This site is dedicated to my father, Lucien Alfred Landry (1915 – 2000).  He was a kind, gentle,  hardworking man who worked many years for the Foss Launch and Tug Company in Tacoma, Washington, on  the boats and in the office dispatching the fleet and doing bookkeeping.  After retiring from Foss  Launch and Tug Company, he worked, seasonally, for several years in the fishing industry in Alaska  aboard a fish tender delivering the “catch” to canneries.  Before he retired for the last time, he  spent five years as an Engineer on the Anderson Island/McNeal Island ferry.  He was a mainstay of  this large, extended Landry Family.  My father has 12 siblings, Eva, Ernest, Alpha, George, Imelda,  Meriza, Paul, Hermene, Ida, Rita, Ray and Victor.  My research begins with their parents, Anselme  Landry and Leonida Morency, who immigrated to the United States from St. Boniface, Manitoba, in  1920 and migrated westward to settle in Stanwood, Washington.  I have researched the Anselme Landry  family extensively for several years, now, and I have found records of ancestors living in Quebec  in the 1700’s, in Acadia (now Nova Scotia) in the 1600’s and in France in the late 1500’s.  Finding  my ancestors, where and when they lived, and reading about how they lived their lives has been an  exciting and rewarding experience for me.

Anselme Landry’s ancestors emigrated from France as a part of the French government’s efforts in  the early 1600’s to colonize newly-held territories in what is now eastern Canada, settling in  Acadia.  Their newly established life in the new territory was brutally disrupted during the early  1700’s, when the English gained control of Acadia from the French, eventually renaming it Nova  Scotia.  Fearing the French Acadians would join other Frenchman in the Quebec territory and other  surrounding territories to fight to retake control of this area, the English forcibly uprooted  Acadian families (mostly subsistence farmers) and deported them to New England states, Florida and  Louisiana (Acadian – Cajun).  This massive relocation effort became known as “The Great Expulsion  of 1755.”  During the expulsion, one of Anselme’s ancestors, Jean Baptiste Landry, was deported to  Boston, Massachusetts, where he met and married Anne Marie Hebert, also a deportee.  Efforts by  deportees to return to French-held territories where thwarted by the English.  If they tried to  escape by boat or through the forests, they were captured by the English and forcibly returned to  where they had been displaced.  After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended the  war between France and England, the Acadians in Massachusetts were given authorization by the  Governor to enter Canada which was now a British colony.  It then became possible for Jean  Baptiste, Anne Marie, and their four children to make their way to Quebec.  Bona Arsenault, author,  historian and genealogist, writes in his book, History of the Acadians, "In 1766, twelve families a  total of eighty persons, arrived from Massachusetts by way of Lake Champlain and were welcomed at  L’Assomption on the seigneury of Saint-Sulpice, near Montreal.  These were the families of Joseph  Brault, Joseph Dupuis, Armand Dupuis, Joseph Hebert, Pierre Lanoue, Pierre Martin, Charles Landry,  Jean-Baptiste Landry, Germain Landry, Joseph LeBlanc, Francois LeBlanc and Francois Poirier.”  He  goes on to write that one of the first things to happen upon their arrival in the Montreal area was  to have all civil marriages and baptisms that were performed while in exile, without a priest, re- validated at L’Assomption.  What Arsenault writes about is confirmed in a record I found in the  registers of L’Assomption parish dated September 4, 1766, which states that Jean Baptiste Landry  and Anne Marie Hebert were taken from Acadia to Boston, Massachusetts, where they were detained for twelve years.  The record also re-validates their May 30, 1759 civil marriage performed in Boston.

As I stated earlier, researching the Anselme Landry ancestral history has been a very exciting and  rewarding project for me.  At every point in my research, I have employed the requirements of  professional genealogy research to ensure the correctness of the information displayed on this  website.  It is my hope that this website will be a valuable resource for all of the living  descendants of Anselme Landry and Leonida Morency, and to others researching their ancestral  history.  As I learn more, this website will be updated and more anecdotes and photographs will be  added.

I have many to thank, including my extended Landry family, and others who were instrumental  in assisting me with this lengthy, challenging, but personally rewarding project.  And it will  continue.