Getting an ‘A’ from history

For Patty Whitney, it all started out as a personal thing, trying to track down her own family’s ancestors and learning the ins and outs of crawling through history, more years ago than she cares to remember.

With all that she learned and then wanted to learn, the former court reporter spread out and started looking into the history of families other than her own, and documenting the past with such pictures and reminiscences as she could find. And while that journey is far from over, she got a nice shot in the arm midway last week.

The Lafourche Heritage Society, an organization that shares her goal of disclosing as much of the past as can be mined in the present, gave Patty an award for distinguished service in history and genealogy, recognizing her many years of dedication to the collecting and sharing of stories.

Not that she has done all this in hopes of any recognition. But the recognition is a help, encouraging as it is intended to the good work that people do.

The sad fact is that in many south Louisiana communities we steamroll over a lot of our history. Maybe because we are used to houses and other landmarks getting claimed by storms, maybe because the struggles we face because of tides and other issues keep us too busy with the present to adequately preserve the past, physical proof of our history is sometimes tougher to find than in other places. In New Orleans there are plaques for where Jean Lafitte stopped to belch, and in Houma or Thibodaux we just don’t seem to care that much.

So few safeguards were in place in Thibodaux that Acadia Plantation, right next to the Nicholls State University campus, fell to the bulldozer as part of a huge housing development that retained the plantation name but little else. There has been little concerted effort at the local level to locate or preserve gravesites, and have for many years depended on industry to play by the rules in this regard, rather than oversee in all circumstances what they do. This may sound a little harsh but there is evidence all the time of this type of disregard.

But then you have people like Patty Whitney, who drinks up every historical anecdote she can, and people like the staff at Nicholls in the Ellender Memorial Library under Cliff Theriot, who preserve what can be preserved whenever possible, who provide some light of hope that maybe, just maybe, our children and their children will one day know more about their world through the things they preserve.

Which brings us to this award and most importantly to its recipient, a Nicholls graduate and native of Houma. who recorded living history by magically taking down what the judges and lawyers and witnesses said in the courts. After retiring she couldn’t sit still, and began to do environmental advocacy with BISCO, which stands for Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing. Helping people in the present required understanding the past, which Patty did well, and then the position of executive director for the Bayou History Center. The center has an awesome Facebook page, and actively solicits contributions of photos and relics of the past which are shared through the social network and otherwise online.

“Our mission is to promote the study and preservation of family and community history in southern Louisiana,” is how Patty explains this. She explains her fascination with facts from the past as being an outgrowth of her initial genealogical interest. “Genealogy is a disease, a compulsion. With my work in advocacy and looking at Louisiana and the coast and the communities of the coast I started recognizing patterns. We are fighting for our survival and I thought genealogy would be a very appropriate tool to help people see their own lives and their own history, and how things need to be changed in Louisiana to make us more resilient.”

Busy as she is and so involved with many time-consuming projects, Patty almost didn’t make the meeting at which she was to receive the award.

But there was to be a particularly interesting speaker.

Raif Shwayri, author of “Beirut On The Bayou,” which tells the story of his ancestor who immigrated to Louisiana from Lebanon in the early 20th Century and ended up living, surviving and succeeding on Bayou Lafourche, was too strong a drawing card. But she made it and so received the award.

Patty may have been gifted with an award that night, but as anybody who knows how important her work and that of others like her truly is, it was merely a reflection that thanks to this kind of work, all of us are winners. •