Response to letter from Dr. Donald J. Landry of Metarie, LA:
....
Some researchers are under the impression that the ancestor of the LANDRYS was Jean Claude LANDRY, spouse of Marie SALLE, but no one of this name appears in any document concerning Acadians from the beginning.
In the censuses of 1671 and 1678, the deceased husband of Marie SALLE is simply called Jean (or even Jehan according to the 1671 census) Claude. A researcher with a lot imagination added LANDRY to the name of Jean Claude in order to explain why Marie SALLE lived between Rene LANDRY the younger and his son Antoine LANDRY on the census of 1686. It was long presumed that this Marie SALLE was the same as the one who was married to Martin AUCOIN at LaRochelle in 1632, which could be true and that she was related, by the first marriage to Michelle AUCOIN, to the daughter at whose home she lived in the censuses of 1671 and 1678, which is also possible. The only way the researchers could prove the association of Marie SALLE to Rene LANDRY the younger was in transforming her husband Jean Claude to Jean Claude LANDRY and in presuming moreover that this would be the father of Rene the younger. We add that this reasoning doesn't hold water. It isn't logical to suppose that the family name of Jean Claude was omitted by two distinct census takers. we note that there are those who have already rejected the faulty idea that the second spouse of Marie SALLE was a LANDRY and have even advanced the hypothesis that he was an Amerindian. This is possible, but we mention that it is also possible he was a Frenchman because CLAUDE was a distinguished family name in French households in the 17th century.
Censuses give us no other indication of the origin of Jean Claude so his origin as all the French origins of the LANDRYS, too, remain to be determined."
