker.  So I knew he was a baker in 1840 when he came to the United States and sixteen years later another passport says the same thing.  He was also listed as a passenger on a ship leaving France in 1857 with the destination of New Orleans.  On that passenger list he was also identified as a baker (boulanger). 

Those documents made me wonder if he continued his culinary skills when he reached his new country.  So when I saw the newspaper article this week, I just knew that the P. Patureau with a Bakery was our very own Pierre Patureau, boulanger.

The other thing I found interesting about the passport is that they give a description of my great great great grandfather Pierre.  Since there are no photos of him, it is the best way to get an idea of what he looked like.   His hair, facial hair, and eyebrows were light brown in 1840, but by 1856 they were graying.  He had a large, somewhat open forehead over light grey eyes.  He had a rather large nose, an average to large mouth, and a round chin with an oval face with a dark complexion. 

I don’t know what to make of the height that they give for him.  One of them says 70 cm and the other says 72.   That can’t be correct!  That would be only 28 inches.  If we had an ancestor that was only two and a half feet tall we would have heard about that.  I think something is missing in the translation.  Yet the nose must have been large.  On one document it was described as ‘wide’ and the other one said ‘big.’  Official documents don’t lie.

“Grandpa, what a big nose you have!”

“Oui, oui.  The better to tell when the bread is just perfect.”

July 29, 2023 Update

Voila!  I have been studying French for the past 105 days (started on April 16) and I thought I’d look over some of my French documents.  I was looking at numbers and it reminded me of this post about the height of my ancestor Pierre Patureau.  In this post I said that the documents report him being 70 or 72 centimeters.  I knew that had to be wrong, because that would have been only 28 inches tall and we would have heard about that.  But it was because I read the passports incorrectly.  For the category of his height (taille) it reads “d’un Meter ______ Centimeter.”  I thought it meant height in meters and that they said he was 70 (or 72) Centimeters.  But what it says is “one meter ____ centimeter.”  So it is actually saying that he was 1.70 or 1.72 meters!  That comes out to be about 5′-8″ in American measuring terms.  Now that sounds more like it.  Much more likely than 2′-4″ for a grown man, even if he was French.

Oh, yeah, I also have determined that an old family photo is of Pierre Patureau.  You can see what he looks like in the post “I Say This is Pierre Patureau.” 

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