Haney and Bernier family tree
My nephew’s grandfather Haney is well known to come through northern Maine and his grandmother Bernier comes fully through Quebec. But which villages and are there any stories to tell along the way.
James Haney came from England as a young man in about the 1820s and settled in Aroostock County of northern Maine. Life is tough in such a setting but like most Americans they farmed, hunted, and served their country. His son Thomas Haney did just that fighting for the Union side in the American Civil War. All did not turn out all right since he sustained a serious wound to his left leg. His many children spread out across Aroostock County and one of them Thomas Junior became a very successful farmer. Thomas the son and his wife Viola Thompson had 12 children born to them in the early 1900s. One of the last sons Norman Haney married Clara Slack and they left Caribou for Springfield Massachusetts to get a more technical job in the post-WW2 boom economy.
The Slack family was more of the intellectual city type. They and the families they married into moved around to the smaller cities of northern New England taking jobs in teaching and retail. Clara Slack’s grandmother Nettie Ryder is one interesting case. Her grandfather, father, and brother were all piano forte makers in Roxbury and Cambridge Massachusetts. They kept the family business going for 100 plus years. They seemed to have had a summer home in northern Maine and that is where the family must have met the Haney clan.
I am trying to concentrate on the period from 1860 to 1960 for all these family stories. All information before that will have to wait until more data comes in. Some day I will write family stories for the 1760 to 1860 era. For any given Quebec immigrant family, the locations will usually remain the same for those two periods of time except for the immigration to the USA. This is true about the Bernier family. They settled for about two hundred years in Saint-Pascal of Kamouraska County of Québec. This region is over the northern tip of Maine. Over-population and brutal winters finally pushed them into the small mill towns of Massachusetts.
Joseph Bernier was one such member of the family. He and his wife Praxede Vaillancourt came to Chicopee about 1903. He took a job with the city as a trash collector. Sad to say that the story does not end well. On 19 December 1910, he took a tumble from atop the garbage cart that he was on and fell headfirst to the pavement. He crushed the front of his brain and 5 hours later had died. His widow Praxie as she was called did not remarry but spent the remaining 37 years of her life caring for her children and grandchildren.
The last quarter of this story is of the Brassard family. They and the families that they married – Labissonnière, LaPrince, and Bouvette – came from the Nicolet region on the Saint Lawrence River. This region has a series of small towns mostly on the southern shores near Trois-Rivieres. It is not known at present why they immigrated but they came at first to the mill towns of northeastern Massachusetts such as Salem and Methuen. Eventually, one member ended up in Springfield where she married a member of the Bernier family. It takes about three generations to get a Frenchman or woman to marry into another ethnic group. But in 1963, a Bernier married a Haney.