In 2015 when I launched this website, I included a picture of my great-uncle and aunt Joseph Abraham Vavasseur and Marie Octavie Mora as a sidebar image. Abraham was born in St Martinville on 27 October 1871 to Charles Jefferson Vavasseur and Joséphine Rochon, who were free people of color before the Civil War.1 He married Octavie in her native Charenton (St Mary Parish) on 27 December 1894.2 She was born in Charenton on 16 November 1874 to Auguste Mora Jr, a Chitimacha Indian, and Marie Talamon.3 Abraham’s sister May Vavasseur was my great-grandmother, and he was my grandfather’s godfather. My family owns the original of this image.
Since LHCV went live in 2015, many online users have scraped Abraham and Octavie’s picture and uploaded to their trees on various websites. I see it the most on Ancestry in public trees, and frequently users who know my family and the picture contact me about it. I’ve attempted to contact the original posters for those I encounter or learn about, but none of them respond.
Unfortunately, this practice is very common. And I can kind of understand the motivation: when folks have no pictures for people in their own families, they try to find pictures from other Creole families to give some approximation to what theirs may have looked like.
But this is very problematic because it involves relabeling, renaming, and giving the subjects new histories, lineages, and memories. And when the images are reshared by hundreds of online users, it becomes impossible to control and correct.
For online users who do this: please contact the website or tree owners and ask (1) if you can republish, (2) who the subjects are, and (3) what the provenance (origin) of the image is. For persons victimized by this practice, watermark your images, or don’t post them in the public domain.
Much appreciation to those who’ve made me aware of this picture’s proliferation on online trees as persons they are not.
– Christophe Landry
- LEVAVASSEUR, Joseph Abraham (Jeff & Josephine ROCHON) b. 27 Oct. 1871 (SM Ch.: v. 11-B, p. 181). ↩︎
- MORA, Octavie (Auguste & d. Marie TALSMON) m. 27 Dec. 1894 Joseph Abraham VAVASSEUR (Charenton Ch.: v.2, p. 104); MORA, Octavie m. 27 Dec. 1894 J. A. VAVASSEUR (Frank. Ct. Hse.: v. 19. p.427A). ↩︎
- MARA, Octavie (Auguste & Marie TALAMON) b. 16 Nov. 1874 (Charenton Ch. v. 1, p. 333). ↩︎
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Great share
Thank you for this very important info. I have seen the woman’s face representing Marie Jean Davion b. 1750! And I heard my mothers voice “ just because it’s on the internet doesn’t make it true.”
Glad I was unable to find provenance.