Cox and Savageau family tree from 1860 to 1960
Peter Cox came from Ireland in the 1860s to work in the mills of Providence Rhode Island. He had a son Peter J Cox in 1863 who is proving easy to find information about during the middle part of his life but harder in the beginning and end. Peter the younger is first found working for the Merrick Thread Company of Holyoke. He at first was into thread production and inspection but moved from there into thread machine design. Merrick Thread was bought out by the American Thread Company that had many branches in the northeastern USA. Peter worked for branches in Holyoke, Willimantic (Connecticut), Worcester, Providence, and Little Falls (New Jersey). Depending upon his assignment, he would either bring his family with him or leave them back. The length of the assignment varied greatly. He was a thread engineer who helped design and inspector the current machines. He met his wife Mary West at the Merrick Thread firm in Holyoke and they got married in 1889. Their son Joseph Cox worked at odd jobs in the Holyoke area for many years. Joseph was married in 1918 to Mary McLaughlin who was a new immigrant from Ireland.
The McLaughlin family fell on tough times very quickly when they came to America. Thomas McLaughlin and Bridget Corduff brought their three young daughters from County Mayo of Ireland in 1905. They perhaps had great expectations but within the first month their mother Bridget had died of measles. Thomas remarried in Holyoke to another Irish native named Bridget Kane. They had three children more. Thomas was not happy about life in America and went back with his three youngsters to County Mayo. His three older daughters stayed behind and made the best of it. They worked in the mills and as domestic laborers. When Mary McLaughlin married Joseph Cox, they had three children that would live to adulthood. The last of these William would work in the etching industry for decades.
The Sauvageau clan of Portneuf in Quebec was a migrant farmer family for many decades. They would work at times in Quebec, then in Leominster Massachusetts, and in Connecticut. Narcisse Sauvageau, born in 1867 in a tiny village along the Saint Lawrence River to Damase Sauvageau and Marie Laplante, would epitomize that migrant behaviour. He and his wife Roseanne Charron dit Ducharme would have children in three states plus in Quebec – basically wherever they were farming. Their son Omer Sauvageau would do the same working many odd jobs plus being a migrant farm worker. It must have been on one such farming job that he met his future wife Agnes Gifford in Ware Massachusetts. They would marry in 1923 and briefly take over the family farm. Economic pressures on farms were severe and they would move to Holyoke within a couple of years. There their daughter would meet William Cox.
George Gifford was born in Salisbury Plains of Wiltshire, England. Primarily a farm community, it is famous for Stonehenge. A bunch of rocks almost never gets you a job so he immigrated to Massachusetts and worked in various jobs in Lowell, Gardner, Ware, and Upton. He finally was able to buy a farm in Ware in 1900 and farmed it until his death in 1925.