The emigrant/immigrant experience

My paternal grandfather's arrival in New Hampshire, 14 years old and fresh from rural Québec, was only 123 years ago, 54 years before I was born. The older I get, the shorter that interval seems.

In the late 19th century when French-Canadians went to the United States, it was primarily to work in the water-powered mills and factories of New England. Earlier immigrant groups (eg, Irish) were past having to do that kind of work. French-Canadians were the next to fill the need for industrial labour.

Information from the period when my three emigrant great-grandparent couples and their children were first in New England is scant. A fire destroyed most of the 1890 Census of the United States, and the few extant portions do not include New Hampshire.

On the records I have for children born during this period, the father's occupation was most often "laborer." One of my maternal great-grandfathers, who seems to have gone to the United States for the first time as early as 1876, gave his occupation as "laborer" on the 1885 record of his daughter's birth but "teamster" in 1888 when his son was born. (In 1890, that boy and his nine-year-old brother died of diphtheria.)

Textiles and shoes

By the 1900 census, the three families were more settled. One family exemplified French-Canadians as mill workers. My other maternal great-grandfather, who was already a naturalized citizen and owned his house (half of a duplex) with a mortgage, gave "cotton picker" as his occupation, which in this context must have been a textile mill job. He and my great-grandmother could both read and write but only in French. The oldest daughter who still lived at home worked as a weaver, possibly at the same mill (employer name was not noted). The other adult and younger children worked in a shoe factory. My 16-year-old grandfather was a cementer, as was his 13-year-old brother. Only their 10-year-old brother was in school.

In early 1910, my great-grandfather died of heart disease at age 63. The census later that year shows that my widowed great-grandmother owned the house with no mortgage. Her children mostly still did mill or factory work. One of my grandaunts, widowed at 28, worked as a hotel maid. My grandfather worked as a carpenter. The causes of death in this family suggest that breathing fibres in a cotton mill was more hazardous than whatever chemicals were encountered in a shoe factory.

By the 1920 census, my great-grandmother was living with my (maternal) grandfather and grandmother in the family home, a non-citizen, maybe still speaking only French (there was no language question on that census). She died later that year.

Fuelling the city

My two other emigrant great-grandfathers showed that there were opportunities other than factory work. My emigrant paternal great-grandfather, who called himself a labourer in 1891, was listed in the 1900 census as being a dealer in wood, which would have been used for cooking and heating. He ran this business until he retired, and he owned the house in which his widow and one of his sons continued to live after his death in 1920. He had become a naturalized citizen in 1900, but he never learned to read or write. The 1920 census, however, just before his death, indicates that he and his wife (who was literate) spoke English.

Two of the sons did factory work, but one of the others became a policeman, one a salesman, and two became proprietors of small businesses. The older daughters married labourers. Their husbands and sons mostly worked in lumber mills and brickyards.

The teamster maternal great-grandfather was still a teamster in 1900, but by 1910, he was a dealer in coal and wood (later just coal), a business that two of his children continued to run after his death. He was a naturalized citizen, and unlike my other emigrant great-grandfathers, could speak English, as could my great-grandmother.

Most of their sons died before adulthood. One became a priest, assigned to a parish in Utah, but died at 41, probably from exposure to high levels of copper in the water. The oldest daughter married a mill worker. Their children worked in the shoe factory while the husband got a job with the B&M railroad. The second daughter married a mill worker who became the family coal company's delivery driver. The third daughter never married. She worked for her father, first as bookkeeper, and later as manager.

My maternal grandmother, the only one of my grandparents born in the United States, married the carpenter. He later worked as a housing contractor. By the 1940 census, perhaps as a result of the Depression, he was doing maintenance for his parish church. During the war, he worked in the nearby navy yard, and afterward returned to carpentry and contracting.

The last to arrive

Not all Canadiens-français went to the US to stay. Many went for a time to try to make money and then return home. My paternal grandfather, the 14-year-old, might have been one of them. His own father, the great-grandfather who didn't emigrate, had spent several years working in Connecticut, where his eldest daughter was born, and possibly also in Michigan, before returning to Québec. My grandfather's eldest brother, the one he lived with at the brickyard-owner's house, returned home, married, and raised a family.

On the 1901 Census of Canada, my grandfather's parents indicated that he lived with them. There's no way to know if he was physically there. They might have listed him because he was only 15, and they expected that he would return soon. At any rate, in 1906 in New Hampshire, the 20-year-old steam mill worker, falsely claiming to have been born in Michigan (in the town to which his uncle had moved), married the 20-year-old daughter of the wood dealer.

That marriage record is the only document I have on which my grandfather lied about his birthplace and citizenship. Of course I have to wonder why he did, what it gained him to do so. One factor to consider is that in New Hampshire, until 1973, the age of majority was 21. Maybe if he had declared himself an alien, he would have needed parental permission to marry, but not so if he declared himself a citizen. Or maybe he needed to claim US citizenship to convince his prospective father-in-law, a naturalized American, to give his assent.

He might have been helped by a familial co-conspirator. Some time after 1901, his older sister, the one born in Connecticut and thus already a US citizen, apparently also left Québec (where she had lived since infancy) and gone to New Hampshire. On the same day in 1906, in the same city and before the same clerical officiant as my grandparents, she married one of my grandmother's older brothers. I have only records, no further details, but I have to think that it was a double wedding, or at least sequential weddings.

Whatever my grandfather and his sister discussed and planned that led up to this wedding, I don't know. There must have been two courtships before the two weddings. Marriage at 20, secrets and lies -- that's some kind of love story! But it's mostly a mystery.

By the 1910 census, my paternal grandfather was a sawmill labourer (probably the same job as "in steam mill"), living in a rented house with my grandmother and their one-year-old daughter. Then something genealogically annoying happened: somehow, he and his family were not enumerated in 1920 and 1930.

Other records indicate that by 1917 they had moved to the house they eventually owned, and that my grandfather worked for a company that made doors, sashes, and other wooden components. Evidence from birth certificates suggests that he was a driver for the company. "Teamster" shows up as early as 1914, and on one record, "chauffeur."

He still worked for the door company as of 1928, but by the 1940 census he was working as a lumber yard foreman, then later as a superintendent at the Diamond Match Company, and finally back in the lumber yard as a machinist until he retired.

Another sister and two brothers followed my grandfather and his sister to New England. It had been the same in the previous generation. Almost all of my emigrant great-grandparents were either preceded or followed by one or more of their siblings. The great-grandfather who didn't emigrate saw two of his brothers move all the way to western Michigan. After generations of living in the same place, families were split apart.

Old and new country

My great-grandparents and grandparents who emigrated -- or immigrated, depending on which side of the border you're on -- persisted through barriers of language and culture. Like other immigrants to the United States before them, they weren't considered "white," even into my parents' generation. They endured bigotry and exclusion.

My grandparents lived through the First World War, the post-war boom, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. They watched many of their sons go off to fight Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, and even some of their daughters off to perform stateside military duty.

The emigrants left Canada with little but managed to create a solid working class existence for themselves in the United States. There is still a lot of blue collar in my family. My second-generation American father and his sister went to university, as did the son of the carpenter. Together, those pretty much constitute the American dream.

Canadiens-français

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 following the military defeat of French troups and Canadien militiamen formalized what was already true: the Canadiens no longer controlled their own lives. The British left them to their farms and trades, and in 1774 even allowed them to practise Catholicism, unprecedented in the British colonial empire. But they were not in charge. Those who had not gone back to Europe were now subjects of the British crown.

The current Québec motto "Je me souviens" is only the first of three lines that translate as "I remember that, born under the lily, I grow up under the rose," the lily meaning the Bourbon monarchy of France, and the rose meaning England. For my fourth and fifth great-grandparents, people born in Canada who died in British North America, the motto was literally true.

After the Conquest, there was no further migration from France. My Acadien ancestors had long since fled from the British to Canada. Now they were all together in the British colony of Quebec. Among those roughly 70,000 French-speaking settlers (and descendants of settlers) along the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal to Tadoussac and up the Saguenay Fiord were all the people I descend from. My particular forebears lived on Île-d'Orléans, across the river south of Québec, and in settlements downriver along the right bank.

Most of the men of the next several generations either farmed the land or did any of several trades: blacksmith, teamster, river navigator, fisherman, and more. The women continued as housekeepers, midwives, and healers. Most gave birth to many children. Some died giving birth to their last.

From the earliest agricultural settlement, farms had been arranged as they were in France: long, tracts straight back from the river. Unfortunately, with many sons in every generation, an allotment would have to be divided into narrower and narrower lots. Sons without land could hope to learn a trade or to enter the religious life. If they managed to get an education, they could practise law. That didn't happen in my family. Rural poverty in Québec was severe, and they were part of it.

In the late 1840s and 1850s, two sets of great-great-grandparents picked up and moved from the long-settled area south of the river between Québec and the US border, called the Beauce, to an area about 75 km southwest near Lac William in the Appalachian foothills. They left behind family and friends. That indicates, if not desperation, at least an inability to thrive where they and their parents and grandparents were born.

The 1861 Census of Canada list occupations. Six of my great-great-grandfathers were farmers. One of my great-great-grandfathers, who had lost his wife nine years before, was living with a relative, and the occupation of all the men in the house was "journalier," day labourer. Men with no land.

One more second great-grandfather died young, before the 1861 census. He is listed as a blacksmith on his marriage record. His father had been a navigator. When his sons came of age, they worked as day labourers, not farmers.

By the time of the 1871 census, some of my great-grandfathers and great-granduncles were old enough to work, but few of them were listed as "farmer." Most were listed as "journalier" or "voyageur." Since there was no longer a fur trade, I don't know what "voyageur" meant. Perhaps it meant someone who transported people or cargo by water, or perhaps someone who travelled to get work. Some sons of working age had no occupation listed at all.

By the 1880s, children of the second great-grandparents who had already migrated internally, my great-grandparents, left family behind yet again, crossed the border into New Hampshire, and settled in a mill town. By the 1890s, two other sets of great-grandparents had migrated from Kamouraska and the Beauce to one or another New Hampshire mill town. All sought a way to have steady work, make decent money, and allow their children to have a better life.

My paternal grandfather's mother died young, and his father did not migrate. Instead, in 1900, my grandfather, then 14 years old, left home and went to New Hampshire. He shows up in the 1900 U.S. Federal Census living with his older brother and other young men and boys. The French-Canadian head of house was also owner of a brickyard, and his workers lived in his house. For each of the men, the relation to head of house is listed as "servant" and occupation as "Labor, Brickyard." Fourteen years old, speaking only French. I can't even imagine.

My European ancestors settled the Saint Lawrence valley with great hope, were conquered, got poorer and poorer with less and less hope, and finally left Québec and Canada behind for life in the United States. People went back and forth across the border for a while, many hoping to return to Québec, but eventually families were sundered and the culture was disrupted.

Canadiens, pas français

We generally think of the settlers of Canada and Acadia in New France as French. The colonies were French, and French was spoken there, as it still is in the current provinces of Québec and New Brunswick. Most of the settlers were indeed born in France, but it was not unusual for settlers to have come from other European countries, and among my ancestors are several who did.

A man named Pierre Miville dit Le Suisse (called "the Swiss") was my eighth, ninth, and tenth grandfather through four of his children. He born in 1602 in Fribourg, Switzerland, about 30 km southwest of Bern. In 1629 he married a woman from Fribourg named Charlotte Maugis (or Mongis).

By 1631, they had resettled in Brouage, on the southwest Atlantic coast of France, where their six children were born. By 1649 the entire family had settled in Canada. Pierre died in 1669 in Lauzon, across the river from Québec. He was referred to as "Le Suisse" on his burial record. Charlotte died in 1676, also in Lauzon. Four of their children are my Nth great-grandparents, some more than once. All four of my grandparents count Pierre Miville from Switzerland as one of their ancestors.

My eighth great-grandfather Jean Bernard dit Anse was born in 1638 in Diedenhofen, Holy Roman Empire (modern day Thionville in northeast France). Given that he was "called Anse" in the records, his given name was almost certainly Hans, which French-speakers would pronounce "ahns" or "ahnz." He grew up during the Siege of Thionville, and in 1659, when he was 21, the area became part of France.

By 1666 Hans was in Quebec, because it was there and then that he married Marie de Bure of Rouen, a fille du roi who was the widow of another settler. They had nine children, seven of whom had descendants, including my seventh great-grandmother Marie Bernard dit Anse.

The marriage contract has his name as "Bernard dit Ance" with "Jean" inserted. The church marriage record gives his name as Jean Bernard son of the late Jean Bernard and Catherine Fauden. His burial record, from the parish of La Visitation in Champlain (near Trois-Rivières) dated February 15, 1698, reads: "A man about 60 years old named Anse who was found frozen on Lac St Pierre (upriver from Trois-Rivières). They tried to save him, but he was frozen." (His widow died two years later.)

The original family name of my seventh great-grandfather Jean Daigle dit Lallemand was Degme or something similar. He was born in the Holy Roman Empire in 1655. According to his marriage record, he was "son of the late Georges Degme from Vienna in Lower Germany and of Marie Chauvin." "Vienna in Lower Germany" seems impossible, since "Bas-Allemagne" was an area of the lower Rhine around Dusseldorf. The Rhine valley is certainly closer to France than Vienna and seems a more likely origin point. 

In 1685 in Québec, he married Marie Anne Proteau, who was born in Poitiers. The marriage contract gives his name as "Jean Deigme dit Lallemand." The "dit Lallemand" means he was called "the German." The marriage record has his name as Jean Degme. The name somehow turned into Daigle (unrelated to a Daigle family in Acadia).

Jean and Marie Anne had two children with descendants, one of whom was my sixth great-grandfather André Daigle dit Lallemand. The "dit Lallemand" persisted through several generations as a way to identify this particular Daigle family. My second great-grandmother's name was given as Angélique Daigle dite Lallemand on her marriage record to show descent, but on her burial record it was Angélique Daigle, the name she probably went by.

My seventh great-grandfather Emmanuel Mirande was born Manoel Tavares de Miranda, which was also his father's name, in December 1658 in Santa Cruz de Graciosa, Azores islands. The baptismal record lists only his father, but the record of his marrige to Marguerite Bourgeois, daughter of settlers from central France, in Beaubassin, Acadia, gives his father's name in French transliteration as Emmanuel and his mother's as Catherine Spire. Azorean records indicate that her name was Catarina Pires de Colvilha. She was the daughter of a man who had been born in the Azores around 1605.

Manoel's paternal grandparents, my ninth great-grandparents, were Antonio da Costa Tavares from Madeira, Portugal, and Maria Alvares de Medina, who had come from Spain. Manoel/Emmanuel and Maria had four children with descendants, including my sixth great-grandmother, Madeleine Mirande Tavare. Manoel died in Acadia sometime before 1707. By the time Madeleine's husband died in 1722, he and Madeleine had left Acadia (or fled) and were living in Kamouraska on the Saint Lawrence.

My sixth great-grandfather, baptized in Montréal at age 8 with the name Louis Philippe Langlais dit Sérien, had been born Daniel Sargent in 1699, son of a Cornishman named Digory Sargent who had settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

When Daniel was 3, some Abenaki warriors raided their settlement, and Daniel's parents were killed. The Abenaki brought Daniel to Montréal, where they handed him over to colonial administrators. The baptismal record reads that the baptized person was "a little English boy named in his country Daniel Sergeant born...to the late Dickery Sergeant of [a blank was left] and Marie Oben, both Protestants." "Dit Sérien" seems to have come from a family that took him in.

In 1718 at age 18, he married Marguerite Lavoie of Rivière-Ouelle, the grand-daughter of French settlers. Rivière-Ouelle is far downriver from Québec and very far downriver from Montréal. They had four children, three of whom lived to have children of their own, including my fifth great-greandmother Marguerite Sérien dite Langloise. Louis Philippe died in 1728.

(I also have three settler ancestors named Langlois. I do not know if that indicates an ancestral connection with England.)

Most descendants of New France settlers have at least one Indigenous ancestor. My ninth great-grandmother Marie Olivier was born Ouchistauichkoue Manitouabéouich in 1624. She was born in Huron territory but might have been Algonquin (the settlers were allied with both nations). Her father Roch Manitouabéouich had converted to Catholicism. He had his daughter baptized and then brought up by his best friend, Olivier le Tardif, although she maintained ties with her birth family.

At age 20 she was married to French settler Martin Prévost. They had eight children, four of whom had descendants, including my eighth great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste Prévost. Marie was only 41 when she died.

(This ancestry does not make me an Indigenous person. My culture is and has always been French-Canadian.)

To the best of my knowledge, the rest of my ancestors came from various parts of France. The largest number came from Normandy, then Île-de-France, the province that include Paris. Many others came from an area of upper Normandy then called Perche, the small province of Aunis on the southwest coast in which New Rochelle is situated, the provinces of Poitou (Poitiers), Saintonge, Orléanais, Champagne, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Picardy, and several others, even from the south of France.

The French language was only partly established in France during the 17th century, but it was the language of Paris and of the Bourbon kingdom. Any settlers who spoke their regional language must have learned or improved their French in the colonies of New France.

This mix of people traded in furs with Indigenous peoples, fought with Indigenous allies against common enemies (including the British), farmed the land, fished the waters, and became their own people and culture. The settlers whom the British conquered but did not defeat were neither French nor European nor Indigenous but rather Acadien and Canadien.