Are family curses real?

Just kidding...mostly

Does anyone else have a particular branch of their family tree that seems to be afflicted with some kind of curse? It seems like all kinds of misfortune are concentrated in just one small family group: premature deaths, freak accidents, inpatient psychiatric stays, criminal convictions, just all manner of drama at a frequency not seen in other branches of my family. This is not me judging (it’s a genealogical goldmine for me, after all), but just wondering: what on Earth was going on there?!

For me, this is my Gautier branch.

That’s my great-great-great-grandparents. The woman on the right was named Rosa Gautier. She married William Hoffman King Sr., on the left there. They were both born in Terrebonne Parish during or just after the Civil War.

Rosa’s parents were Pierre Etienne Gautier and Emilie Hebert, also both from Terrebonne. Emilie died around 1878, when Rosa was still a teenager. In 1880, Pierre remarried to Marie Theriot.

As you can see on the 1880 census, Pierre’s oldest daughter was only two years younger than his new wife. Rosa was only five years younger than Marie Theriot. That must have been awkward.

Between his two wives, Pierre had at least sixteen children over a span of about thirty years. As I started to look into Rosa’s many siblings, I found that many of them had interesting, usually tragic, stories. Rosa herself seems to have made out better than most of her siblings; she married in 1881, and converted from Catholicism to the Episcopal church, which her husband was a member of. On the 1910 census, which asked about children living and dead, Rosa is said to have given birth to 14 children, with only six living. :-(

Rosa died in 1933 of a bacterial skin infection and septic pneumonia. She was around 70 years old.

So what happened to all those siblings? I’ll start with her full siblings, of which there are seven.

Rosa’s oldest brother, Joseph Gautier, was born in 1865. He married Josephine Dantin in 1890 in Morgan City and had at least four children. Joseph died in 1944, age 79, in a boating accident. He was paddling a small boat across the Intracoastal Canal after a night spent crabbing. Unfortunately, a larger shrimping vessel was also in the canal, and that larger vessel collided with Joseph’s boat and cut it in half. Joseph bled to death in the water.

Notice at the end of this obituary, how short his survivor list is. Only one half-brother, Eddie Gautier, is named. Joseph had at least 15 half and full siblings. Where is everyone else?! Joseph was one of the older siblings and died at a pretty advanced age.

Let us continue down the list. Lucinda Eve Gautier was born in 1866. In 1880, she is listed as “divorced”. She was married, apparently very briefly, to a man named Thomas Fitch. She later remarried to Edwin Chiasson, had at least six kids, and lived in Terrebonne until she died in 1939 at age 72. Nothing too notable there, but does explain why she’s not listed as a survivor on Joseph’s obituary, as she had already died.

Next up: Emee Domitille “Mamie” Gautier, born 1867. Mamie actually was still alive in 1944, but she had moved to Houston, Texas, where she passed away in 1949 from stroke complications. She married Henry Clay Naquin in Terrebonne and had several children. I have talked to some descendants from this branch, and they know very little about the Gautier side; apparently, Mamie’s daughter had nothing to do with her family and wouldn’t talk about it. It’s not clear why.

Eulalie Rose Gautier, born in 1869, married Bertrand Chauvin. They lived in Morgan City. Eulalie died in 1930 at age 61. I’ll pause here to note that in 1900, Pierre was living in Eulalie’s household in St. Mary Parish:

His marital status is “widowed”. On the same census, his wife, Marie Theriot, is alive and listed with their children together in Terrebonne.

Interestingly, the whole family’s race is marked “B” for black. I’m not sure if this was a mistake or not; this is the only document I’ve ever found that lists them as black. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that it was on purpose; DNA shows that Pierre Gautier’s descendants with both wives have trace amounts of African and Puerto Rican DNA. More on the family split later. For now, I’m going to keep rolling down the list of kids.

Octavie Gautier, born 1871, married Franklin Bergeron. She also stayed in the same area. She died in Terrebonne in 1926, age 55.

Roseanna Gautier was born in 1873. She married Apollos Randall in 1893 and had at least six children with him. They divorced in 1919, and Roseanna remarried to Jackson Haase, with whom she had no children. Roseanna and Jackson were both tragically killed in 1925 in a train-auto collision. The article about it is pretty grim.

Amedee Gautier is the last known full sibling of Rosa, born about 1878. It’s possible that his birth is what killed their mother. I don’t know much about Amedee; as far as I know, he never married. In 1910 he’s on the census with Roseanna and her family. In 1920 he’s alone, occupation “hired man”. I did find a death certificate for him from 1942:

It’s striking for what information is not on it; the hospital seems to have known very little about Amedee, so I’m guessing he didn’t have any loved ones around when he passed. He died of amoebiasis and intestinal hemorrhage and was probably cremated and buried in the Charity Hospital burial grounds as an indigent person.

So that’s all of Rosa’s full siblings. Now onto her half-siblings.

Louis Bernard Gautier was born in 1881. He married Adeline Dusenberry and stayed in Terrebonne Parish. Louis Bernard died in 1929 at age 47, in the state mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. His death certificate reveals why he was in the mental hospital:

He had “general paresis” due to syphilis. Syphilis is a disease that takes a long time to kill you, generally (decades), and leads to dementia-like symptoms. It’s not a fun way to go. He was only in the state hospital for about five months. It seems nobody claimed the body, and he was buried in the cemetery at the state hospital.

Next, Henry Clovis Gautier, born about 1883. On the 1900 census he’s listed as an “orphan” living with a Duplantis family. He married Clara Hebert in Chacahoula in 1903. The family eventually moved to New Orleans and lived on St. Claude Ave, near where the Shell station is now. Henry died in 1931 due to complications from a peptic ulcer. He was only 47 and had at least 11 kids.

The next sibling, Oscar Gautier, has one of the most interesting stories out of any of them. Oscar was born in 1884. In 1900, he was living with his “uncle” John Smith in Terrebonne. On the 1910 census he’s living with a Duplantis family.

In 1907, Oscar served time in the state penitentiary for “inflicting harm less than mayhem”. Some later newspaper articles claim that his crime was cutting a police officer.

I found the first mention of Oscar in the newspaper in 1911. This time, he was in the papers as a hero. Oscar was on a burning gas boat with a family, including two children. He heroically saved one of the children by jumping back into the burning boat after having jumped into the bayou, receiving burns himself for his efforts. Sadly, the child seems to have later died of burns anyways.

The next time Oscar’s in the papers, it’s not so positive. He’s charged with murdering his brother-in-law, Charles Roux. He had invited Charles to work on the boat he was employed on, the Enterprise. Oscar apparently hit Charles in the head with a hammer then threw him overboard. His body was found later. Here’s an article about the ordeal:

The section about a possible motive is most intriguing to me. Oscar had told several people, including his brother, Jules, that he wanted to kill Roux. The article also notes that Roux and his wife, Oscar’s sister, had had marital difficulties and been separated.

I did some more digging into Charles Roux. What I found was enough to convince me that Oscar was probably just protecting his sister. Charles Roux was not a good guy. He came from a whole family of dirty cops. He had been previously married and divorced, and there was a fiasco involving Charles and his policeman brother, Leon Roux, abusing his first wife and her mother immediately after they were married. More details:

This was far from the first time Leon Roux abused his powers as a police officer. The Roux brothers’ dad was also a dirty cop, often in the newspapers for abuse of power. I can’t find it now, but I remember seeing an article that mentioned Charles trying to commit suicide over his marital issues with his first wife. The guy had a history of violence and instability, and Oscar probably did the world (and, especially, his sister) a favor.

As far as I can tell, Oscar was never convicted of murdering Charles, although it seems clear he did indeed murder him. I found him on the 1940 census in Terrebonne, working as a shrimper. In 1950, he’s still in Terrebonne, married to Corinne Baye. I don’t think Oscar ever had any kids. He died in 1957 in New Orleans.

The next sibling on my list is Pierre Gautier, Jr., born in 1886. He married Eva Mary Ourso in Thibodaux in 1915 and had at least one daughter with her. He must have left the area not long after that, because a 1936 article published in Phoenix, Arizona, (with picture!) features him and his donkeys.

I don’t know what brought Pierre, Jr. to Arizona, but he seems to have led a pretty wholesome life there. Here’s another article I found from 1945:

Notice that the article claims that Pierre (aka Peter) was “of French and Indian parentage in Louisiana”. His World War II draft card also lists him as “Indian”.

I have never seen any of the other siblings claim to be native American, but it’s not impossible that they were. They certainly lived in the part of Terrebonne Parish where native Americans are found. Their neighbors were often Indian. Marie Theriot and all her kids were counted “black” on that one census. And… I do have a consistent 1-2% indigenous North American DNA show up on my DNA tests. I can’t pinpoint who it came from, so it could very well have come from this line.

I also found an article that published a letter Pierre wrote to the newspaper regarding horny toads:

Finding these mentions of Pierre in Arizona made me happy; it took me a while to find him at all. I was glad to see he didn’t have a tragic story like so many of his siblings, and finding pictures of the man himself was a special treat! It seems he married again over there to a woman named Ethel who is named on his death certificate as his wife. Pierre died in Arizona in 1954.

Jules Gilles Gautier was born in 1887. He married Julienne Neil in Houma in 1905, and they had at least nine children. About 1919 the family relocated to New Orleans, where Jules ran a small store on Bourbon Street. Jules later worked as an oysterman and seems to have moved to Pointe a la Hache, where he died in 1953. Weirdly, his death certificate has “malnutrition” in the list of contributing conditions.

We only have three more siblings to go! Thanks for bearing with me, if anyone has made it this far. I am going to cover the next two sisters together because they have the same story, at least early on in life.

Julienne or Julia (born 1889) and Elise (born about 1892) Gautier are the two youngest Gautier daughters. In October 1900, both girls were ordered by a court to be sent to the Mount Carmel orphan asylum in New Orleans. Allegedly, this was due to the “immoral conduct” of their mother. I found a very old forum post where a nun from Mount Carmel stated she had some documents relating to these girls if anyone was interested. The post was from, I believe, 2012, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to actually get a reply back from this nun when I sent a letter (snail mail) to Mount Carmel. She directed me to the New Orleans Archdiocese archives, where she had sent all her documentation some years ago. I was able to get a copy from them.

I have no idea what Marie Theriot did that was so immoral and dangerous; it strikes me as extra sad that, although their father was, as far as I know, alive and well, these girls were sent to live with strangers in the city. Their brothers who were too young to live on their own yet seem to have been scattered amongst other families as “orphans” after this. Marie lived until 1919 herself.

In 1910, Julienne was enumerated as a domestic servant in the household of a Cancienne family in New Orleans. Later that year, Julienne was in the papers because she and her first husband, Earl McCarty, were the first people to get married in the new courthouse.

Julienne married a second time in 1921 to Frank Neumann, a German. According to the laws in place at the time, this marriage caused Julienne to lose her own American citizenship. She had to apply to be naturalized in 1953.

Julienne, like her brother, Louis Bernard, died at the East Louisiana State Hospital for the Insane. She died in 1962, age 73, of coronary thrombosis. Her death certificate gives no clues as to what landed her in the mental hospital, but it does show that she was a patient there for nearly 3,000 days. Her body was sent back to New Orleans for burial. As far as I know, Julienne never had any children, although she does seem to have cared for her sister Elise’s child for some time.

Elise, her sister, was the wife of the murdered Charles Roux. In 1920, after her husband’s death, Elise was enumerated by herself and working as a machine operator at a canning factory. Her son, Sidney Joseph Roux, was living with her sister, Julienne. In 1923 Elise married a second time, to Eric Johansson, a Swede. Eric died in 1940, and sometime after that Elise remarried a third time, to James Fitzpatrick.

Elise’s obituary mentions two children, Sidney Roux and a daughter, Mrs. Joe Romano. It’s not clear to me yet who the daughter’s father was. Elise died in 1947 in New Orleans from complications of uterine cancer.

We have finally made it to the last Gautier sibling, who, fortunately, allows us to end on a happier note. Joseph Elie “Eddie” Gautier was born in 1893. He never married or had children, and his draft card labels him “mentally deficient”. However, Eddie seems to have had a pretty good life.

He stayed in the Morgan City area and was taken care of by various members of the community, notably by the Morgan City Fire Department, who seem to have come to consider him their unofficial mascot of sorts. Towards the end of Eddie’s life he lived at the St. Mary Guest Home. I found this cute article that includes a picture of Eddie and his harmonica:

An article published much later (1997) features a recollection of Eddie chasing kids down to protect a monkey that apparently lived in the park…

I found an article published in 1913 that mentions Eddie actually going to New Orleans in an attempt to find his sisters. This must be referring to Julienne and Elise, who were sent to the orphanage. Eddie got lost and wound up at the police station, where a well-meaning citizen who found himself in the drunk tank offered to make sure he made it home.

Eddie’s obituary is rather heartwarming. He died in 1976 in Morgan City, age 82. Eddie outlived all of his siblings, by a large margin.

He is survived by just one cousin. All 15 of his siblings had already died, and he doesn’t seem to have been in contact with most of their kids. Thelma Watkins was actually Eddie’s niece, a daughter of Joseph Gautier, whose obituary named Eddie as his half brother in 1944. Luckily, it seems that the people of Morgan City took it upon themselves to take care of Eddie, and he was well-liked.

So to circle back to Joseph’s obituary I shared at the beginning of this (very long) post, so sparse on surviving family members… basically, all of the other siblings had either died or moved away, whether to New Orleans or even further afield, by 1944, when Joseph died. The family does not seem to have stayed connected, and I’m sure that had a lot to do with their father’s second marriage and whatever issues arose that led to the removal of Julienne and Elise from their mother’s care.

I have never been able to find a record of their father, Pierre Sr.’s death. The last mentions I’ve seen of him anywhere were in 1900, when he was on the census with his daughter’s family, and when he was named in the court documents regarding Julienne and Elise. I would love to know what happened to him. I would also really love to know more about what kind of a person he was; his kids really went through a lot. I’ve written a little bit in another post about my hunt for information about Pierre’s father, also named Pierre Gautier, who is a perplexing brick wall in his own right. I still have many more questions about this family.