Family History

Happy Thanksgiving!  If I had to choose one photo that I was most thankful for this year, it would have to be this one.  I got it earlier this year at one of the three Landry family funerals that I went to this year.  That’s too many, especially since they had to do with my godparents and their families.  It’s good to be around family for those situations, but it’s nice when we get together to celebrate something.  We did have one of those, too.

This photo is part of the Box 301 Collection that I’ve talked about before.  It was up in Aunt Wana’s house for years.  When we were going through that box, I was very excited to see this photo, even though I didn’t know who it was at first.  The exciting thing was that it was an old metal tintype, and I thought it might be some Patureau boys.

My dad’s mom was Germaine Erie Patureau Landry and she went by the name Erie.  Though her grandchildren knew her as Mee Maw.  (I think I was her favorite!)  Her father’s name was Vincent Maximilien Patureau and he went by the name Max.  I usually refer to him as Grampa Max.  (Grampa pronounced with accents like the name Santa.)  Grampa Max was the son of Ferdinand Patureau and Emma Landry.  Ferdinand and Emma were the parents of 16 children.  Ten of them grew to adulthood – five girls and five boys.  The last five children were four boys and a girl.

I thought the photo could be of two of the younger Patureau boys.  When we were looking through the photos, I was hurrying to take photos of them and moving on to find the next good one.  I didn’t have time to spend examining them closely.  I would do that later when I was at home and had more time.  There were so many good old photos that I had never seen before.  That is always exciting to me.  I was able to bring several of them home to get good scans, too. 

A few days later I looked at the photo closer.  I thought that I recognized the boy standing up as one of the younger Patureau brothers.  I looked through the photos from the Tyrrell Historical Library Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection.  I took photos of the collection when I went to Beaumont in 2021.  Sure enough, there was a photo that was identified as Pierre Oscar Patureau in February of 1895.  The boy standing up was definitely Oscar Patureau.  I also noticed that the teenaged boy sitting in the chair looked slightly older than him.  So I went to my family tree to see which brother was slightly older than him.  And – surprise, surprise – it was my very own Grampa Max!!!  Grampa Max was born in 1865 and Oscar was born in 1866.  They were only a year and a half apart.

The main reason I didn’t recognize him at first was because of the lack of a moustache.  In every other photo of Grampa Max, he is sporting a moustache.  Other than that, he looks just the same as he did in the other early photos of him.  As soon as I figured it out, I went to look at the photo on my phone.  And there it was – my phone’s facial recognition software identified him as Grampa Max, too.  I’m glad I figured it out on my own, but the confirmation with the software was an added bonus.

Max would go on to marry Marie Emma Landry.  They had fifteen children, with nine of them reaching adulthood.  Needless to say, I come from a large family.  Many of Max’s siblings also had large families as well.  There are over a thousand cousins out there.  Oscar only had four children, and as we saw a few weeks ago in a post I wrote, his oldest son committed suicide when he was just 19 years old.  He had no children.  Oscar, Sr.’s third son only had one daughter.  She was married to Alois Maxwell Hirt – better known as the famous New Orleans jazz trumpeter Al Hirt.  According to one of the Patureau cousins, he was friendly and welcoming to the Patureau relatives.

The other thing about Max and Oscar is that both of them became doctors.  I’ve written a few posts that talk about Grampa Max being a veterinarian.  He began his veterinary career in Plaquemine, Louisiana, but then around 1912 he moved to Lafayette for a bigger practice.  He retired in 1933 when his health began to go down.  The photo of Oscar was taken in Nashville, Tennessee, where he went to dental school at Vanderbilt.  He was a dentist for many years in New Orleans, then moved to Beaumont, Texas, to practice around 1920.  He died in 1926.

Talking about having too many funerals in a short amount of time, 1924-1926 was a difficult time for Grampa Max.  In 1924 his sister Zulma died.  In 1925 Zelica, another sister, died.  Then in 1926 Oscar died, followed by another sister Aline.  I’m sure they had some big Patureau get togethers then, as well.  Like I said, it’s a big family.  They’re good to have around in the good times, but they’re even better when they’re there for you in the bad times.  I do appreciate my family.

I thought I would continue with the theme from last week.  Like last week, it is about the unnatural deaths of family members.  But this time, the deaths are from my Patureau family line.  My maternal grandmother was the Phenice, while my paternal grandmother was the Patureau.  All of the stories are about young people whose lives were cut short by tragic events.  For the three I’m talking about this week, their ages were 17, 19, and 21.  Way too young.  This is another post that I’ve thought about doing for quite a while.

A little over seven years ago I first saw this photo of Pierre Oscar Patureau, Jr. sitting in a chair.  I got it from a member of one of his siblings’ family.  I don’t think I knew the details of his death when I first saw it, but it wasn’t long afterward that I found the tragic story of his death.  I’m pretty sure he went by the name Oscar, and he was a first cousin to my grandmother Erie Patureau Landry.  He was six years older than she was, so she probably looked up to him. 

Their fathers – Pierre Oscar and Max Patureau – were brothers and they seemed to be pretty close.  They were close to the same age and they were both doctors – Max was a veterinarian in Plaquemine, Louisiana, and Pierre Oscar was a dentist in New Orleans.  Even though Pierre Oscar wasn’t participating in the Largest Patureau Family Contest – like his siblings Max (15 children), Leobon (12), Zelica (8), Abel Omer “Pat” (10), or Victorine (12) – he probably still valued family.  It’s a Patureau thing.

What I’m getting at is that this death would have had an impact on my grandmother when it happened in 1909.  The two families lived not too far away from each other, and they probably saw each other at family get togethers somewhat regularly.  I’m sure it wasn’t as tragic to young Erie as the death of her own mother later that year, but it was still a loss of a family member.

I wonder how she found out about the death of her cousin.  Grampa Max probably found out about it soon after it happened.   Either he or my great grandmother Marie Therese Landry Patureau would have been the one to break it to their children.  From what the newspaper explains, Oscar checked into room 802 at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on May 17, 1909.  He was enamored with a young lady from Mobile, so he might have been hoping that she would join him there.  He was there for a few days and did not call any attention to himself.

That changed drastically.  On May 20st he made the fatal choice to shoot himself.  That got the attention of the staff at the hotel.  When the house detective arrived on scene, he could tell that it had been self-inflicted.  Oscar was still alive at that point, and he didn’t deny that he had done it.  He stated that he had done it because of a love affair.  Another article stated that it was because of unrequited love.  He was asked who the young lady was, but he would not answer.  The newspaper article said that a photo of a young woman was found in his suitcase.

Of course, the newspaper wasn’t correct about everything.  They say that he was 22 years old, but he was not even 20 years old yet.  As you can see by his death notice, he was 19 years, 10 months, and 25 days.  But wait, from my calculations that is incorrect also!  Using digital calculations (counting with my fingers!) I say that he was actually 19 years, 9 months, and 25 days.  If you want to check to see if I’m correct, I have to tell you that he was born on July 26, 1899.    Either way, a life cut too short.

I didn’t want to talk about lives cut short in the Patureau family without mentioning one of the closest relations to me that died unnaturally.  As you know, my grandmother was a Patureau.  She had a younger sister named Sylvie.  Sylvie has a grandson who is very close to the same age as I am.  Unlike me, he has children.  In 2003, he was hit with the tragedy of his 17-year-old son Joshua’s death.  He was found in a car with a shotgun.  I don’t know many details, but according to investigators it was declared that there was no foul play.  I don’t have a newspaper article or photo for this, but it reminds me of another Patureau death that I do have an article for.

This event happened in 1933.  John Gerald Patureau was born in 1911 and he was the grandson of Leobon Patureau.  Leobon was the older brother of Max and Pierre Oscar.  In 1933 Gerald was living with his aunt Edna Landry in Plaquemine.  It sounds like he was an outdoorsman, because he was hunting alligators on that July 21.  From what I can tell, he went out hunting in the morning off of Plaquemine-Addis highway in West Baton Rouge Parish just past the Iberville Parish line.

It doesn’t say whether he was successful in getting an alligator.  Around noon he came back to his car, and according to reports he was putting his gun back in his car when it went off.  The gun was pointing right at his stomach when it went off and it resulted in his death.  There was an investigation into his death, and it was ruled to be “accidental.”  What’s with the quotes there?  That makes it sound somewhat questionable.  Was there a possibility of someone else involved or were there suggestions of it being self-inflicted?  Unresolved questions have got to be unsettling in situations like this.

But really, the main thing is that deaths like this are always tragic.  I think they’re important to remember, but they are somewhat depressing to write about.  So next week I’ll try to find something a little more cheerful.  That shouldn’t be too difficult.

 

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Oct. 19, 2024 Addition

I meant to include this earlier photo of Pierre Oscar Patureau, Jr. in this post.  It is a photo that came from the Tyrrell Historical Library’s Pierre Ferdinand Patureau Collection (AC-824) in Beaumont, Texas.  The death notice for young Oscar was also in that collection.  His aunt Victorine Patureau Cropper must have been fond of her nephew and saved these mementos of his life.  I’m glad she did.

This photo was taken around 1900 when Oscar was about 11 or 12 years old in New Orleans, Louisiana.  I think the family moved there in the mid 1890s.  This would have been a photo from his Solemn First Communion.  The Patureau was a Roman Catholic family in southern Louisiana.  At that time, the first communion would have happened a few years earlier when they were in first grade or so.  Then later they would have their Solemn First Communion and there were photos like this to commemorate the occasion.