I have big, tremendous, exciting news for Louisiana genealogy buffs. We’re talking news worthy of a drum roll, a musical introduction, maybe a loud bang of the keys on a grand piano.
Are you ready?
Louisiana death certificates are online at Ancestry!
Now give me a moment to defend myself. I realize that you have to pay for Ancestry, and I’m all about free resources. However, you can peruse Ancestry for free at your public library.
Death certificates are a tremendous resource for family sleuths. They’re packed with details – although be careful about how trusting you are of those details. The person supplying the information often was unsure of key facts.
Here’s my granny in 1963 reporting the death of her parrain. His mother was her much beloved grandmother – and she spelled her name wrong. It was just a few days before Christmas, and she loved her parrain very much so she was probably just distracted.
I’m shocked – and thrilled – to see these certificates online. The last I talked to the State Archives about this, there was no plan to make them this easily available. The certificates were a revenue stream for the state albeit probably a small one.
Here’s what I knew: Jean Baptiste Hebert and Doralise Gautreaux had but one child.
That child, Ophelia, was brought up by her maternal aunt and grew up in a large household of cousins. Among those cousins was my granny’s favorite grandmother, Merante Aucoin.
On census records, Ophelia was listed as deaf and dumb in 1870 and a laborer in 1880. She never married and died age 48.
That’s all I knew about poor Ophelia other than her parents’ names and that Merante’s mother took her in.
Here’s what I didn’t know (and it makes Ophelia something of a miracle child): Ophelia’s mother was ancient by the standards of the time when she had her only child. She was ancient when she got married. And, reading into court records, it’s a wonder that Doralise was even allowed to wed.
Doralise, was deemed incapable of handling her inheritance after her father died.
She was interdicted, which means the courts thought she was incompetent or crazy. I know this because her curator and the interdiction are mentioned in Assumption Parish probate records.
See below.
At 10 am on Jan. 2, 1837, Doralise’s closest relatives gathered for a meeting with the parish judge, Bela Hubbard.
I’m going to have to spend some time on this because it’s a little hard to read the most important parts. I can tell that they were discussing a mortgage.
If Doralise was incompetent, how did she manage to marry and have a child? Interestingly, she married at 38 – a very advanced age for a woman to marry in 1849. She had Ophelia and died age 43.
I started wondering if Doralise was a little simple and passed that onto her only child. In my experience, interdictions are stored with probate records. However, I couldn’t find one for Doralise even though she was clearly interdicted.
Because I’m a nerd, I spent my birthday at the Assumption Parish Courthouse to do some digging. Research is my version of happiness.
I struck out although I did find Doralise’s probate record from when she died in 1850.
Rooting around in the vault, I flipped open the index to civil records … and there was Doralise. She sued the judge over her interdiction. I still can’t find her actual interdiction, but this was interesting.
The court case seems to be confined to one page. It’s in a collection of entries about court cases from that era. And, the handwriting is awful. I recognize the swoopy lettering.
For some reason, there was a clerk with awful handwriting in 1800s Assumption Parish who was allowed to write far too many court records.
I’m going to spend more time on this and go back for another look through the files.
But, look at Doralise: fighting back!
Here’s what I’ll never know: Whether Doralise’s only child truly was deaf and dumb. Granted, she never married, which was unusual. She survived a yellow fever epidemic that erased multiple members of her extended family after she moved in with the Aucoins.
Oh, to have letters or diaries that delve into this.
Capt. Aucoin’s riverboat. He purchased it in 1880, long after the horror of 1861.
Children tell tales. And no one likes to tell a tale more than an imaginative young boy.
However, Joseph Gregoire (always called J.F.) and Apoline Dupuis Aucoin likely spent years regretting not believing the story spun by their young son about the family nurse.
The year was 1861 in Assumption Parish. J.F. Aucoin was in the process of amassing wealth and recognition as a riverboat captain despite being illiterate. He and his wife had buried a daughter, but still had three healthy boys. On the eve of the war, they purchased a slave woman to help them care for the children. At first, Aspasie was visibly unhappy about being taken from her previous home, but she seemed to adjust.
Everyone thought it was a terrible accident when the Aucoins’ middle son, 7-year-old Elfege St. Clair, tumbled into a well and drowned in 1861. Children do sometimes fall into wells.
A few weeks later, though, his elder brother Leo was found with his head plunged into a jar of water. Little Leo was rescued and revived. He told the family that the children’s nurse, the enslaved woman named Aspasie, had thrown him into the jar. His parents dismissed it as a tall tale.
The next day, Leo was found dead in the family corn bin. A dog was blamed and shot for the child’s death while the Aucoins grieved the loss of two children.
A few months passed. The Aucoins buried their children and limped through summer with their last remaining child, 4-year-old Narcisse.
August is a brutal month in Louisiana. The heat is overwhelming, and fall can’t arrive soon enough. Morning and evening are the only times to find somewhat bearable temperatures.
Perhaps in search of the morning breeze, Apoline took a stroll in the garden while Narcisse slept. She was startled by Narcisse’s cries from the house. Rushing to the child’s bedroom, she passed Aspasie in the hall and found her youngest child with his throat slit. On a nearby table was a kitchen knife covered in blood.
The Aucoins must have had nearby neighbors for they heard the mother’s shrieks and confronted Aspasie. At first she denied any involvement in the children’s death. Eventually, though, she admitted “with revolting cynicism” to killing the children.
What I’ve told you is what I gleaned from newspapers and burial records. I don’t know what Aspasie had to say about why she supposedly did this. You do have to wonder if she was torn from her own children.
I can tell you what happened to Aspasie. She was hanged. Her end was noted in Capt. Aucoin’s obituary.
The Aucoins would endure another four decades, living to see Teddy Roosevelt elected president. They wouldn’t welcome any more children.
Remember phone books? I could spend hours flipping through them, looking at the ads and marveling that some families sprung for a children’s line. It was a sad day when they were discontinued as much as I welcomed the kitchen drawer space.
Fortunately, libraries have hung onto these volumes. Best of all, they have directories dating back to before the advent of land lines. In those days, the volumes were slim enough to include occupations if the resident chose to share.
City directories from the 1920s captured residential and business addresses. I’m not sure why these were particularly useful at the time. Did you show up unannounced at a fellow church member’s house after locating their home address?
Here’s an example from the 1927 Baton Rouge directory:
Miss Beatrice was a sales lady for an orange drink company. Clay Montgomery worked at a downtown storage company. And my great-grandmother’s cousin Raoul Montet was a carpenter.
I took a little Google drive down Canal, where Raoul and his family lived. His address is now an empty lot. The neighborhood has declined so the house probably was in disrepair and torn down.
I’ve had far better luck finding directories for big towns than small communities. Check them out the next time you’re at the library!
We’re approaching the anniversary of Dr. Ben Guilbeau’s death so I thought I’d share some more memories of the grandfather my husband never met.
Dr. Ben was born in 1860 and died in 1935 when the youngest of his 12 children was only a few months old. He was a county doctor who practiced medicine for 50 years while somehow also managing to farm.
Here he is with his third and final wife, Natolia Castille. The story is that Natolia – an old maid nurse – was hired to tend to Dr. Ben’s second wife (my husband’s grandmother) and married him after he was widowed yet again. Nat lived to be 102. Isn’t she pretty in this photo?
It’s a little odd to visit their double gravestone in Grand Coteau. In life, 31 years separated them. Then, she outlived him by nearly 60 years. And he was 74 when he died.
I’ll share some excerpts from a book a descendant put together years ago. It includes a rare photo of my husband’s grandmother, who was a stunning beauty.
You’ll also see his trailblazing daughter – my husband’s Aunt Wilhelmina. She was a fierce cook. My father-in-law said he’d eat her gumbo while clutching a glass of milk to counter the heat. She liked a spicy gumbo. She also was the first female mayor in St. Landry Parish.
This is Benjamin Guilbeau – the grandfather my husband never met – and his eldest daughters. My husband never met them either.
As you can see from the photograph, Vivian and Louise are grown women in this photograph yet they’re firmly in the days of horses and buggies. They were the first bookends in a long line of children by four different women (most of whom he married).
Between 1887 and 1935, Dr. Guilbeau fathered at least a dozen children.
These daughters – the only surviving children from the first marriage – are a distant memory to the children of their half siblings. Louise died in 1957 and Vivian in 1912 so even my father-in-law only met one of his own sisters from this first marriage.
It’s nice to see an image of them – even if isn’t the greatest of images.
Charles Tamplait might be Charles Tompley (emphasis on might), but is he also Charles Joseph Templet?
Let me explain.
Genealogy research can be rather vexing because names are misspelled and key details don’t always match like they should. And, no one is more vexing to research than the Templets.
The Templets are the teflon branch of my family tree. They seemed loathe to leave a paper trail. Marriage records are missing. Babies’ baptism records are spotty. Court records were checked out of the courthouse and never returned.
To be fair, I doubt they deliberately built brick walls between themselves and future generations. It just always seems that the priest was absentminded when it came to recording some of their life events. They had rotten luck.
The only arrow in my quiver is that Templet isn’t as common of a name as Boudreaux or Hebert.
So, when I saw a Union pension application for a Charles Tamplait, I thought it might be my great-great grandmother Anaise Templet Giroir’s brother. After finally receiving the record from the National Archives, I’ve hit yet another Templet brick wall.
A military packet in the file (above) shows that the man applying for the pension enlisted as Charles Tamplait of Thibodaux in 1864 and served until 1865. Certainly, the Templets lived in and near Thibodaux so that tracks.
The next page is a badly spelled letter (above) from Charles Tamplet – signing his name as Charles Tompley – inquiring about the status of his pension application. The letter is dated Aug. 12, 1913, from Rayne.
Anaise’s brother Charles was living in Rayne in 1910. So, again, that tracks.
Most of the file is consumed with a dispute between the Bureau of Pensions and Charles Tamplait/Tompley over his military service. The bureau contended he deserted. Charles insisted he had small pox and was in an infirmary camp for several months before rejoining his company.
Finally, on page 13 of the 17-page file, I come to the declaration for pension (below). This is a highly useful resource because applicants were asked to give their date of birth.
My Charles – according to the church records which surprisingly exist for him – was born on Dec. 22, 1849. The Charles in the pension application lists his birthday as June 11, 1846.
Were it just a matter of dueling birthdates, I’d be tempted to overlook that oversight. My own father-in-law wasn’t sure of his exact birthday. His mother died young, and his baptism record was smudged.
But, since this is the Templets, there’s yet another brick for that massive brick wall.
In his pension application, Charles describes himself as being 5’9″ with black hair and black eyes. The Charles who enlisted apparently was 5’4″ with blue eyes and fair hair. I’m not even sure Charles Tompley is Charles Tamplait much less Charles Joseph Templet.
This past weekend, I spotted this beauty after emerging from a questionable alleyway that was the most direct route between my niece’s dance recital and my faraway car. I’d foolishly misjudged just how many people would head to downtown Shreveport for a recital despite the production value (more sequins than a Richard Simmons tank top) and the talent level (my niece dazzled and later informed me that the classical music I liked was ripped from K-pop). So, I’d overlooked it during my speed walk to the theater in Louisiana humidity.
This is the Johnson Building at 418 Milam St. It currently belongs to a wealthy businessman who tends to collect downtown buildings and then not do anything with them. You can see in the photo below just how many windows are broken. But, look at the trim. I spent a few moments puzzling whether those are balconies on either side of the top floor.
I’m always sad when I see craftsmanship like this left to decay. Ideas have been floated about turning the building into apartments, but nothing’s materialized. How long can this grand lady hold on?
Here’s the story of the eight-story Johnson Building.
Before there was a skyscraper (by Shreveport standards), this Milam Street site was home to the Ardis family.
Col. Clinton Harry Ardis moved to Louisiana from South Carolina as a young man and established a wholesale grocery business. Col. Ardis was successful and shared the wealth. He donated money to build a school as well as a church that once bore his name.
Although he raised his family in Minden, business brought him to Shreveport, where he settled at some point. By 1885, he owned a newly built two-story house on Milam Street in downtown Shreveport, which he was seeking to sell in consequence of “Mr. and Mrs. Parker leaving … (and his) family being small” as he wrote in a newspaper advert. Mr. and Mrs. Parker were his son-in-law and daughter who left Louisiana to seek their fortunes in St. Louis.
Was this house the one that was later demolished to make way for a skyscraper? It’s unclear. What is clear is that the Ardis family home that once stood where the skyscraper now soars is the one where Col. Ardis’ funeral was held on Feb. 17, 1906.
Twin Blends unearthed a fabulous photo of houses that once stood just a block from the Ardis family home. Ardis’ funeral procession may have passed these beauties on its way to the railroad station for the trip to burial in Minden.
It was Col. Harris’ daughter Penny who demolished the family home to pave the way for an office building named after her family in 1920. She didn’t cut corners. The architect was Edward F. Neild, who created the beautiful Scottish Rite Cathedral and a number of other gorgeous Shreveport buildings.
By the 1920s, downtown wasn’t as residential as it once was so the decision was understandable. Only the rare downtown family home was still standing by the 1950s. Today, they’re all gone.
The Ardis Building was to house storerooms on lower floors with offices on higher floors. Ferrying visitors to those floors would be three elevators. Construction workers toiled day and night to complete the project.
Ardis’ daughter and grandson managed the property for a bit, but the family sold the venture in 1943. Bus lines executive W. Harry Johnson purchased the building for $400,000. For a time, the property was known as the Ardis Johnson Building. Today, it’s just the Johnson Building.
Downtown Shreveport has the wonderful photo of the building in its heyday.
Johnson died just five years after buying the building, but tenants continued occupying the space that the Ardis family created.
Through the years, the building provided quarters – naturally – for a number of attorneys (the courthouse is down the street). It was also home to a cafeteria, a beauty salon and a drug store (if my eyes are correctly identifying the sign in the above photo). These were the glory days, when the building was the first Shreveport office to enjoy air conditioning.
It was front page news when Michael’s Cafeteria opened on the ground floor in 1936. A glass partition separated the kitchen from the dining room to spare patrons from food odors. Two serving lines and smiling workers greeted diners in air conditioned comfort.
By 1942, Michael’s was bankrupt and putting its stainless steel serving counter, coffee stand, steam table, tables, chairs and even the lauded air conditioning units up for sale.
Still, meals were to be found at the Johnson Building for decades to come.
Artist A. J. Cariere IV housed his artwork and a po boy shop on the ground floor until 2003, when the enterprise moved down the street and attempted to breathe life into a shuttered department store building. Today, the century-old Johnson Building stands empty after being snapped up for $100,000 by a businessman who gutted it and then set the project aside.
There’s a lesson here. Gutting a building changes it dramatically. It’s difficult to get preservation tax credits when you’ve recklessly destroyed parts of a historic building.
Actually, I’m using the word “aunt” loosely. Eugenie De Generes was born in 1808 so I’m not even sure how many greats to put in front of her to describe her connection to the famous comedian. I think four is the correct answer.
There’s also a lot more I don’t know about Eugenie herself. Details tend to be scant about maiden schoolteacher aunts who lived – and likely died – in the 1800s.
Still, Miss Eugenie was very resourceful, providing help to the French nuns who crossed an ocean to settle in Marksville. She taught English at the sisters’ school in exchange for $200 a year and the education of her four nieces. She advised the sisters on what to charge students who boarded, posted letters for them and even selected a secondhand piano for the school during a trip to New Orleans.
I believe Eugenie was the daughter of Jean Constantin DeGeneres and his wife, Zepherine. Their son, Henry Constant, most certainly created the line that leads to Ellen. Jean Constantin and Zepherine were an interesting couple. Their story begins in Haiti, which they supposedly fled in a laundry cart during a revolution. You can read more below.
But, back to Eugenie. I came across her in the collection of letters I just finished reading. Sister Mary Hyacinth faithfully chronicled her work building schools for the Catholic Church in north and central Louisiana during the 1800s.
Eugenie was one of the first people they encountered in Marksville upon arriving from France. She seems to have gone back and forth to New Orleans quite a bit. She last makes an appearance in the sister’s letters in 1856, when she was tasked with bringing back an Irish girl who could do some American cooking.
That’s where my knowledge of Eugenie’s life ends. However, I did find a treasure trove of information on her family tree.
