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.