Milton Francis Guidry

Milton Francis Guidry for being one of the earliest family historians of the Guédry family to make contact with his Acadian cousins in Nova Scotia and the first to exchange annual visits with his Acadian family of Baie Sainte-Marie. Born in 1907 in Abbeville, LA, Milton Francis Guidry was an entrepreneur and astute businessman. He owned and operated at least six indoor and three drive-in theaters in south Louisiana as well as an home appliance store, feed distributorship, candy concession distributorship and a booking service. Enjoying success in his various businesses, Milton became interested in his family ancestry and likely was the first person to establish the linkage of the south Louisiana Guédry families to their founding parents Claude Guédry and Marguerite Petitpas. Despite the lack of the internet and other modern-day techniques, Milton painstaking visited archives and churches to document his Guédry line. He traveled often to Acadie (Nova Scotia) to visit his Acadian cousins there. In Meteghan and St. Alphonse he met many of his Guédry cousins with the surnames Geddry, Gedry, Jeddry and Jedry. And at Meteghan on the shores of Baie Sainte-Marie he met Gustave Geddry and Zita Doucet Geddry with whom he and his wife Bette Atkins Guidry became lifelong friends. The two couples enjoyed week-long visits each summer alternating between Meteghan and Lafayette, LA. This likely was the first incident of Acadian and Cajun families becoming lifelong friends and exchanging visits to each other's homes annually - a tradition still enjoyed by many today. Milton died in 1969 in Lafayette, LA survived by his wife Bette, four sons and five daughters.