There is a genealogical point to this article. I promise.
But, first, let’s talk about this “imposing shaft of polished marble” that stands in DeSoto Parish’s Mansfield Cemetery and why the “Alexandria Town Talk” newspaper saw fit to rave about it in 1921. The clue is in the name on the shaft: Mary Miles Minter.
Mary Miles Minter was the name of a silent film star whose career came to an abrupt end when she became entangled in a still unsolved Hollywood murder case.
Poor Mary’s life was complicated. She was saddled with a stage mother and an alcoholic sister. Born Juliet Shelby in Shreveport near the auditorium where Elvis would one day rise to stardom, she soon found herself on a New York stage. Too young to work the long hours demanded of her, she was renamed Mary Miles Minter to trick enforcement officers. Mary was her dead aunt’s dead child, buried 1,500 miles away in a rural Louisiana cemetery. The dead child’s name and birthdate were borrowed by Juliet’s quick-thinking mother. Ten-year-old Juliet magically became 16-year-old Mary. Did they put lifts in her shoes to make her taller? Just how stupid were child labor law enforcement officials?
The ruse worked.
Juliet took the name Mary Miles Minter from the stage to the screen and became a star. Just a year before the lights dimmed on her career, she spent money on the marker in the Mansfield cemetery. The marker remembered the lives of little Mary, her sister and their mother. But here’s where it gets tricky. The local newspaper reported that Juliet did this to pay tribute to her aunt, “whose name she bears.”
Yep. There was a third Mary Miles Minter. Juliet’s aunt was the original Mary Miles Minter. She married, had three little girls and died long before Juliet was born. And, she most certainly did not inspire her niece to adopt her name. Ten-year-old Juliet would have had to become 37-year-old Aunt Mary if that were true.
More likely, by 1921, at the height of her stardom, Juliet was a seasoned public relations machine. Taking her aunt’s name as a tribute was a better story than taking her cousin’s name in an attempt to trick law enforcement.
The marker still stands to this day, a sweet tribute to two of the Mary Miles Minters. And, perhaps, an indication that Juliet felt a little guilty about scaling the heights of stardom under the name of a cousin who didn’t live to pursue her own dreams.
The Rapides Public Library has a nice collection of Alexandria-area newspapers that can be searched online. Here’s the handy dandy link: https://rpl.advantage-preservation.com/
Years ago, my grandmother handed me an old cookie tin. It didn’t contain a single cookie, but it was offered in the spirit of sentiment and thrift.
She knew that I love Christmas, and the tin is sweetly decorated with Santa giving a gift to a little pajama-clad girl. As a child of the depression, my grandmother also is loathe to discard anything that can be repurposed. Fabric scraps are stuffed into drawers for later use. Margarine tubs become tupperware. And this tin – rinsed of cookie crumbs and carefully dried – was also finding new life. It contained, or so I was told, a few of my great grandmother’s recipes.
My great grandmother was renowned for my cooking. My grandfather was her only child, but he apparently had the appetite of three children because he worked the family farm, played high school football and could put away a pie a day in his youth. As one of 12 girls who pulled together to feed a large family, my great grandmother trained her entire life for the job of keeping him fed.
She did so much with the limited resources of a farm kitchen amongst the tumbleweeds of Scurry County. Her cast iron skillet produced chicken fried steak that my grandfather remembered with wistful fondness decades later. She scribbled down recipes from her sisters and the backs of food wrappers. Known for a thriftiness that rivals my grandmother’s, she probably didn’t purchase many cookbooks.
In her later years, she and my great grandfather would make the long drive from Texas to Louisiana with reused cookie tins filled with homemade goodies. The great grandchildren would dig into the tins in search of orange balls – crushed vanilla wafers and orange juice rolled into glorious deliciousness. Sometimes – to our great disappointment – we’d find peanut brittle, which we’d then have to pretend to nibble on while our great grandmother beamed with pride at our sweet tooth. Sugar, we love. Good teeth, we do not have so we were always wary of the peanut brittle.
My great grandmother was generous with her time but not so generous with her recipes. She carefully guarded them. She wouldn’t even share them with family. My hunch is she recognized that she was better at endearing herself to people through cooking than through her often difficult personality. As her sisters always tried to explain, she was born cranky so maybe it was actually a combo of self awareness and bitchiness that kept her recipes locked up. It’s sweet but annoying because the revered orange balls died with her.
So I looked through the box eagerly years ago in search of the orange ball recipe. Guess what I found? The peanut brittle recipe.
It calls for a ton of sugar so it’s a wonder we still have teeth.
Disappointed, I put the box away. The other day, I was cleaning out the pantry and came across it again. I decided to take another look through it. This time I sat down on my kitchen floor and carefully spread the fragile pages around me. Here, decades after her death, is what my great grandmother considered important enough to save. Recipes. An entire booklet of pie recipes. A toaster receipt. Newspaper clippings. The manual for a pressure cooker – again with recipes.
She was like a magpie, plucking up recipes whenever she came across them. She favored desserts – not because she ever ate them but because her son and his descendants did.
I wonder how long she prepared for the occasional trip to Louisiana. How long she worked in her tiny kitchen to create goodies for a trip she’d make no more than once a year. How much she thought about what she would make.
Looking at the contents of that cookie tin again, I feel like it’s a boxful of love letters.
Jean Baptiste Baras was Jean Baptiste Baras, but he was also Jean Baptiste Le Blon or Jean Baptiste Le Blond.
Does that seem completely confusing? Well, welcome to “dit” names, which were common amongst the French ancestors who settled Louisiana.
“Dit” names were nicknames that sometimes became the actual surname. For example, let’s say you were baptized as Jean Valjean. You might also be known as Jean LeBlanc – or when the priest feels helpful – Jean Valjean dit LeBlanc. So when you take in a waif named Cosette, you might baptize her under Valjean or LeBlanc. Can you tell I just saw Les Miserables?
Some “dit” names make sense if you use your imagination. Maybe Jean Baptiste Baras – one of the early settlers of Pointe Coupee Parish – was blonde, thus his alternative name of “Le Blond” or “the blonde.” Maybe Francois Bossier had a handsome head of brown hair, thus his “dit” name: “LeBrun.” Maybe Jacques Descuire was the baby of the family, thus his “dit” name: “Bebe.
Many “dit” names point to military service. Apparently it was tradition for French soldiers to get a “dit” name upon joining the military. I wonder if this was because many soldiers had the same original surname or if this was just a fun tradition.
The possible origins of other “dit” names are anyone’s guess. Maybe there was a 1700s version of the stripper name generator that was lost to history.
“Dit” names are rather vexing because they make genealogy research challenging. Sometimes the priest recorded names under the surname; sometimes he recorded names under the “dit” name. You have to look under both once you’ve figured out there was a “dit” name.
Even more vexing: Families would ditch the actual surname entirely and adopt the “dit” name. You can’t assume the line ended. You may just not be looking under the newly adopted “dit” name.
In my branch of the family, the name is Penisson. Other branches spell it as Pennison. Regardless of the branch and spelling, it’s always wonderful to “meet” a descendant of Etienne Benjamin Penisson/Pennison. It’s amazing to think that one man could put down so many roots in a country he adopted. It helps that he fathered at least 11 children.
I thought it would be fun to spotlight some of Etienne’s descendants. Today’s featured descendant is Auguste Joseph Pennison. If you’re also a descendant and would like to spotlight your beloved Pennison/Penisson grandfather or grandmother, give a shout! And let me know your spelling preference.
Auguste was born Feb. 19, 1909, in. Bayou L’Ourse, Louisiana, to Ernest Joseph Pennison and Azelie Verret. He was their fifth child. He died Dec. 28, 2003, in Brenham, Texas.
I’m not closely related to Auguste. His grandfather and my Penisson grandmother were brother and sister, which makes us very distant cousins. However, I noticed an interesting commonality when reviewing his family tree: Twins!
Twins run in the Penisson/Pennison family. My Penisson grandmother had a set of twin daughters and twin granddaughters. Auguste also welcomed twins although his were boys.
Here’s how his grandson remembered him recently:
Grand dad (Paw Paw Penny) went back to France to research the records he included in the family tree. The spelling is strange on those records – literacy, phonetic spelling, etc contributed to all of that.
He was amazed at how much wine the French drank in a day. He want a prude by any stretch but I remember him telling stories about that. Also, he went back every year to hunt for nutria because they would pay for the tail.
Why Martin Eustis Carricut has a grave marker in the Plaucheville cemetery and his infant daughter doesn’t is beyond me. I would’ve thrown Eustis into an unmarked grave.
Eustis died in 1925, and it wasn’t a natural death. But to understand what led him to an early grave, you have to go back to 1923, when Eustis moved to Bunkie with his four children. Not with him was Anna, his wife. She eventually turned up, pregnant and pleading with law enforcement officers to help her see the children. She feared her husband but worried about the children’s welfare.
In newspaper accounts, law enforcement officers would later claim that they took Anna to the Carricut home and saw her happily reunited with her family. A few weeks later, she gave birth to a baby girl.
The happiness wouldn’t last long. Eustis apparently wasn’t a very good provider, and he had a nasty temper.
Anna’s older children would tell the tale of what happened in April 1924 at the Carricut house. Eustis raged at his wife for hours. It turned physical with Anna running from room to room trying to evade Eustis. He beat her before cutting her throat and throwing their newborn to the floor. He then stabbed the baby to death.
Eustis gathered up the remaining children and put them in the family car. One of the children later told law enforcement: “We couldn’t kiss mamma goodbye because papa had killed her, and she was too bloody.”
The town of Bunkie wasn’t feeling favorably toward Eustis once the bodies of his wife and daughter were found. When officers found him hiding on Bayou Jack, they took him to Marksville for his own safety. He told law enforcement that Anna killed the baby and he killed Anna in a rage. His own children disputed his story. Later, Eustis amended his tale and claimed Anna accidentally shoved the baby off the bed while they were fighting.
On March 20, 1925, Eustis tried to delay his own death. With the noose around his neck and his feet on the trap door, he begged for more time to finish writing his statement. His request was refused. The trap door was sprung, and Eustis’ neck snapped.
He’s buried in the Catholic cemetery in Plaucheville. His infant daughter lies in an unmarked grave. Even her name isn’t remembered 100 years later.
I’m fascinated by downtowns. Sure, most are struggling nowadays. But just a few decades ago, they were full of life. People lived, worked and shopped downtown. Downtown department stores were such a big deal that the unveiling of the new flagship store for Selber Bros in 1956 consumed an entire page of a Shreveport newspaper. By the 1980s, the department stores started tumbling like dominos.
We visited Cleveland last year and searched for the department store where Ralphie and Randy have a rather unfortunate visit to Santa in “A Christmas Story.” The building is still there, but it’s now a loud, obnoxious casino. The window displays are gone and the windows are covered up so you lose all sense of time when you’re inside.
Across the country, downtown department stores are on the wane. Absolutely extinct – as far as I know – are the locally owned department stores that used to dot downtowns. You’ll still find a Macy’s here and there, but stores like Selber Bros in downtown Shreveport are long gone. They were gobbled up by corporate giants ages ago.
We passed the old Selber Bros on a recent weekend during a whirlwind trip to north Louisiana for my niece’s dance recital (she was the most talented and cutest performer on the stage in case you missed it), and I wondered about its history. I vaguely remember when Woolworth’s and Rubenstein’s were still open downtown. I don’t remember ever stepping inside Selber Bros.
In 1940, Selber Bros expanded its downtown Shreveport in a bid to become more like the Fifth Avenue salons of New York City. A little more than a decade later, the Selbers built an entirely new downtown store.
Selber Bros occupied several locations in downtown Shreveport before landing at the corner of Milam and McNeill streets. It was the 1950s. Women still wore gloves and furs. Men still wore suits to the office. The store was doing well enough to justify a brand new building. The location? An old theater.
And what a store! The Majestic Room – named for the theater that once stood on the site – housed formal and custom wear for men. The Chandelier Room showcased expensive women’s clothes and could be cleared to seat 650 for a fashion show. A public address system could play music or page customers in the days before cellphones. Alterations could be done on each floor. Gift wrapping was available in the basement. Toys could be found on the fourth floor, next to something called a Boy Scout Trading Post.
I have a feeling that you dressed to shop at Selber Bros. It’s a pity that the store’s doors would be open for just 21 years.
The interior of the downtown store in its heyday (from Pinterest).
Here’s the history of the Selber Bros (gleaned from newspaper archives:
The department store was the brainchild of Charles Selber, who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland with his wife and their two sons, Louis and Isador. Two more sons – Aaron and Mandel – were born in the U.S. In 1900, the family moved to Shreveport, where Charles started making and selling pants. The pants business evolved into a department store seven years later that Charles named for his four boys: Selber Bros. Over the years, the store grew with locations opening across the state.
The store in downtown Shreveport – which bears the family’s name to this day – was the flagship. It was built on the site of an old vaudeville theater that burned in the 1950s. The store that rose from those ashes boasted 80,000 square feet, bronze fittings, show windows and red marble.
In the 1960s, the family opened a store in the “suburbs” at Pierremont Mall along Line Avenue in Shreveport. Pierremont was never a sprawling mall with a food court and an ear piercing station. It is a small, boutique mall along Line Avenue that’s now anchored by a gym rather than a department store. In the 1960s, ladies would have bought their furs at Selber’s in the winter and brought them back in the summer for storage.
Other satellite stores opened across Louisiana and East Texas before the retail boom turned to bust. The downtown store was the first to close, shutting its doors in the 1980s.
By that point, the brothers were all gone.
Isador – the eldest – was the first to die. He didn’t live to see the family business move into the grand building downtown. He died of a heart attack in 1944, the same year as his mother.
In the 1960s – the same era that saw such growth for the business that Charles Selber named for his four sons – the remaining three brothers died in quick succession.
Dillard’s bought what remained of the Selber’s stores a few decades ago and rebranded them. Today, only the older folks remember the chain founded by a Polish immigrant for his four boys.
I’ve been knee deep in colonial records of Pointe Coupee Parish. I’m still trying to figure out how many children Jean Baptiste Barras had with his three wives. By my last count, it was 14, but did he really have two daughters named Perinne and then yet another named Petronille? It’s tricky.
Veneta deGraffenried Morrison had similar problems when she cracked open the conveyance records in the Pointe Coupee Parish Clerk of Court’s Office. She wanted to create a reference guide for early marriage records. What she found – in her words – was poor script, nonexistent punctuation and surnames spelled an assortment of ways.
Veneta persevered. The purpose of her project was to help other researchers, as she noted in the forward to her published results. She transcribed 72 years of records, translating hard-to-read French into typed English.
Veneta died in 1983 so I would imagine she undertook this project in the 1960s or 1970s. We owe much to ladies like Veneta who took the time to transcribe old records. Handwriting in those records fades. Fragile pages tear. Projects like Veneta’s are invaluable to modern researchers.
I found Veneta’s index at www.familysearch.org. If you click on the “search” tab in the navigation bar, you’ll find an option for books. That’s the portal to the digital library. Warning: Some books are only available for digital viewing at the library or a family history center.
If you’d like to see the fruits of Veneta’s mission, her work is entitled “Index, early marriages of Pointe Coupee, 1771-1843.”
I was in Paris last year, sitting in the back of a taxi when my Louisiana genealogy skills came into play. At the time, most of my attention was focused on trying to understand French traffic laws as I nervously watched drivers honk their annoyance at bicyclists without actually slowing down to avoid hitting them. Marveling at the fact that Paris isn’t littered with the bodies of bicyclists, I belatedly realized that my husband was trying to chat with the taxi driver.
It was clear that the driver spoke not one word of English other than an uncertain “yes,” but my husband is persistent. He wanted to know if the driver was a native of Paris. And, just like that, the words for “Were you born in Paris?” bubbled up in my brain from years of genealogy research. The driver looked very surprised – no doubt wondering why I hadn’t rescued him sooner – and then clarified that he had been born in another country.
It was a monumental moment – and surprising given that I can read French much better than I can understand or utter the spoken word. I need context and continuity. Throw me into a French conversation, and I’m lost. Give me a probate document written in French, and I can limp through it.
Since many early Louisiana records were written in French, it’s helpful to have a loose grasp on the language. Maybe you’ll even find it useful for talking to Parisian cab drivers.
I’ve put together a short glossary. You can find a longer version here.
dit (don’t get me started on the frustration of this word; basically, your ancestor may have used another surname sometimes)
child
enfant
died
décédé
father
pere
godfather
parrain
godmother*
marraine
month
mois
grandfather
grand-père
grandmother
grand-mère
mother
mere
name, given
prénom, nom de baptême
name, surname
nom, nom de famille
parish
paroisse, paroissiaux, paroissiale
sister
sœur
uncle
oncle
*As an aside, I grew up in Cajun country, where Cajun French was routinely spoken by the older generations. A few endearments were taught to us even though we didn’t learn to speak Cajun French fluently. My cousins and I called our godfathers “parrain.” However, I’ve never heard a godmother referred to as “marraine” even though it is the proper French word. Instead, we called our godmothers “nanny” – and I am “nanny” to my godchildren. I wonder if this is a riff on marraine.
As someone who loves the library and proudly puts that love on display with a sign in the front yard, I don’t often spring for a pricey book. I can, after all, peruse “The Catholic Church in Louisiana” whenever I’d like by visiting the library. However, I recently noticed that this treasured book was available through an online used bookseller for more than I wanted to pay but about what I was willing to pay. So, I treated myself. Merry Christmas to me.
“The Catholic Church in Louisiana” is a very well researched, exhaustive history of just about every Catholic church in Louisiana. It’s full of rich details, from scandals to priests who ministered to the same flock for decades. It’s such a good book that Mrs. Theodore F. Genter put a plea in a 1958 issue of the New Orleans “Times-Picayune” for a copy of it. She didn’t get the title quite right, but it’s amusing that she even had to ask. You can read her inquiry below.
I don’t know if the nuns at the St. Catherine of Siena convent ever got a copy of the book, but I do know that Roger Baudier was a brilliant researcher.
This is how Baudier was described by an unnamed friend in the Nov. 18, 1976, edition of the “States Item”: “(He was) never happier than when he was browsing in documents and ferreting out historical data long obscure.”
So revered was Baudier in the world of words that journalist Peter Finney Jr. wrote an article about him in 2013 – 53 years after Baudier died.
Baudier’s childhood was rather Dickensian. His parents died weeks apart before he was 10. Little Roger was put in the care of a great aunt who regaled him with stories of the past. He attended school in the French Quarter, wrote plays while in elementary school, studied at a seminary, tried to enlist in the military six times during wartime (he finally was given a job as an interpreter only for the war to end as he was packing his bags) and eventually forged a vocation as a church historian.
As a writer, Baudier was forever tumbling down long forgotten rabbit holes. He researched and described how Indians made bread and how flour was produced in colonial Louisiana. His real passion, though, were the Catholic churches that dominate small communities across south Louisiana and some of north Louisiana.
He edited a weekly newspaper called the “Catholic Action” from 1933 to 1949. On the weekends, he motored to small Louisiana churches. While his wife and children enjoyed a picnic on the church grounds, Baudier pored over the church records. His meticulous research led to one archivist remembering him as “the most prolific Southern Catholic writer and historian of the mid-1900s.”
I own two of Baudier’s books – and I treasure them. You can find libraries and archives that house his works at worldcat.
The book sought by his niece for the nuns is an astonishing work that took Baudier six years to write. It’s crammed with fascinating details and tells the story of the Catholic Church in Louisiana beginning in 1528.
A 1938 newspaper article described what readers would find:
I just finished a rather fabulous book about gumbo.
The mission of the book – “Gumbo Life” – was to determine gumbo’s origins. Gumbo is rather sacred in Louisiana. It’s a very personal dish. It starts with a roux, which is flour and oil mixed together over a low heat until it turns a rich shade of brown and your arm is tired – and oil spattered – from all that stirring. Other ingredients include a holy trinity (bell pepper, onion and celery), broth and protein. Everyone has their own rules when it comes to gumbo. One of my rules is that okra is fine for shrimp gumbo but has absolutely no place in chicken and sausage gumbo. Also, if you use a jarred roux, don’t tell me. I will judge you.
While we’re clear on our gumbo preferences in Louisiana, we’re not clear on the dish’s origins. I subscribe to the belief that a melting pot of influences created what we now know as gumbo. African slaves brought an okra stew. The French, known for their fussy cooking, added a roux. The Spanish, famed for their bold flavors, added peppers. The Germans, who had a flair for smoking and preserving meat, added sausage. All of those cultural influences met in the boot during our early days, and gumbo just evolved.
Nowadays gumbo is so well known that I actually had a conversation last month with a cab driver in Italy about it. He wants to leave Florence and come to New Orleans just to sample it and possibly learn how to make it. Can you imagine? I’ve waited my whole life to sample Italian pasta and see the Florence duomo – and he’s waited his whole life to experience gumbo.
But back to the Germans.
Germans settled in Louisiana because of a Scotsman named John Law. In the 1700s, the French needed to populate Louisiana, and they turned to Law as a recruiter.
I knew about the German Coast of Louisiana – present day St. John the Baptist, St. James and St. Charles parishes – where German settlers congregated on the west bank of the Mississippi River. What I didn’t know was that they were duped into leaving their native country.
Coast is a bit misleading. Don’t picture German immigrants in sun loungers alongside crashing waves. Coast simply referred to the Mississippi River. Much like the Nile is to Egypt, the Mississippi is a lifeline for Louisiana. It’s vital to farming and ports.
Law came onto the scene in 1717, when he was granted a charter by France to establish a colony in Louisiana. He started with French settlers, but they weren’t robust enough for the wild terrain. So, he turned to the Germans. He tempted them with dishonest pamphlets and glorious maps.
Things weren’t great in Germany at the time. War and a bad king created hunger, abuse and religious persecution. Law probably could’ve just said, “Hey, I’m offering somewhere different to live.” Instead, he promised a land of gold, silver, copper and lead mines. Louisiana has none of those things. Even worse, he had no real plan in place for helping them settle once they got there.
The Germans were fooled, swindled through a slick marketing campaign, into leaving all they knew for a foreign land. For many, it would be a fatal fool’s journey.
How many actually tried to reach Louisiana? Probably thousands. Some never made it onto a ship. The ports became clogged with Germans trying to board a ship bound for the new colony. Many died waiting for passage in cramped quarters that became havens for disease. Those who got onto a ship had it no better. The accommodations were appalling with not even enough drinking water for passengers, leading to the transport becoming known as “pest ships.”
How many reached Louisiana? Maybe hundreds. It’s difficult to say. Let’s just say that if you’re descended from those who immigrated to the colony, you come from very good stock. Not only did your ancestors cross an ocean, they survived the hell they encountered upon arriving.
Most of what I’ve told you thus far is well trodden material. Once the Germans arrived in Louisiana, accounts get a little murkier with historians debating what unfolded. I’ll use an account from the Oct. 9, 1911, edition of the “Daily Picayune” for the rest of their story.
It’s clear that the Germans were at sixes and sevens upon arriving in the new world. What they’d been promised was a lie, and there was no safety net of food and housing. They were told – probably rather curtly – to figure it out. However, it’s hard to immediately start farming the wilderness when you’re given few resources. They repaired to Arkansas, where Law had a concession of land. This proved to be a disastrous decision for many more died.
Supposedly, the ones who survived made their way back to New Orleans and pleaded for a ride home – as in back across the ocean. Can you blame them? Gov. Bienville persuaded them to stay and settle on what would become known as the German Coast. Maybe. Historians are in disagreement on whether the Germans who went to Arkansas settled on the German Coast or if the German settlers there were completely unrelated to that group.
What is clear is that German settlers survived terrible circumstances to build communities along the Mississippi River above New Orleans. With few resources, they built farms that not only fed themselves but also New Orleans. Indeed, without the Germans, New Orleans might not have survived its early years. They never found gold mines in the new world, but those who lived did find an existence that’s lasted for generations.
louisianagenealogygirl 