Canal Days

Robert Comeau family history

The Comeau family of New Bedford Massachusetts is from four lines of Quebec heritage.  Each immigrated separately from Canada during the 1861 to 1912 era due to economic pressures.  The home country remained to them a strong cultural base and this was evident in their need to build ethnic schools, churches, and clubs.  All came to work in the fiber mills of Massachusetts but all still retained their culture from Quebec.

Joseph Felix Comeau immigrated with his large family in 1875 from Pointe-du-Lac to Thompson, Connecticut.  They worked in the North Grosvenor Dale mills but by 1897 had left for New Bedford Massachusetts.  Thompson was an important location since the Comeau family met the Touchette family there and two members of each family married.  The Jean Louis Touchette family had immigrated in 1861 from Saint-Mathias-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.  Their large family had spread out across Windham County of Connecticut and many remain there still.

Trefle Comeau went to New Bedford with his growing family and they mostly set down roots there.  Two of his brothers did from there move onto Leominster and one Ferdinand onto Holyoke in 1900.  The fiber mills attracted them all to a better future than the agricultural life in Quebec.  Strong Quebec ghettoes were developing in all three cities and these Comeau families made heavy use of the churches and schools.

Patrick Henley and Caroline Fournier immigrated from the Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec in 1887 from the fishing community of Sainte-Anne-des-Monts.  They came with the Deschenes family of the same town and other families from there.  Their son Elzear would marry Marie Deschenes who he knew since youth.  Both families would live in the booming mill town of Fall River and their families would grow quickly like the town itself.

By the early 1920s, the Henleys would expand out to Martha’s Vineyard.  Many would stay there for many decades but some would move from there by the 1950s to Rhode Island, as they needed more jobs.  Work in home construction was common in both locations.  Most of Elzear and Marie Henley’s children followed this path and were successful.  Their first child however choose to remain in the Fall River / New Bedford area.  This was Leda Henley.  She would marry Laurent Comeau in 1922 and that is why she selected to not go to Martha’s Vineyard like the rest of her siblings.

Marie Deschenes’ parents never came to the United States for long.  Her mother came for a while but returned to the Gaspe.  Some of her sisters lived in Bristol County and had large families there.

William Spoor and Rosalie Gauthier immigrated in 1891 from Farnham Quebec with their child.  They would have more children in New Bedford and the family was quite settled in that region.  William Spoor’s grandfather Orange Spoor was a natural born American.  Orange due to economic pressure in the sawmill industry moved to Farnham in the 1850s.  Reverse immigration was possible in the lumber field since Canada had many trees.  Orange was of Dutch American ethnicity which was not common in Quebec in general but Farnham was a cosmopolitan town.  Orange gives us the only portion of our family that is not Catholic since he was of the United Methodist Church.

Jean-Baptiste Gauthier dit Marcoux and his wife Rosalie Hebert were also from Farnham.  Many of their children would immigrate to New England in the 1890s.  They went to scattered locales but remained a strong family and visited each other often.  Rosalie Hebert after her husband’s death immigrated to New Bedford and is buried at Sacred Heart Cemetery.

The Robert and Cecile Comeau children are of 10% Acadian ancestry and most of it comes from the Gauthier genealogical lines.  Their children are by nationality 100% Quebec.  By ethnicity, they are, however, 84% Quebec, 10% Nova Scotia, 3% British, 2% Irish, and 1% Dutch.  The Irish comes from the Henley family since James Henley in 1780s started a family in the Gaspe.  The British comes from both Abraham and Orange Spoor marrying British American women.

Damase Brault and Olympe Gendreau were from the greater Farnham area of Quebec.  They married and had 17 children together.  Six of their children would end up in northern Alberta Province as homesteaders.  Their children and grandchildren remain there to this day.  It was a nice family with two daughters of Damase and Olympe becoming nuns and one becoming a nurse.  Every family tree will have at least one dark character however.  Alphonse Brault was born in 1873 to Damase and Olympe.  He married Eliza Hade in 1895 and had 12 children with her.  Their life was far from settled and they lived a nomadic life due to his criminal behaviour. They lived in many small villages in the eastern townships of lower Quebec Province.  He ended up leaving the family behind in 1917 in New Bedford and settled in Clyde Albert until his death in 1927.

Édouard Hade and Elise Lagace would marry in 1873 in St-Mathias-sur-Richelieu but he would die three short years later.  They were basically migrant farm laborers.  Their daughter Eliza Hade would have a poor and hard life.  Her first husband died within a year due to malfeasance and her second husband was continually racing horses and selling alcohol.  Her third husband would die within two years.  Her last daughter would be Adrienne Brault.  She would live in an orphanage with her young brother from about three to eight years old.  People who endure hardship usually come out for the better.

Robert Comeau and Cecile Comeau married in New Bedford.  Due to a job loss in 1960 they moved to South Hadley.  There they raised 11 children and made a life of it.  A lot of the ethnic pride is gone but the family still remembers its past.

Barnes and Henchey family history from 1860 to 1960

Arthur Barnes was born in Georgia in about 1916 to 1919.  His father seems to have left the family when he was young so his mother and maternal grandparents raised him.  I have done a lot of work to find the names of his parents and grandparents and might have a good prospect.  By 1935, we find him in Perth Amboy of New Jersey.  He graduated from a local high school and was now working in a fertilizer plant.  In 1945, he joined the Army Corps of Engineers and went out to Honolulu Hawaii.  We pick up his trail again in 1948 in Springfield Massachusetts working first as maintenance at a bank but then a permanent career as a metal worker.

John Dacey and Isabella Mcmaron were recent immigrants from England to Connecticut when their daughter Isabella was born in 1903.  They stayed in Connecticut for a few decades.  Isabella met her future husband Andrew Peters in Connecticut but they soon moved to Springfield Massachusetts.  Andrew’s parents are not well known since it seems he was orphaned at three years old. Edwin and Maria Peters his paternal grandparents raised him on a farm in Tolland Connecticut although they were both in their 70s already.  Andrew and Isabella would have a daughter Eleanor Peters that would marry Arthur Barnes I in 1948.

Dennis Henchey and Catherine Lyons immigrated from Ireland in about 1854.  The Irish left Ireland for many destinations and for many reasons.  There were certainly a series of famines in the western farmlands of Ireland during the 1800s, but the Irish were on the move before any famine hit and after they ended.  Overpopulation was a grave problem on the island.  The potato blight was serious but was only one cause amidst many.  The Henchey couple settled in Northampton and had 8 children there.  Their son Michael married Mary Jane O’Connell from County Kerry of Ireland in 1887.  County Kerry was the source of most Irish that left the island.  It is on the far southwestern coast and most inhabitants did not speak English.  About 25% of all Irish left the country in the 1800s, but the percentage was far greater in the western counties.  The Henchey clan moved to Westfield in about 1900 and their son Thomas married Julia Svenson in 1919.

Julia was the daughter of Adolfus Svensson and Kerstin Olsson who had immigrated from Sweden in 1881.  The Svenson family lived in Canton, Connecticut. Kerstin lived to about 90 years old and stayed in Canton all that time.  Julia’s son Thomas married Geraldine Burke.  The Burke family like the Henchey family was an early arrival from Ireland – coming over in about 1830.  Michael Burke and Mary Cotter lived in many towns around Springfield.  Their son Florence was a soldier in 37th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War.  He was killed in the trenches during the initial attack against Petersburg Virginia in 1864. He is buried in Saint Benedict’s Cemetery in Springfield.  His widow Ellen Daley continued to live in West Springfield with her four children.  One of them Jeremiah Burke married Mary Begley who parents had immigrated from Ireland.  In turn, their son Harry Burke married Grace Murphy who parents had also immigrated from Ireland.

Barthelette and Glynn family history from 1850 to 1950

Eustache Berthelet and Delia Stephens married in 1871 in Vermont as recent immigrants from Quebec.  They would be migrant farm workers for many decades between Quebec, Massachusetts, and Vermont.  They had 17 children but only 9 lived to adulthood.  If the child was born in Quebec, then they would give the baby a name of Berthelet, but if it was born in the USA, then they named it Barthelette or Bartlett.  After another generation all would use Barthelette.

They ended up permanently in Holyoke by 1886.  The father was able to find a job in the Parsons Paper Mill.  They settled down by moving onto a farm in northern Holyoke.  One of their sons Arthur Bartlett married a first generation Quebec immigrant Alexina Loiselle.  They are buried in the Barthelette family plot in Notre Dame Cemetery in South Hadley.  About 30 Barthelette members are buried together – quite a surprise to me since I was just cutting through the cemetery on my bike.  One of their sons Armand married Helen Donoghue whose grandparents came from County Kerry of Ireland in the 1870s.  The draw for all was their need for a stable job in the mills to escape the starvation of Quebec and Ireland in the 1870s.  Helen’s grandparents Hugh Donoghue and Catherine Looney had 10 children in Holyoke.  It is difficult to keep in mind that most of the Irish immigrants to Holyoke did not speak English but rather Irish or Gaelic.

Helen’s father Joseph Donoghue married Maude Sears of northern Vermont.  Maude had ancestry from the original settlers of Vermont.  Many Irish immigrants did not mind marrying Americans but usually they married farmers as their parents had been.  Most Quebec immigrants did not marry outside their ethnic group for three generations.  Only the fourth generation did in significant numbers.

The Glynn side of their family has an interesting story. Walter Glynn was born Walter Richard Boardway on November 19, 1893 in Holyoke Massachusetts.  His birth parents were William Boardway and Mary Wood.  Three years after his birth his parents divorced and his mother cared for him. Five years after his birth his mother remarried to an Alfred Glynn in Holyoke.  His mother selected to rename her son after her new married name.  Thus Walter Boardway became Walter Glynn on March 29 1899 – same boy but new name.  He used that name formally and informally throughout his life.  This includes naming his sons Richard Glynn and Donald Glynn when they were born.  He had married Estella Anson of New York state as his ancestry was.

Mary Graham married Donald Glynn and lived in South Hadley for many decades.  Graham is a Scottish name but her maternal ancestors are Irish.  Her maternal grandfather was John Somers of Holyoke.  He worked at the Holyoke City Hospital for many years in the 1910s.  This side of the family is hard to get facts and stories on but I still try.  Interesting case is that of Estella Anson.  Was a music teacher in Holyoke for her whole life.  Also was in various musical clubs of the city.  She gave private lessons in her home on Maple Street.  Her ads in the Holyoke directory are informative.  Quite different from the typical person in a mill city.

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.

The Family of Alphonse Brault and Eliza Hade

1 – Antoine Brault (14 Jul 1896 to 20 May 1903)
Died of diphtheria in East Angus Quebec at age 6.

2 – Joseph Simeon Adrien Brault (22 Mar 1898 to 08 Feb 1906)
Died in Sherbrooke Quebec at age 7.  Unknown as of now why he died young.

3 – Marie Émélie Rose Brault (24 Jan 1900 to 08 Oct 1980)
Born in East Angus, Quebec and lived to 80.  Married Mina Nicholas Zafarapolous but she used the married name of Rose Nicholas.  Not able to conceive children.

4 – Marie Émélie Dorila Brault (10 May 1901 to 04 May 1935)
Born in East Angus Quebec.  Married Israel Fortier in Clyde Alberta in 1919.  Fled with her father after they had lived just a few years in New Bedford.  Lived in Bromptonville Quebec from 1906 to 1910 and in New Bedford from 1911 to about 1917.  Had seven children: Marina – Josephine – Oliva Gerard – Lucille – Georges – Yvonne – Achille.

5 – Marie Antoinette Louise Brault (17 Jan 1903 to 15 Apr 1903)
Born and died in Sherbrooke Quebec at a few months old.

6 – Marie Elizabeth Josephine Brault (14 Sep 1904 to 1959)
Born in East Angus Quebec. Did not move with the family in 1911 to New Bedford Massachusetts.  Rather she lived with her half aunt Eveline Dion and immigrated in 1914 to New Bedford.  This may be due to a premature birth giving her a frail body and health.  Married Emile Charbonneau and had one child Paul Charbonneau. In the family image, she is in the middle as an insert.

7 – Marie Louise Germaine Brault (13 Mar 1906 to 5 Aug 1906)
Born in Bromptonville and lived only four months.

8 – Marie Antoinette Germaine Brault (23 Sep 1907 to 30 May 2002)
Married Adolphe Bedard and had five children – Leo – Ernest – Beatrice – Edna – Doris.

9 – Marie Sylvia Yvonne Brault (9 Sep 1909 to 23 June 1919)
Died at 9 years old of rheumatoid arthritis that was complicated by a weak heart.

10 – Marie Rose Adrienne Brault (16 May 1912 to 20 Oct 1997)
First Brault child born in the USA.  Married Archie Spoor and had four children – Theresa – Connie – Cecile – Archibald.  This is my grandmother and Cecile is my mother.

11 – Ovila Alphonse Brault (15 Jun 1913 to 16 Oct 1988)
Only Brault son to live to adulthood.  Known as Pete to all.  Was a barber.  Children from a second marriage are Tammie – Tonie – Kenneth. Children from the first marriage are Shirley and Donald.

12 – Antonio Brault (08 Nov 1914 to 18 Feb 1915)
Died at three months in Fairhaven Massachusetts.  Death is suspicious.

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.

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.

Cardinal family story from 1870 to 1970

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.

Charron and Reinke family tree

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.