A History Of The Breaux Family

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
A History Of The Breaux Family
Addendum To The Allendom Papers

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
PART 6

"The Family-Who-Lived-Next-Door..."

One of the more frustrating puzzles we encountered, (which should clear up once we get the children of HONORE and MAGDALENE sorted out),is the Family-Who-Lived-Next-Door. A constant in the mid 19th century census records, the large family headed by one Joachim Braud consistently occupies the land just south of EDOUARD, Sr.’s. For along time, the relative ages of the two families (a couple of Joachim’s kids appear to end up over at ED and ROSALIE’S place, led us to believe they were brothers. When we finally noticed that MAGDELEINE was 42 when EDOUARD was born, it became far more likely that he and

Joachim, though close enough in age to consider themselves of the same generation, are more likely uncle and nephew. We are particularly fascinated by this family because they are
in a position to offer us the clearest answer to one of the questions we carried with us to Louisiana: How did the family and community view the marriage of EDOUARD, JR., and CELESTINE?

Here’s a look at the census records for the family in 1850 and 1860:

1850 1860

BREAUD, Joachim 42/M/W BREAUD, JOACHIM 55/M(mulatto) BREAUD, Marie 35/F ----------Marie Joseph 48/F(mulatto) BREAUD, Marie Louise 20/F ----------Marie Louise 37/F(mulatto)
BREAUD, Sosthene 28/M BREAUD, Sosthene 28/M/M(mulatto)
BREAUD, Oscar 16/M BREAUD, Oscar 26/M/M(Mulatto*
BREAUD, Amelia 15/F BREAUD, Amelia 24/F/M(Mulatto)
BREAUD, Colette 12/F BREAUD, Rose Amie 22/F/M/Mulatto) BREAUD, Elodie 10/F BREAUD, Elodie 20/F
BREAUD, Theophile 8/M BREAUD, Theophile 18/M/M(Mulatto*
BREAUD, Darvina 7/F BREAUD, Dorvina 16/F/M(Mulatto
BREAUD, Albert 3/M BREAUD, Desireé 14/F/M(Mulatto)*

*It should be noted that Oscar and Theophile are listed as "Sugar Maker" and Desireé, Mason Apprentice.

Obviously, census records can be chancy things -- Colette seems to have undergone a name change, and it does seem odd that Elodie is the only non-mulatto amongst the children, and a couple of spellings have some minor differences. But for now, the most noteworthy difference in the record is the new (1860 emphasis of preserving womens’ maiden names (in EDOUARD’S family, ROSALIE is identified by the last name, Cloatré), and recording racial classifications. Joachim’s wife (and perhaps her sister?) suddenly have no last names and were likely former slaves or the offspring of free-negroes. Were they married or co-habiting? And who was the 70-year-old Louise Breaud of the 1850 census? Joachim’s mother? The ages are obviously inaccurate; in a ten year period Marie Joseph goes from 35 to 48,while Marie Louise jumps from 20 to 37. If the elderly Louise had made it to the 1860 census, would she have had a last name? Might she be Mary Louise’s mother? One thing for sure, EDOUARD JR. and CELESTINE didn’t exactly break any new ground when they fell in love!

Another clue: For nearly 100 years, the Arceneaux family (Acadians) had lives not far beyond the Breaux, down river. Joachim’s son, Oscar (the mulatto "Sugar Maker" in the 1860 census) will marry one of the Arceneaux girls (Ophelia) and in 1877 their son, Valcour, will be godfather to LEONTINE BREAUX and GEORGE ALLEN’S fourth child, Isabelle Allen LeBoeuf/Warnie, our grandmother and their mother of Ruth Warnie Romine/Strange, one of the giants on whose shoulders our research stands (12).

And one final note from the 1860 census. A never-before-seen name appears on land between Joachim’s and the Arceneauxs - a widower named Tricuit and his eight children ranging in age from 1 to 11, the eldest a boy named Climent (22) is a school teacher. Tucked in between the Tricuits and the Arceneauxs is a fascinating entry -- landowners with no last name. Three free blacks live there: a 76-year-old blind woman named Marie Louise, 49-year-old Therese, and a 6-year-old boy named Marthe. Now how do you suppose this came about?

The devil may be in the details, but the trust is often found in the big picture, so let’s step back for a moment and look at what’s going on here...

We’ve got EDOUARD, SR.’s (probable) nephew living next door with two mulatto women, one of whom is his actual or common law wife, and a whole brood of their mulatto children. We’ve got prominent families like the Arceneauxs witnessing Breaux weddings then marrying of of their granddaughters off to one of the mulatto Breaux boys. There are school teachers all over the place, (that teacher from France lives with the Arceneaux family), one of whom is close enough to the Brauds to witness their son’s marriage. Right in the middle of it all is a small piece of land owned by three blacks -- an elderly blind woman, a middle aged woman and a child of 6 -- who don’t exactly sound like they muscled their way in with a wad of cash and forced some bigot to part with a parcel of land. Someone must have given them the land and set them up there. The newcomer Tricuits? The Arceneauxs? Joachim or EDOUARD? Mid-19th century St. James may not have been colorblind, but it’s safe to say the big picture leaves plenty of room for EDOUARD, JR. to marry CELESTINE after Emancipation without causing any heart attacks amongst the family members.

An accent on education seems to permeate the air -- the sprawling Gaudet plantation may have been the source of the senior brothers’ wealth, but the "Occupation" column of the census on the eve of the Civil War states that they are "J.K. and Bros. -- Attorneys at Law". Brother Theophile Gaudet (37) is the Clerk of St. James.

We need not travel far to find the echoes of this atmosphere in our own family. The Reunion Document mentions LEONTINE’S daughter, Mary Alice Allen Villavaso (born 1885) who founded the first black school in St. James Parish. Alice was the twin of Ellis Allen and taught for ten years in the small, one-room schoolhouse she founded. Later, the St. Louis Elementary School, with seven classrooms, was built and Alice went on to serve as its principal for another 25 years. We talked to several people in St. James who were her pupils and remember her well. Lillian "Doonie" Williams, daughter of Alice’s younger brother, Louis Allen, and current proprietor of the old family homestead, remembers helping Alice cook lunches for her students and carrying them over to the school. Today, the Fifth Ward Elementary Accelerated School (motto: "A great place to learn") in St. James, is located just a short distance upriver from Braud Road on the street named in her honor -- at the corner of Highway #18 and Villavaso Street.

The Waist of the Hourglass...

And so we come to EDOUARD, JR., AND CELESTINE, the grains of sand at the waist of our hourglass. We don’t have nearly as many answers as we’d have liked, and, indeed, seem to have only added to the list of questions. But we did find one important missing piece of the puzzle -- why the gap between the birth of their daughters prior to 1850, and the birth of their son, Theophile, in 1863?

As mentioned earlier, we can’t help but wonder if CELESTINE might not have grown up on the Breaux plantation. (NFS: We didn’t have time to investigate the slave records of the era but are confident that future sleuthing would yield some interesting results in this area.)

EDOUARD, JR. was 19 when he and CELESTINE became lovers. Their daughter, LEONTINE, was born on February 7, 1846, and one of our greatest thrills was to actually run our fingers over the original baptismal certificate, bound in a large volume and covered with thin rice paper for protection. (A) The ink has faded to a warm gold, but still states clearly - in French - that, "In the year 1846, the 4th of October, l the undersigned, curé of the parish have baptized Marie Leontine, born the 7th of February last, natural daughter of Celestine, slave to Edouard Braud".

Nineteen years (and a Civil War) later, on another October afternoon in 1865, (after Emancipation had paved the way) EDOUARD (39) and CELESTINE "of unknown age", were married.

Their affair had resumed at least three years previously, however, since the document makes clear that they now have a two-year-old son, Theophile. It appears to be the first marriage for CELESTINE, but the second for EDOUARD, JR.

In 1852, a few weeks before his daughter, LEONTINE’S sixth birthday, five months before his younger brother, Bienvenu’s marriage to the Bergeron girl, EDOUARD, JR. married Lise Dongieux. (ABD-7) The official witnesses included the stalwart Sylvanie, the bride’s mother, Caroline (44), Jean Baptist Bergeron (25), JBM Sturle (a Frenchman who lived with Lise’s family, and two others. After a bit of searching, we found Lise’s family about 8 farms down river from the Breauxs. (11-1850)

Her mother was a widow, maiden name: Bourgeois, whose land was bordered on both sides by the lands of her family. She had two adolescents still living at home and one young child (5) so she’d probably not been widowed too long. She was caring for an orphan in addition to the enigmatic "JNM Sturle" from France (30-years-old).

EDOUARD, JR. was 26 when he married Lise, slightly on the late-ish side for boys to be marrying, which invites all kinds of unconfirmable speculation about what reasons made him wait so long or why, once Lise was gone from his life, he made a beeline back to CELESTINE ten years later... .

Lise, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock -- she was just 15-year-old! We need to investigate further to learn if they had any children or how long they were married, or for that matter -- where on earth did they go? Both seem to have dropped off the face of the census records by 1860, leaving us with quite a mystery. All we know is that by 1862, at the age of 36, he’d come back to CELESTINE.

Trying to reconstruct a story from census records and other civil data can be tricky business; walking a fine line between speculation and leaping to conclusions. Even so, the changes in the Breaux households during the decade immediately prior to the Civil War strongly suggest that some very sad times visited the family. (NFS: It may prove fruitful to investigate whether an epidemic or some other calamity swept through St. James in the 1850’s.)

In 1850, for example, we last saw Emile (31) and Azema Gaudet (28) on their own land with two children, Emilka (5) and Camille (3), and Theo. Melancon living with them. By

1860, the farm, Azemå, and Emilka have vanished. Emile (42) and his son, 13--year-old Camille, have moved back home with EDOUARD, SR., and ROSALIE, and brought Theo. Melancon, the carpenter, with him. EDOUARD SR.’s household also now includes 14-year-old Elphese Cloatré, indicating that ROSALIE had lost at least one and possibly two close family members of her family and was raising their orphaned son.

Bienvenu (28), who’d married Amelie Bergeron in the summer of 1852, has lost Amelie. He now appears to be married to Olphids Poirrier (24) (whom we suspect was an orphan from ROSALIE’s family, mistakenly listed as Olphida Braud (14) on the 1850 census of EDOUARD SR.’s household -- ROSALIE’S mother was a Poirrier). They are raising 8-year-old Adeline, probably born not long after his marriage to Amelie.

Joachim’s (55) family is missing his two youngest children, Felix and Albert. In a rather poignant entry for 1860, we find that the stalwart Sylvanie and Elizabeth have named their bay Albert (1) and have an older son, Felix (9). (NFS: Which raises an interesting question -- could Sylvanie be raising Joachim’s Felix for some reason? Or was Elizabeth only 15 when she married the then 28-year-old Sylvanie? We need to track down marriage and birth records on these people.)

Prosperity!

All in all, the years and the new land had been very kind to this branch of our family. Although the Reunion Document indicates that the top rungs of the economic ladder -- the Gettys and the Trumps of their tie -- owned plantations of up to 200 slaves, EDOUARD, SR. and ROSALIE may well have represented the pinnacle of achievement among the river plantation Breauxs. A book on the origins of French and Spanish surnames in Louisiana notes that,

"Although during the late 18th and 19th centuries a large number of
them (Breaux families) left their Mississippi River farms...a substantial
group remained. Some of the latter became prosperous antebellum planters,
such as one of the grandsons of Alexis Braud, Edouard (m. 1816 Marie
Rosalie Cloatré), who operated near Convent in St. James Parish, and in
1860 owned 63 slaves."

In 1858, a man names Persac drafted a map of all of the major plantations along the Mississippi from Natchez to New Orleans, a distance of some 300 river miles. A copy of the map hung on the wall in the Bluebonnet Library’s genealogy room. Since one of our original objectives was to locate both the original Breaux plantation and the family homestead, we were elated to find that the Breaux lands fell very close to the town of Welcome, St. James Parish, where family members who’s visited the homestead said we would find it. Thankfully, the course of the Mississippi on the Persac Map matched our modern Louisiana map exactly and assuming Persac had plotted the plantations accurately, we felt we could carefully follow the river contours and determine the location within a couple of hundred yards. (The Persac map is huge -- even divided into two segments placed side-by-side, it still measures six feet tall -- so we had a terrific scale ratio to work with.)

We east down Highway #18, correlating the river’s course with our map and stopped the car at the point where our best estimate determined was the site of the plantation. To our astonishment, the first thing to catch our eye was a street -- Braud Road -- and not far away, a mailbox marked "L. Braud".

The owners of the mailbox turned out to be two delightful and incredibly helpful sisters, caring for their 99-year-old mother, all of whom had known "Ma’am George". Both sisters were students of Aunt Alice(!), and after a delightful hour or so of welcome and a series of phone calls, they directed us a few doors down the street to our second cousin, Lillian "Doonie" Allen Williams who,in turn, provided a warm welcome, more conversation and sent us to the site of the family homestead, just a few more doors down Highway #l8.

Second clue: In the early 1960’s, some business regarding the family homestead ended up involving the family in California, and among our mother’s papers we found the following; "Description of Mammå’s (LEONTINE’S) property, October 23, 1962 - 17.60 acres ore or less...in Section 37, township 12, 16 East and Sections 71, 31, 65, township 12, 15, East". Meanwhile, among the documents we’d found and copied in the Parish courthouse at Convent was a land grant to Honoré Breaux for 6 arpents of land (40 arpents deep) bounded by the lands of Charles Breaux and Charles Gaudet. It was dated 1812 so we knew it couldn’t be our HONORE, who’d died in 1810, but might it have been his son, an Honoré Jr. -- a brother of our EDOUARD, Sr.? Since our research has a big hole in it regarding EDOUARD, SR., siblings, we just filed the land grant away for future sleuthing. Only recently did we notice the cover place, "Certificate 146. Section 3,12,15E". The section numbers differ from our mother’s papers, but then this grant would have represented only a small art of a plantation which would reach its zenith 50 years in the future.

Where did EDOUARD, JR. and CELESTINE live after their marriage? Might LEONTINE have inherited the property where she and GEORGE raised their children, from her father?

Who got it from his father? Did the huge old fig tree still spreading over the homestead site once grow on the Breaux plantation? (NFS: OK cousins, an afternoon spent burrowing around in St. James Parish’ land transfer records should be very productive.)

So much to know...so little time...

It is only one thread in the tapestry of our past, this sprawling sage of family and exile and eventual triumph in a new land. Yet it is no less critical to who we are than any of the other threads in our tapestry: What if ALEXIS had continued on to Natchez and built his life there? Or if HONORE had rejected slavery and moved to the plains? Could the younger EDOUARD have married CELESTINE? could there have been a LEONTINE to climb the pecan tree and watch GEORGE ALLEN come a-marching down the road? It is more than a story, just as they are more than genetic material we carry around in our chromosomes. Change one decision made by any one of them and none of us would be here at all . . .

Maybe this is a real value of looking back down the genealogical road. Beyond the comfort of feeling connected across time and the fascinating glimpses of ancestors reflected in ourselves and our families, comes the dawning realization that from moment to moment, each decision we reach, each choice we make reverberates into the future and changes it beyond our wildest imaginations. . . .

Near the end of the Reunion Document, Betty Reid Soskin wrote a paragraph which expresses most eloquently our own feelings as we put the wraps on this phase of our odyssey into our family’s past. We hope that she won’t mind if we offer it again:

"We hope that this early attempt at tracing our genealogy will
spark an interest in others of you so that the youngest among us will
gain some sense of being a part of a continuing family entity that stretches
as far as their imaginations will take them. And that they can then project
themselves into a future that, together, we will shape. What wondrous
creatures we mortals be..." .

Our fondest wish for this work of ours is that it inspires others to climb on our shoulders, fill in the gaps and follow new threads. For until they do, we will remain merely storytellers.

We aspire to be giants... .

Very sincerely yours,

Janet Wood Duncan
Stephen Joseph Duncan
©June 1995

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