Meet Landie – at about eighty years old. She wants to tell you some things about her ancestors and their history in the Louisiana bayous.

“Let’s talk,” the lady said. “I have some old papers that may be of interest to you.”

I was recently going through some old family journals. I picked one describing family research I did some sixty years ago on a trip to the Louisiana bayous.

Through my research involving very old church bibles and other church records, I traced down several of my ancestors. What fun to find out who they were and to discover details about them. With that information at my fingertips, I then set out to find and ask questions of the oldest of my own relatives in the area. I was only twenty-one years old at the time.

Fortunately, I was able to locate two distant female cousins on my mother’s side of the family who were ninety-plus years old. I also found a male cousin-by-marriage on my father’s side who had reached 101. All three individuals were sharp of mind, with memories, both of their own experiences and of things they had heard or been told by their own elders when the cousins were young. And one should remember, these three individuals had been young in the years going back to approximately 1850. That could easily make their elders birth dates go back to the late 1700s.

Several of the relatives and others they knew had lived in the area around New Iberia, Louisiana, in those earlier years. The settlement, dating back to 1779, was aka Nueva Iberia, Nouvelle Ibérie and New Town by American settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. The settlement received its first post office from the federal government in 1814. Originally settled by a group of 500 Malagueños colonists led by Lt. Col. Francisco Bouligny, those brave individuals came up Bayou Teche and settled around Spanish Lake.

I find this so interesting, don’t you? I’ll tell you more the next time we visit.