“Larceny of a cow”: Newspaper goldmines

I couldn’t figure out what to write for my first post, and then I remembered my great-great-grandfather and his sordid crime.

In case you didn’t know, Genealogy Bank can be a veritable goldmine for the kind of information that actually tells you who your ancestors were, as opposed to knowing them only as a list of names on census records. If your ancestors lived in big U.S. cities (and even some scattered small ones), chances are good that you’ll find them in GB’s huge archive of historical newspapers. The site has a free trial, so you might want to sign up, see if they have newspapers for your main locations, and decide if you want to subscribe. And sadly, no, I’m not being paid for plugging this site.

On to my great-great-grandfather, Frank A. Marceaux. So it turns out he was running for sheriff of Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, in 1931. But he ran into a complication. He needed to file a petition with the state board of pardons because three decades earlier, he had committed, and I quote, “larceny of a cow.” Reported the Times-Picayune in December of 1931:

In the candidate’s application he states that he was convicted of larceny of a cow on October 10, 1899, and was sentenced to serve two years in the state penitentiary. He states that he was released from the penal institution on July 3, 1901, after his sentence was commuted on grounds of good behavior.

Frank, in spite of his shady past, had one prominent supporter: Governor Huey P. Long, who is quoted in the same article:

I would like to know since this prohibition law how many of us have not violated the law.

For a genealogist, this stuff is gold. Am I right?

Frank Marceaux and Family, c. 1919