Fusari and Jackson family tree
Pietro Fusari immigrated in 1894 from Fornaci di Barga, Lucca, Toscana, Italy to Holyoke of Massachusetts. With his wife Giovannina he had 7 children and worked as a fruit dealer. The family as most recent immigrants stayed close and their children married other recent immigrants from Italy. Their last child Henry Fusari would work hard at many jobs but mostly at Acme Chain in Holyoke. They saved money through the years and were able to move to Chicopee and then to South Hadley to find better housing.
Henry would marry Ethel Grace Ellison. Her Ellison progenitors would work as farmers in Uxbridge Massachusetts and then in Chester Vermont for two centuries. Her paternal grandmother was Irish and would meet her future husband in Vermont. Her maternal grandmother was of original South Hadley stock. Mattie Moody descended from the Moody family that settled South Hadley in the 1720s and owned farms throughout the region.
The Jackson family lived in Chatham Massachusetts for at least three generations. No surprise that they plied their trade as sailors on the Atlantic. When Thomas Jackson moved to South Hadley in 1870 to work in the mills of Holyoke, he still commuted back to Chatham on weekends to work as a sailor. Thomas’s son Lester fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898 as a private. Lester eventually worked as a locksmith at Mount Holyoke College by 1925. Knowledge from that job passed onto his own son Edmond since they jointly opened the Holyoke Lock Company by 1945 and it still exists. Lester married Jennie McLennan who hailed from Nova Scotia. They had met in Nashua New Hampshire in 1900 or so but it is not known what both were doing there yet.
William Halkyard and his wife Sarah Gowk came to Massachusetts from Great Britain in 1890. They eventually settled in Holyoke with their 7 children. Their son George married three times – the first to Alice Hunt. Not much is know about Alice since she died young. Their children include Rosamond Halkyard. She would marry Lester Jackson’s son Thomas in 1936.