November 29, 2009
-
Ancestral Home?
Today I learned from my sister that the home of one Francois Cousin in Bayou Lacomb, Louisiana, is being rescued. The original part of the house was probably built between 1787 and 1789, but it has been added on to many times since then. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it was in the news recently because the Parish historical society is trying to raise it above flood levels in order to save it from future floods. It’s on the bank of Bayou Liberty. Evidently my brother (in-law) saw a story about it on TV, and that’s how I found out about it.
Francois Cousin is my grandfather, upteen generations removed, and he had a brick factory that made many of the bricks that rebuilt New Orleans after two devastating fires in the eighteenth century. When Katrina hit that place in 2005, she washed away a lot of topsoil and uncovered a bunch of material related to the brick factory. At one time, Francois Cousin had six schooners that took his bricks to New Orleans. He was the guardian of one Adrian Rouquette, his nephew, and Rouquette was a poet, novelist, and the first native Louisiannian ordained to the Catholic priesthood. Appropriately, the library at St. Joseph College Seminary of the Archdioceses of New Orleans (which is near Bayou Lacomb) is called the “Adrian Rouquette Library.” Rouquette was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who actually visited him.
Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article about the Francois Cousin House, and it has some nice pictures: click here. Here’s a link to another article about the house: click here.
This Francois Cousin was many generations ago, and we don’t have anything to do with that property today. But it’s still kind of neat to know that stuff about your (long ago) family.
ED
Comments (3)
that is really interesting, I wish I knew stuff like that about my distant relatives.
ED, Next time you are near the ABBEY and Covington check out the info there on Roquette. My deceased classmate Fr. Dominic OSB did research in the area. Another (former seminarian) Blaize D’Antoni who lived in the Lacome area I believe, wrote about Roquette. Thought you’d like to know more material than just the name of a library is in that area. HOWARD
@vicarhoward - I own and have read Blaize D’Antoni’s book about Rouquette, but the best book about Rouquette is Dagmar-Renshaw Lebreton’s scholarly study. She was a professor of French at Tulane, and her book is 442 pages long. I’ve wondered for some time now what it would take to get Rouquette canonized. We already have one family member canonized as a saint, St. Germaine Cousin (go here for the Catholic Encyclopedia article about her: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06474a.htm). I think all this stuff about Germaine Cousin is folklore, but maybe not. Adrien Rouquette was a real apostle, an intellectual, and somebody who opposed slavery, even though his family were slave holders. He went in the face of the establishment of his day on the issue of slavery, including his own family, and I’d like to see him canonized.