Dubois and Caron Families of New Bedford Massachusetts

The children of Ulysse and Gertrude Comeau have grandparents of Comeau – Henley – Dubois – Caron.  The Comeau quarter and the Henley quarter were written of previously so this will be about the Dubois and the Caron quarter.  They are by ethnic groups 95 % Quebec, 3 % Acadian of Nova Scotia, and 2 % Irish.

Joseph Dubois moved to New Bedford in 1892.  Within 5 years his wife Clarise Peluge Roberge had died of anemia.  He had five children to care for including George Emile Dubois.  He would soon remarry and worked for decades as a weaver in the cotton mills of New Bedford.  Joseph lived to 93 years old and is buried in the Old Sacred Cemetery far away from his birth place of Sainte-Sophie-d`Halifax of Megantic County Quebec.  These Dubois and Roberge families had a long history of farming in the counties at the western edge of the Gaspe Peninsula – counties like Kamouraska, Levis, and Bellechasse.  This stability is a good sign since they were not migrant farm workers but rather farm owners. The burgeoning population by the 1890s had forced many of the families to move south to the mill cities of southern New England.  The son George Dubois would have 11 children with Marie Louise Eva Caron in New Bedford.

Napoléon-Noël Caron would move as a young boy to Nashua, New Hampshire without his parents in 1885.  Nashua and Manchester were both giant mill cities and Napoleon would work as a mill machine operator.  He would marry Marie Alvine Plourde in Nashua in 1890 and they would have 11 children too.  The last of their children Irene Gertrude Caron was born in 1914 in New Bedford and is still alive having celebrated her 100th year two weeks ago.  Both the Caron and the Plourde lines come from the small city of Kamouraska in Quebec.  This is right above southwestern Maine and is surrounded by many farming villages.  The genealogy is not particularly hard to trace but they do have long names in these tiny villages.  Double first names and double last names were used into the late 1800s.  For example, Alvine (Ovaline) Plourde had a maternal grandmother of Marie Emilienne Laplante dit Madore.  Mostly, she was known as Emilie Laplante but on a couple of early census forms she was identified as Marie Madore.  Thus some people are hard to track and consequently some death records are hard to find.

The Caron family is seen below.

Marie Louise Eva Caron was one of the many children of Napoleon and Ovaline Caron.  She would marry George Dubois in 1912 in New Bedford at the Sacred Heart Church.  One of their daughters would marry Ulysse Comeau in 1945 in New Bedford.  They would have eight children themselves.