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.
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.
Joseph Cardinal immigrated when a teenager to Manchester of New Hampshire in the 1870s. It is hard to find information about his early life but we do know that he married Josephine Girard in 1885 and he would die about 10 years later. He was a baker by trade so he did not work in the Manchester mills as so many did. His son George Cardinal did become a mill worker, in fact, for 50 years he worked at the Belknap Mill in Laconia. He married Marie Blanche Aurore Marcoux in 1915 and both would live past 90 years old. Many of the Cardinal family in Belknap County would descend from this couple. One son Lionel would only live to 45 years old. In the early 1950s, he would marry Dorothy Page granddaughter of German immigrants.
Karl Adolph Poetzsche would immigrate from Prussia of Germany in 1866 to Philadelphia. He would take on the name of Charles Page and have 11 children in that city with his wife Wilhelmina Johnson. One of their sons Frank Page would marry a gentrified woman named Emma Rose Chaput. Frank would work as a machinist in Laconia during and after WW2. They would have to leave their city life behind but in the early 1940s work was hard to find.
Samuel Henry Hume was a day laborer in Boston, Massachusetts since his youth. He married Margaret Hoey in 1874. Their son Samuel Henry Hume the younger must have did well enough that he could afford living in the southern suburbs of Boston. His son Warren Samuel Hume did the same. Warren married an Anna Walls of Utah in the 1930s. Not much is known about Anna beyond that she had four children. One of them Edward Thomas Hume moved from Boston to northern New Hampshire and there he would meet the Gordon family.
The Gordon family has roots solidly planted in New Hampshire soil. Enoch Gordon was born in 1745 in Poplin. He had a son named Eliphalet, and then a grandson named Eben, and then a great grandson named Ede. Typical name for early New Hampshire. In 1888, Lucius was born to Ede and Eva Gordon. The family was by then resettled in Laconia and were working mill jobs. His son Francis married in 1937 in Gilford to Winnifred Reister. Their daughter Rachel would marry Edward Hume in the 1950s.
Treflé Charron immigrated from Quebec in 1863 to Nashua New Hampshire. He met his wife Celina Royer there and they 10 children together. Among them was Jean-Baptiste Charron who would leave to come to South Hadley and work for the military at Westover Air Base. His son Jean-Baptiste Charron the younger and his grandson William Charron would also enter the US Air Force leaving three generations of military families. Jean-Baptiste the younger would marry Bernice Bullough in 1942 just before leaving for military assignment in World War II.
Bernice was the daughter of John Bullough and Paulina Katherine Haas. John and Paulina would have 19 children together in South Hadley between 1911 to 1938. The 1930 and 1940 federal censuses had the family living near me on Pittroff Street with their many children. Immigrant families in mill cities would have mortality rates of about 50% among their children due to diseases. Families in the countryside would have most of their children live. Here all 19 lived to adulthood and lived in the same household into the 1950s. I determined the number of the house that they lived in and went to check a house that would fit 21 people. Well I found a tiny home there and guessed that it was not the one or had been razed. Some of these Bullough family members are still alive and it would be interesting to talk to them about their family.
Gustave Reinke was the son of German immigrants that settled in the Cincinnati Ohio area. His future wife Maude Brannock Morgan was from the farmland country of Sunrise, Kentucky where her parents and grandparents had been born. It is in Harrison County in the north of the state and the population is about 400 people still. Sunrise is about 100 miles from Cincinnati so it is not apparent how they met. What is known is that their son Gustave the younger was born in 1931. He entered the air force to fight in the Korean War and this brought him after that war to service at Westover Air Base. Louis Roberge was born in the Quebec agricultural village of Wolftown in 1874. His family and he were migrant farm laborers that worked not only in Quebec but also in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. His wife Marie Louise Fredette had been born to Quebec immigrant in 1880 in Holyoke Massachusetts. Her early life was also unsettled but she met her husband-to-be while both with living with their parents in Northfield of New Hampshire in 1901. She must have convinced him to try to get a mill job in Holyoke since they soon settled there permanently. Their son Theodore Roberge was born in 1905. He would marry Marie Ange Martinbeault and have 7 children. One Beatrice would marry Gustave Reinke.
It is hard to find out more about the childhood of Marie Ange Martinbeault. She was born somewhere in Quebec in about 1903 but being a migrant worker makes her hard to pin down. I have neither found her parents nor her birth information. I went to visit her grave at the Forestdale Cemetery in Holyoke. It is a Protestant Cemetery and that is unusual in this case since almost always a man when marrying a Quebec man would convert religions and not vice versa. She is buried near her parents-in-law and near her niece. Hopefully, more will be found in the future.
Joseph Félix Comeau from descendency from 1875 forwards
Joseph Félix immigrated with his large family in 1875 to Thompson Connecticut. His first six children were boys and he would have 10 boys and 4 girls with his wife Marie Julie Euphémie Legendre. In April of 2012, Massachusetts placed its vital records on-line and became the number two state in the USA for genealogy. This allowed me for the first to not only do ancestor research back in time but also to do descendant research forward in time from a set past point. The year of immigration is the greatest point to start. There is a need to stop before we list living people so it might seem abbreviated.
Joseph and his children would stay together as a family until 1897 when a large group of the Comeau siblings left for New Bedford. To New Bedford went Treflé, Honoré, Louis Phillippe, Adéline, François Xavier, Jacques, and the parents, to Leominster went Édouard, to Woonsocket Rhode Island went Jean Alfred, to Dudley and then to Holyoke went Ferdinand, staying in North Grosvenor Dale were Télesphore Ernest, Désiré, and Marie Anne, becoming a nun in Manitoba was Évangéline, and Frédéric went into the military for many decades.
First and second cousins are possible only through our great grandfather Treflé and his wife Mathildé Touchette. Three of their children had children themselves, Laurent, Dorothée, and Joseph Romeo. Laurent my grandfather would give us out siblings and first cousins. Dorothée would give us the Landreville family as second cousins. Joseph Romeo would have Irene and Edward for children and their children would be our second cousins. Only third cousins are possible through the brothers and sisters of Treflé.
Luckily, one such Comeau third cousin showed up this summer via my on-line family tree. Télesphore Ernest Comeau only lived to 42 years old and when he died his wife Hermine Héloïse Paré went to live with her brother-in-law Édouard Comeau in Leominster. The two families formed a tight bind and essentially became one. One of the sons Honorat Comeau was typical of this family. He married Eva Lillie Vaillette and they had 7 children all sons – Alphonse (1918), Robert (1921), Edward (1924), Homer (1925), Leo (1927), Philip (1930), and Émile (1933). All seven sons would serve in the US Navy – the first five in World War II and the last two in Korea. A picture and story was posted of them last year here. All survived the war and became businessmen afterwards. They are second cousins to our Comeau or Landreville fathers and their children are third cousins to us.
Ferdinand Comeau was the ninth child of Joseph Felix and Julie Comeau. He married Marie Bertrand in 1890 in Dudley and they had 5 children. During the pregnacy with Marie’s last child, she suffered a ruptured appendix and gave birth to Marrion Cécile Comeau prematurely. They both would die that day. Ferdinand would next marry Marie Louise Brunelle and have 5 more children. They would leave Dudley and move to Holyoke Massachusetts in 1908. The large family would live at 23 Sargeant Street until about the late 1960s. Ferdinand would work in just about every mill that Holyoke had searching for the best wage. Most of his grandchildren would move to Connecticut. I thought this was the end of the story for me since I could find little about Ferdinand after 1940. I ride my bike every day and pass through a cemetery when I ride. I often look at the gravestones as I pass them. This November, I spotted a gravestone with Picard / Comeau on the front. I truthfully did not think much of it since there are a few very distant Comeau ancestors around town – three 9th cousins for instance. I went to the back of it and goodness there was Ferdinand Comeau and many of his children engraved there. Ferdinand’s children are our grandfather’s Laurent Comeau’s first cousin. This stone only a mile from my house had about 10 close relatives on it. Ferdinand had lived to 1949 and was 80 years old. One of his daughters Solange Comeau was born in 1904. She married a Picard and hence the other name on the front of the stone. She died in 2005 – lived to 101!
The last that I will write of is Honoré Comeau. He like his brother Felix would marry a Touchette woman – Emma. One of his sons Leonidas was a professional full-time musician in New Bedford his entire life. His only other son was a firefighter in New Bedford – Joseph Louis Raoul Comeau.
Obviously, there are many other tales to tell but a sample is all that is needed. My Pepere Spoor has over 60 living descendents and I am sure that my Comeau side of the family has even more than that. My siblings and I have four pairs of great grandparents but I will have five post and not four. Henley, Spoor, and Brault will have one. The Comeau / Touchette pair will be in two since those families came a long time before the others.
Nils Tobias Omdal was born in 1879 in the hamlet of Omdal in Norway
Nils Tobias Omdal was born in 1879 in the hamlet of Omdal in Norway. He married Sina Marie Nesvåg who was born in 1881 in the hamlet of Nesvåg in Norway. These are ancestral villages by the look of it since they have the family names attached to them. They immigrated with their three young children in 1911 on the Empress of Ireland from Liverpool to Montreal. They soon moved to the Seattle area. Their son Sigve Magnus Omdal was only nine months old at the time. They would have three more children. Most of the family remains in the greater Seattle area still.
Ole Johnsen was born in Norway in 1842. He immigrated to Iowa in his youth and fought in the American Civil War in the 18th Regiment of the Iowa Infantry Company A. Soon after the war he married and moved to Freeman of Freeborn County, Minnesota. There he would have 9 children and work the farm. One of his sons Andrew Johnson would eventually move to Washington State. Unfortunately, Andrew’s wife would die while giving birth to his only daughter Florence Mariam Johnson. His wife was Florence Knoell and she had a grandmother Philippine Bena Zimmermann that was born in Bavaria in 1832. Philippine moved to Wisconsin and had 8 children with her husband Valentin Johann Knoell. I have been able to find many pictures of this large family plus many images of their gravestones.
Melchior Jossi was born in 1879 in the Germanic portion of Switzerland. In 1907, he immigrated to Oregon and soon after married fellow Swiss compatriot Marguerite Brugger. They had a son Henry who would marry a second-generation Norwegian immigrant Evelyn Johanna Elde. Her family moved to Chinook, Washington during the Great Depression. She worked for the Kaiser Shipyards in Portland, Oregon during World War II.
Her father Sivert Elde and her mother Elida Solhein had immigrated sometime in the 1890s to farmland in Montana. Their story is quite abbreviated since the connections to Norway are not known. They moved a lot within Montana but by 1940 were in Washington State with their daughter.
Patrick Henley and Caroline Fournier descendancy from 1880 forwards
When Patrick Henley and Caroline Fournier came to Fall River in 1889, they already had all the children that they would have. Patrick was 55 and Caroline 45 by that time and their oldest son Joseph did not even bother coming with them. That left Elzear as the de facto eldest of the siblings. The Henley family knew the Deschênes family very well in the Gaspe and they seemed to have returned often or wrote letters back a lot. Well at least Elzear must have since he convinced Marie Philomène Pétronille Miville dit Deschênes to move to Fall River and marry him. Besides having a marvellous name, she also had two younger sisters that would move a decade later to Fall River too. But it is the Henley clan that is most interesting.
Elzear and Marie would have 11 children in mill towns around Massachusetts. Eight of the first nine were born in Fall River from 1899 to 1913 but Louis Phillip Henley and his sister Marie Évangéline Lorretta Henley were born in North Adams. It seems that during the 1913 to 1920 period, the entire Elzear Henley family moved to North Adams. By 1920, they are now in New Bedford for a short while and then to Edgartown. It must have been during that short stay in New Bedford that our grandmother Henley met our grandfather Laurent Comeau.
Marie Jeanne Léda Henley, our grandmother, was the first born but she would have 5 younger sisters and 5 younger brothers. Her brother Oran Télesphore Henley would marry Annie Coulie and then two days later they would serve as best man and maid-of-honor at the same church. Oran Henley and Annie Coulie married on Saturday September 12 1925 and then Arthur Barriault and Anna Monnelly married on Monday September 14 1925. Both couples were married at the same church by the same priest but two days apart. Marriages happened on any day of the week and not just the weekends as now. Each couple had stood at the altar for the other couple. An article from the September 18 1925 Martha’s Vineyard newspaper gracefully reports about those two marriages that had happened within the past seven days.
What they did not mention, but what is now known is that the men were related and we Comeau are doubly related to this Barriault.
Arthur Barriault is the step-cousin of Oran Henley. They grew up as teenagers on a farm on Taft Street in North Adams during that 1913 to 1920 period that I mentioned before. Arthur Barriault’s father was Jean Baptiste Barriault who married twice first to a Lalonde woman who died young and then to Leda Henley our common great grand aunt. This is not the Leda that is my grandmother – but rather a daughter of Patrick Henley and Caroline Fournier. Interestingly, my grandfather Laurent Comeau had a cousin that married Marie Alice Barriault in about 1925. This Alice is the sister of Arthur Barriault. So my family is doubly related to Arthur – once as a Henley and once as a Comeau.
The children of Elzear and Marie Henley are the siblings of our Memere Leda, the grandchildren of Elzear Henley are the cousins of our Comeau fathers – among them are children of Oran and Annie Henley – William, Corrinne, Marie, Dorothy, Richard, and Anne. The children of these siblings are our second cousins and I have invited two of them to this group. Since our great grandfather Elzear came with his parents and siblings to Massachusetts, then third cousins are also possible. Patrick Henley brought daughter Élisabeth who married Joseph Duval, son Télesphore who married Marie Posé, daughter Rosanna who married Arthur Duchesne, daughter Leda who married Jean-Baptiste Barriault, Patrick Frank who married Alphonsine McGee, and daughter Léopoldine who married Joseph Deroy. I have only been able to contact one third cousin from this research although there are many more.
Of this group, the saddest story is that of Télesphore Henley and Marie Posé who married in 1898 in Fall River. Their children are Larence, Annorio, Omer, Candia, Edmond, Leona, Leo, and Alice. Eight births but only two of them made it pass the age of 1 year. Fall River experienced incredible population growth in the late 19th century. Its population expanded from 11 thousand to 110 thousand within 60 years. Such growth does not lead to good sanitation and public health officials were very busy trying to detect the location of an outbreak of an epidemic. Influenza, pneumonia, and diphtheria would kill many children each year. The average life-expectancy a hundred years ago was 30 in the USA, but if one could make it past 10 years old, then they could expect to live to 60. The Télesphore Henley family was no exception and actually other immigrant families fared far worse.
Joseph Achim dit Saint-André was born in 1810 in Longueuil, Quebec, Canada. The family name was originally Achim in France in the 1600s but in order to distinguish it from others of the same last name Saint-Andre was added. This is a very typical process and is especially common with members of the armed forces. The word “dit” will mean co-called. 250 years later when they entered America the Achim was dropped. Joseph would immigrate in 1863 with their 6 children and then would have 5 more. They at first went to the French enclave of Chateaugay of New York but after a few years moved to Sutton Massachusetts. Chateaugay was the name of the county that the Saint Andre family had lived for many decades and the town in New York must have been swamped with Quebec immigrants and named by them. Joseph’s first son Joseph Saint-Andre stayed in Sutton as a butcher for many decades. His grandson Ernest Saint-André was the one that initiated the move to Chicopee with the entire family in 1922. Ernest had many sons and thus many grandchildren with the name of St Andre. His son Oliver was near the end of that large family. The family profession had improved from farmer to butcher to mill worker to engineer – normal progression to follow in the developing USA.
Herménégilde Mercier and Philomène Lacoursiere lived in the village Saint-Guillaume in far southwestern Quebec. Their 8th and last child Victoria would immigrate with her mother to North Brookfield Massachusetts where she would meet Ernest Saint-Andre. Victoria’s ancestors for over 150 years had lived in the same village but the mills of New England proved a great economic attraction.
Pierre Firmin Asselin and Marie Blais lived in Saint Charles of Bellechasse County. Their son Joseph Pierre Asselin immigrated at a young age in 1905 to Chicopee. He would marry Exilda Mathieu in 1909 and have five children. They would work many jobs in Chicopee and were part of the rise of that city.
Exilda Mathieu had parents Stanislas Mathieu and Rosanna Bernard from the village Saint-Jude in Sainte-Hyacinthe County. All the above families came from small villages of southwestern Quebec. This is testament to the need to marry someone with the same mentality. Stanislas and his wife brought all 13 of their children from Quebec with them to first Hardwick and then to Chicopee.
LINK to a GazetteNet story about the year 2022 removal of the dam. In 2016 a part of the dam was taken out and the Lyman Mill Pond drained. The Manhan River in the portion is now returning to its natural state.
The Lyman Mill on the former dam is from 1854 and is a grist mill. The current dam that was just removed is from 1938. The first dam in this area was in the 1732 and powered a sawmill. The dam was about 8 feet high and 40 feet wide.
The mill is now in the Lockville Historic District.
Sobon and Gaudrault family history from 1860 to 1960
Andrzej Wincenty Soboń had five children that immigrated to the Holyoke – Chicopee area in the 1890s. They left behind their homeland due to political and religious repression and a poor economy. Andrzej and his children were born in the Galicia area of Poland that was occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were among the first of Polish ethnicity to come to the region and thus they started churches and schools to suit their needs. There were a limited number of other Polish families so two of the Sobon clan married two of the Mikolajczyk clan that settled in Granby and two others of the Sobon clan married two of the Frodyma clan that settled in Chicopee.
Jan Soboń the youngest of the family operated a grocery store on Lyman Street in Holyoke for many decades. His son Leo worked many industrial jobs within the city. He married Mary Adams a second-generation woman with Slovak parents. Her parents Mihály Ádám and Mária Bednár both came from the tiny village of Nižný Hrušov of the mountainous Michalovce region of Slovakia. They were the last of many generations from that town where mining was the biggest industry. Michael as he would be called in America shuttled back and forth from Slovakia to Lisbon Falls in Maine for many years. He eventually settled there and then moved onto Holyoke. At one point his parents Juraj Ádám and Anna Karkos visited him for a summer. They returned but his grandmother Terézia Zlatnicky did settle with the family in Lisbon Falls. Amazing that enclaves of ethnic groups form in such ways around this country.
The Gaudrault family had lived for about a century in L’Islet County of the upper Saint Lawrence River area. This is where the Appalachian Mountains finally end and as may be guessed is farm country. Lucien Gaudrault was born in Saint Aubert of this county but due to crop failures he moved with his family to Concord New Hampshire by 1911. All eight of his children were born in Saint Aubert but moved to Concord with him. They settled quickly into the American culture taking industrial jobs more than mill work. His son Joseph Arthur Gaudrault did as almost all first generation Quebec immigrants did and married another first generation Quebec immigrant. His new wife Bernadette Lamontagne was from Bellechasse County of Quebec and her family had settled into the mill city of Concord also. The Great Depression of the 1930s changed the lives of all Americans profoundly. It surely changed the lives of the Gaudrault couple. Like all families, they had to search around for jobs in a poor economy. By 1935, with their son Raymond Gaudrault in tow, they moved to Holyoke.
John Reynolds of County King Ireland and Johannah Donoghue of County Kerry Ireland had immigrated to America in 1912 and 1910 respectively. They would meet and married by 1916 in Holyoke. Their daughter Rose Reynolds would marry Raymond Gaudrault by the early 1940s. In turn their daughter Joan would marry into the Sobon family in the 1960s. Four distinct ethnic groups into one household – surely the American way.
