In search of the Montet Plantation in Assumption Parish

A mention of Aurelie in the National Real Estate Journal.

Family legend has it that my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Montet Giroir, came from a well-to-do family who lost everything with the conclusion of the Civil War. Certainly, they didn’t have any money after the war. The family lived very hand to mouth.

I wondered if the Montets really were prosperous and dug through old newspapers and succession records to find out. The succession records talk of a sugar house and property (this was after the Civil War so no slaves at that point). Newspaper accounts refer to an Aurelie Plantation in Assumption Parish that belonged to the Montets.

I’m pretty familiar with the swath of bayou road between Plattenville and Thibodaux. I travel it regularly to see family. The big plantation home in the area is Madewood, which belonged to the Pughs. I’d never heard of Aurelie.

To this day, there’s a Montet Street in Assumption Parish. Could this have been the Montet property of the 1800s? Montet Street is a dirt road.

At this point, I should point out – once again – that the mention of the word “plantation” in the family tree likely doesn’t mean that your family once lived at Tara. Plantation is another word for farm. Sorry.

But I went in search of Aurelie anyway. Elizabeth’s father came from a large family who lived near Plattenville. One of his brothers was Zephirin Montet. It was Zephirin who launched Aurelie, which he named for his wife.

Zephirin Rosemond Appolinaire Montet now rests in the Plattenville cemetery. Nearby is the final resting place of my great-great-grandparents, Joseph Augustin Giroir and Elizabeth Montet Giroir.

Zephirin was actually Zephirin Rosemond Appolinaire Montet. He was a prosperous planter in Assumption Parish. His grandson Numa Montet was a U.S. congressman.

It appears that the extended Montet family called Aurelie home. The Assumption Pioneer – still in circulation to this day – recorded Zephirin’s sister-in-law Pauline Truxillo Montet dying at Aurelie in 1886.

I don’t know if Elizabeth grew up on Aurelie or if she grew up on a neighboring property. I remember my grandmother talking about the Montet home, but she never clarified if it was the Florentin Montet home, the Zephirin Montet home or the home of Florentin and Zephirin’s father.

What I suspect is that Aurelie originally was the property of Elizabeth’s grandfather (father to Zephirin and her own father, Joseph Florentin). It seems likely that the property got divvied up when the old man died, and Zephirin called his portion Aurelie for his wife. Perhaps Zephirin’s portion was a real money-maker – or maybe he added to it and expanded the acreage.

A similar arrangement happened after my husband’s grandfather died. Each child got a portion of the family farm. The entire farm still is in his descendants’ hands to this day, but it’s not really intact. Instead, it got sliced up into thirds for his three children. One of those thirds has been more profitable than the other two-thirds. It’s the luck of the draw.

From the succession records, it seems that the Montets shared a sugar house (where sugar was boiled into syrup). It appears that Zephirin and Florentin got shares in the sugar house when their father died. I’ll have to dig up Joseph Philippe Montet’s succession record, which most likely is in French, for clarity.

In 1912, Aurelie changed hands. The National Real Estate Journal described the sale as one of the biggest real estate deals of the month. The Montet Company Ltd. sold the plantation on Bayou Lafourche to Joseph Webre. At that time, the plantation included 600 acres, including 500 acres in cultivation, residences, cabins and a sugar house. The sale was speculated to be $50,000.

Could this be Aurelie? That dirt road to the left is known as Montet Road.

Other accounts name the buyer as John Webre, who died in 1915. It looks like Numa Montet bought the family property back temporarily and then sold it to an Edmond E. Webre.

I’m still in search for more on Aurelie. An old map of Assumption Parish probably would help.

 

 

The problem of Apolinaire Frioux

I pity any one with the main line of Frioux to trace. It could be Frioux, Fryou, Frillot, Frero or goodness knows what else.

I first came upon the name after discovering that my grandmother’s godfather, Oleus Oscar Montet, had been married before he married my Aunt Louise.

I always felt a little sorry for Oleus. He was always described to me as a very nice man who would give my mother and her sister fruit (a precious thing for a poor family). And he was married to Aunt Louise, who was never described in kind terms. Oleus and Louise had but one child, Paul, who died in his teens.

Ten years before he married Louise, Oleus married Josephine Frioux. She died a little more than a year after the wedding. My guess is that she died in childbirth, but I’m guessing because no one ever told me about Josephine. I stumbled across her in the Catholic record books.

Josephine’s father was Apolinaire Frioux. Her mother was Philomene Gautreaux. Josephine was the only daughter in a family of four children. When she was 14, her father died. Her mother died five years later. Josephine herself was only 20 when she died. I don’t know much about Josephine’s little family. One brother died young. The two other brothers moved to Texas.  Frioux/Fryou/Frillot has been a tough name to trace.

The name Apolinaire was interesting to me, though, because Oleus’ mother had a sister who married an Apolinaire Frioux. I wondered if it could be the same man and if he had two families. It turns out he had three families (but all in a respectable way).

I hadn’t been able to make the link until I found a succession record for Celestine Aucoin, Oleus’ aunt and Apolinaire’s second wife. I knew Celestine died in the yellow fever epidemic. I didn’t realize that she had enough property for a succession to be filed.

In 1880, Apolinaire went to the Franklin courthouse to report that Celestine had died on September 24, 1879, leaving behind one (surviving) child, Florestine. Apolinaire wanted to get married again (only a year after burying poor Celestine) and needed to separate out Celestine’s property for their daughter.

Here’s the inventory:

1. A tract of land lying and being in the parish of St. Mary having two acres front on Bayou Boeuf and containing about 44 superficial acres more of less with adjoining tract to the rear line appraised and valued at $350.
2. Nine heads of horned cattle.
3. One small Creole mars (I have no idea what this means).
4. One plow.

Total=$452, half of which went to Florestine.

If you read successions, you read a lot about family meetings. I doubt they were as formal as the legal papers make them sound. Regardless, in one description of a family meeting, it was revealed that Apolinaire wanted to marry a Philomene Gautreaux and that it would be his third marriage.

So now I know that Apolinaire was Oleus’ father-in-law and uncle.

War of 1812 Pension Records

If you love family tree research, then you know how exciting it is to find a new resource, especially for long, long, long-dead ancestors. It’s also amazing how many records now are available at the click of a mouse. It makes me worry for the survival of dusty archives, but that’s a topic for another day.

The other day, I checked out http://www.fold3.com. It’s a depository of military records. It’s going to have to pick up more data in order for me to spring for the subscription price. However, I enjoyed my free trial.

I discovered War of 1812 pension records on fold3. All I really knew about the War of 1812 was the Battle of New Orleans. It never occurred to me that some of my ancestors might have actually fought in it. I just assumed they were busy tending to their farming along the bayous in Louisiana.

From reading the pension files, it seems the federal government was a little skeptical that the Cajuns left their farms to fight in the Battle of New Orleans. I saw rejection after rejection of pension applications. However, there’s some really great information in there, and some good gossip about early day slimy lawyers.

Here’s the file card for Joseph Montet.

Joseph was born Joseph Philippe Montet in 1789. He and his wife, Marie Francoise Giroir, had eight children. I’m descended from Joseph Florentin Montet, their fourth child.

Joseph claimed to have served in Capt. Borel Aycock’s company. He said he signed up at Donaldsonville in 1814 and was discharged on March 1, 1815.  The records confirm this was true – although I read many records where no service could be confirmed.

The page above is the 1800s version of a fill-in-the-blank form. You can see where Joseph – or someone filling it out for him – filled in the blanks. Joseph later supplied an “x” for his mark on a signature so it’s doubtful this is his handwriting.

Joseph also made a claim for a land bounty, and here again, was something I didn’t know. If you served in the war, you could get acreage depending on when you enlisted. However, the land initially was in Arkansas, Illinois or Missouri. Later, though, bounty land warrants were awarded in a broader area.

Swearing that Joseph served in the war were Jean Baptiste Guillot and Simeon Landry.

I don’t know if Joseph Montet got his land. But it was fun to get another glimpse into his life.

Other pension files revealed death dates, marriage records and baptism records. Even better, fold3 is accessible from my laptop through the local library. UPDATE: It appears the library has discontinued access to fold3.