The Gaudet family

The Gaudet Family – from Vienne in France to Tignish, Prince Edward Island

My genealogical research has given me a very clear progression of the Gaudet family for fourteen generations. The most remote reliable entry I have with dates and places is for Guillaume Francois Louis Gaudet, 1530–1603, who came from the area of Vienne in what is now called the Poitou-Charentes district of France. They left Vienne for North America after 1604 and carried to Canada their customs and social structure.

I have never come across a list of the various places in France where the settlers in New France originated. That story is a complicated one, not at all clear to me, involving urban over-crowding, getting the new Protestant rebels, the Huguenots, out of the country, and most obviously, seeking workers skilled draining salt marshes such as could be found in Brittany.

In this post, and the next one, I want to introduce you to my maternal ancestors – the Gaudets and the Poiriers –  by means of genealogical charts made with Ancestry software.

This chart, which I hope is reasonably accurate, of the most recent five generations, will give you an idea of the long continuity of this branch of the Gaudets. When the chart is extended (which I cannot do usefully in this format), it goes back fourteen generations to the end of the Middle Ages in France.

 

 

 

Isidore Gaudet (1834-1894)

Isidore was remembered as the patriarch of the family, and the first of his line to obtain land rights in Lot 1 in the later Nineteenth Century. His fifty acres, quite close to Tignish, was a modest holding where he would not have done more than subsistence farming with a little produce and hay to sell or trade for the other necessities of life. They were not prosperous nor, it seems from family stories, ambitious.

(I am not certain that this is his image. It could be a photo of his son, Joseph Isidore.)

 

His son, Joseph Isidore Gaudet (1860-1939).

He was my grandfather’s father and so my mother’s grandfather. He was half-Scottish as Isidore had married Charlotte Harper (1834-1936) who was born on April 16, 1834, in Prince Edward Island. Her father, Louis Guillaume (William) Harper, was born on February 9, 1793, in Quebec City and his father, Louis Harper was born in 1760 in Banff, Banffshire, Scotland. Charlotte married Isidore Gaudet on January 19, 1858, bringing Scottish blood into this Acadian family. They had five children during their marriage. She died on November 1, 1926, in Tignish, at the age of 92. My grandmother, Marie Blanche Gaudet, remembered Charlotte clearly, and could imitate her accent when she spoke French. Charlotte even learned the traditional French songs popular in the family, and so powerful was imitation in the learning and passing on of these songs in those days of oral tradition that the singer’s accent was sometimes adopted as well as the words and tune. My grandmother sang her Charlotte Harper French songs with an English/Scottish accent.

My mother remembered quite a bit about Joseph Isidore Gaudet and his ways. He imagined himself perhaps as a man of leisure, and lacking ambition and drive, saw his inheritance of 50 acres shrivel to 4 by the time the Cummins ATLAS was produced in the 1920s. He was not fond of work, and before his eyes, he saw his property and home fall apart. Some winters were so cold, and the family without firewood, that Joseph Isidore tore off the door and window mouldings in the house to burn as firewood, and in the end, the interior doors were chopped up.

 

Bit my bit he sold his land to his prosperous land-owning neighbour, Pierre à Maximin Chiasson, all the while resenting his neighbour’s success and relative wealth. This is what he stared at resentfully, down a long lane, across the road from where his house stood. It was still standing in my youth.

Pierre à Maximin Chiasson property, circa 1899.

Joseph Isidore was a very kind man, and my mother loved him. She was born in 1918 and so knew him for the first 21 years of her life. He was a member of the church choir and loved Gregorian Chant. Every day, seven days a week, he would go to Mass and sing the Liturgy of the Day with other men in the choir. Then, if that had not been enough, he would come home, and sometimes from memory, would sing for his exasperated family the entire mass of the day. They wanted bread, not Gloria in excelsis Deo. When I was a choirboy, and because of the memory of Joseph Isidore, I was expected now and then to sing parts of the Mass from memory, especially when his daughter Mary visited from Rhode Island. One day, while rooting in the organ loft at church, I came across several old leather-bound hymnals, one of which had my great grandfather’s name written in it. It was well thumbed with greasy fingers but was very beautiful. I still have it and it is one of my prized possessions.

 

The Family of Joseph Isidore

When Joseph Isidore Gaudet was born on May 22, 1859, in Tignish, his father, Isidore, was 25 and his mother, Charlotte, was 25. He married Mary Elizabeth Bernard on February 17, 1890, in his hometown. Mary Elizabeth Bernard was born on January 17, 1859, in Tignish. Her father, Thomas, was 33, and her mother, Domithilde, was 34.

Joseph Isidore and Mary Elizabeth had five children, four of which I knew, and in some cases even loved.

Charles Joseph (April 20, 1891 – November 28, 1960).
Jerome Joseph (January 31, 1893 – June 16, 1958).
Marie Angeline (May 17, 1895 – April 25, 1974)
Isidore (September 22, 1896 – January 1955).
Mary (September 8, 1899 – July 6, 1972)

 

Joseph Isidore died on March 19, 1939, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, at the age of 79. Mary Elizabeth died in January 1927 in Tignish at the age of 68. Around 1960 a locally made cement gravestone was placed in the Gaudet plot in the Tignish cemetery. Next to it is one dedicated to Marie Blanche’s nine children who were all born, and died, in Joseph Isidore’s house.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Keane

 

 

Jerome (January 31, 1893 – June 16, 1958).

The first was my Uncle Jerry, baptised Jerome. He was an extremely talented fiddler, and later, mandolin player, and was in great demand from an early age. He was an extremely handsome – beautiful – young man, and on the back of this picture postcard taken perhaps around 1910, somebody had written “Jerry Gaudet the best fiddler on PE Island.”

A terrible catastrophe befell him in his teens when, fooling around with his slightly older brother Charlie, flying through the fields, and jumping over fences, his leg got caught and he broke his knee. There was no doctor and there was no money. No one straightened his leg and over time the break healed leaving his leg permanently bent at the knee.

At the beginning of his beautiful life, he became an unemployable cripple and made his own peg leg which he is seen here wearing while talking to his neighbour from across the road, Pierre à Maximin Chiasson. In these early years he was deft at getting around without a crutch or cane.

 

How quickly he aged, living in perpetual pain. He decided to become a cobbler and a little shed was moved to the edge of his father’s property, opposite the lane leading to Mr. Chiasson’s house, and there he made his home until his father’s death at the beginning of the war.

Uncle Jerry had a great love of animals and liked to study their ways. He fed the birds and when he could lure a squirrel to his hand, he put him in a carefully constructed cage with toys and a treadmill.

Early in the war when the family home burned down Jerry moved to Tignish in what I was told was an old railway boxcar moved down to the bottom of what is now Sunset Drive where the Royal Canadian legion is located. Indeed, after Jerry’s death in 1958 the building may have become the temporary home of the Legion. There he lived alone in the back half of the building while his cobbler’s shop was in the front half. Everybody for miles around brought their shoes to be repaired and resoled.

Uncle Jerry’s tools, now in the Acadian Museum at Miscouche

One wall was covered completely with shelves of unclaimed shoes and boots that had accumulated over the years. Jerry worked next to a window facing the street, at his little bench that held all the tools of his trade: his anvil, awl, two needles, thread with a lump of tar to waterproof it, boxes of nails and tacks, a tack lifting tool, and a special hammer and a cobbler’s sewing machine. There was a bottle of leather glue that was very aromatic, and which competed with the other smells in that shop of fragrant thick sole leather hides, tar, and horse shit still on the farmers boots.

I used to love to visit him and sit on the stool next to his worktable and watch him rebuild shoes and boots. It all fascinated me, and I was full of questions which he answered. Most of the time, with his deep-lined face that had not seen a razor for days, he sat hunched over his work. He always had a smile for me, and sometimes a gift of five cents. My grandmother, who loathed all her husband’s family, would, from time to time, grudgingly send him a loaf of her delicious bread. Although he let me handle his precious fiddle and the beautifully inlaid mandolin, he never played for me. But I heard, about once a year, his magical playing, full of passion, but that will be described in another post.

My old friend Leo Gaudet recently reminded me that Uncle Jerry used to mend the Tignish baseballs as they came apart at the seams. Patiently he would sew with his curved needle the joints where the various bits of leather that covered the balls had come apart. He hated doing that work but the players always came back to him to pester him to do another repair.

When he died, I was devastated as he was the only member of my entire family that I truly loved. I was a choirboy and sang at his funeral, and accompanied his body to the grave, where with the other boys I sang the Latin liturgy for commitment to the ground.

 

Isidore (1896 – 1955).

Isidore was born in his father’s house near Tignish on September 22, 1896. He lived there for his first 18 years with his siblings, and also his brother Charlie whose wife Marie Blanche already had two children. It was a crowded house.

Here is the handsome Isidore shortly after he enlisted to fight in World War I. He was only 18 in 1914.

 

We don’t know if he enlisted or was drafted to fight in World War I. Photographic evidence preserved by his sister Mary indicates that Isidore became a German prisoner of war. He is seen here, in the front row, kneeling on the right, carrying the little German all-purpose eating utensils called a henkelmann, from  which one can eat or cook.  The original photo is very tiny – only about two square inches – and must have been taken and distributed by a German soldier.

Here is a close-up detail of Isidore from that group photo.

 

Isidore may have owed his life to having been imprisoned as he was one of the few who returned. After some travel to see his siblings in the US Isidore appears to have settled down in Saint John in the early 1920s. Official records place him there in 1922. At present we have no idea what he did for the next 20 years. This photo, taken in those years, shows him respectably dressed with his youthful good looks still intact.

Isidore circa 1930-40. Photo courtesy Stephen Keane Collection

There are two fine portraits of Uncle Isidore that were preserved by his sister Mary. Brother and sister were very close. These were handed down to my family and date from the 1920-40 period.

Isidore and his sister Mary.

R. Porter Collection.

 

At the beginning of World War II Isidore met a lovely woman in Saint John who would become his partner for the rest of his life. They had four children. She was called Helen Beatrice (Condon) Kelley (May 9, 1900 – August 28 1985), and had recently been abandoned by her husband, leaving her with another four children.

Photo courtesy of Lynn Doherty, Isidore’s grand daughter.

Over the years Isidore’s family in Saint John grew and it is a great sadness that we never made contact or even discovered anything about them. Charlie’s wife made this impossible and it was a painful issue that hovered between them. My deeply religious grandmother, Marie Blanche, never forgave her brother in law for cohabiting with a Protestant woman. She never knew the circumstances of Isidore’s relationship with this abandoned woman who could not marry him as there was no legal divorce.

Recently, through Ancestry.ca, I came in contact with one of Isidore’s grand daughters, Lynn Doherty, who preserves her family’s traditions. She provided me with new photographs and for the first time in my life I have been able to form a picture of Uncle Isidore’s Saint John environment.

This is a very happy photo of the entire family taken at Christmas circa 1949. It is a complicated one because it contains not only Isidore’s family with Helen Beatrice, but the children from a previous failed marriage with John F. Kelley. These were Earle, Helen, Ronald and Bernard. Isidore’s children with Helen Beatrice are Gerald, Norbert (Newt) and Shirley.

Photo courtesy of Lynn Doherty
Front Row: Shirley Kelley, Helen Beatrice Kelley and Gerry Kelley.
Back Row: Isidore, Earle, Norbert, Helen, Ronald, Donald and Bernard.

[insert description of Helen Beatrice]

With this new information it has been possible to create an update of Isidore’s family tree, incorporating not only his ancestors, but the family of his heart in Saint John, NB.

 

Isidore died when he fell off a railroad bridge in Saint John harbour when he was taking a shortcut home one winter night in January of 1955. His body was found on the ice, embalmed, and shipped to Tignish on the train. He was waked in our tiny back room, and in mountains of snow and freshly dug frozen earth, with the choir, I sang the Liturgy of the Dead while his body was lowered into the grave. A few years later a cement tombstone was made by a local maker and this pitiful memento of a most interesting life is all that survives of Isidore on the island today.

 

 

 

Marie Angeline (1895 – 1974)

Angeline and Ernest, from a group photo.

Angeline whom we called Aunt Angie (May 17, 1895 – April 25, 1974), married Ernest J. Gaudet (1893-1988) and, like so many other at that time, they moved to New England for a better life.

Ernest J Gaudet was born on September 10, 1893, in Tignish. His father, Pierre-Urbain, was 35 and his mother, Mary, was 29. He married Marie Angeline Gaudet on February 29, 1916, in his hometown. They had 9 children in 19 years. He died on June 27, 1988, at the age of 94, and was buried in Cranston, Rhode Island, USA.

 

My American cousins, descendants of Angie and Ernest, have done extensive genealogical research on their family and have provided me with copies of their charts. I have never had the opportunity to discuss this subject with the only American relative with whom I am in touch – Stephen Keane – who with his wife manage all these family records.  When time permits I will sort through this material and list their children with their dates.

From time-to-time copies of pictures have made their way to my mother or her sister May, such as this one showing Aunt Angie in 1936 with her daughter Rita, whom I met as a child, and later in the 1980s when she visited Tignish.

Angeline and Ernest had a large family of nine children, and when I was a small boy in the early 1950s two of their girls Rita and Patsy, visited Tignish and were full of light, laughter, and pure charm in our domestic environment of doom and depression. I remember the wild extravagance of their beautiful loafers, which I had never seen before, with coins inserted in the slots.

Every year Aunt Angie and Uncle Ernest would come to Tignish to visit their relatives, and there would always be a visit, usually for a family meal, at our house. The conversation was highly animated with Aunt Angie and my grandmother Marie Blanche sorting out some event of the past and Uncle Ernie, who had a powerful voice, jumping in to make his views known.

The last time I ever saw – and heard – Aunt Angie and Uncle Ernie was late one afternoon when I dropped by just as supper was finished and conversation at the table was heating up. It was August 16, 1966. I was sitting to one side in the stairwell and had with me the small tape recorder I used to collect folklore. Surreptiously, I turned it on and captured the whole conversation. There were tales of the evil eye where one look was enough to break dishes in your cupboard. And there were haunted houses. Alphonse à Joe Madeleine (whose daughter Charlie’s son Gerard married) would tell the story of sleeping at a certain house and repeatedly having the bedclothes town off his bed while he slept. He escaped in terror through a window. And Ernie told of haunted woods where an invisible presence followed close behind until, in terror, he ran home and hid under his bed.

This generation was full of such stories, many of which I heard at that time in my life – I was 23 – when my passion for folklore was at its height. These stories and perceptions were an important part of their lives and filtered the way they perceived the world around them. They were reality, not fantasy. It was an integral part of everyday life that has disappeared in our culture today, except among aboriginals, where ancient ways of experiencing the world are still alive.

 

Mary (1899 – 1991)

Detail from a family group photo.

Mary Gaudet (September 8, 1899 – July 6, 1991) was born in Tignish. Her father Joseph Isidore was 40, and her mother, Mary, was also 40. The earliest image we have of Mary is a group photo of her First Communion class, probably dating from 1907 or ’08. Sadly, a break in the photo runs across Mary’s face. Seated with them was their beloved parish priest, Fr. Dugald MacDonald.

When Catholics looked back on family history, along with the other major anniversaries and celebrations enjoyed by the rest of the world, they were aware– at least to the middle of the Twentieth Century – of their First Communion and Confirmation events, when, dressed their best, the boys and girls were received into the Church as full members, trained and anointed to begin, with full knowledge of their actions, the road to Salvation. Their life behaviour had been defined by inflexible rules, and many followed most of those ancient precepts all their lives.

In 1927, when she was also 27, Mary went to New England, like so many others, to look for work in the factories. She was just under the line before the great crash of 1929 put an end to emigration. She became an American citizen, like so many Islanders who sought a new life in that richer world, and spent most of her life in Providence, Rhode Island. Not a great beauty, she nevertheless was a most attractive person, full to the brim with wit, kindness, and generosity. Mary never married.

She was a great mimic and could do convulsively funny imitations of the people in her world. She also liked to dress up and here is a picture of her as Charlie Chaplin, taken after she had moved to the US.

Aunt Mary came home to visit for one week every summer, and she stayed with her brother Charlie, my grandfather. Her arrival was heralded by frantic house cleaning and her bedroom – the best in the house and reserved exclusively for visitors from away – was freshened up and the bed covered with crisp sheets and special quilts, made by my grandmother, glowed in their splendour on the bed.

It is probable that the cloth for those quilts came to us in huge boxes of many things gathered by Aunt Mary in the textile factory where she worked and then sent to Tignish. It is possible that these significant acts of kindness began during the Great Depression and most certainly intensified when the Gaudet house in Tignish burned down, right after the death of Joseph Isidore.

To jump ahead for a moment, these boxes arrived regularly in my childhood, and at Christmas an eagerly – wildly – awaited-for box would come from Rhode Island. It was wrapped in heavy brown paper, tied up in a cage of heavy cord where every joint and knot was covered in red sealing wax. The presents inside were wrapped in papers such as we had never seen – rich and brilliant – and the contents were carefully chosen. For me it was always clothing, the likes of which could not be found in Tignish.

Aunt Mary was beloved by my mother and her sisters, and I too adored her. She sent special cards and a prayer book for my First Communion and I still treasure there relics. She is the only member of the Gaudet family of that generation with whom I corresponded.

 

Charles Joseph (1891 – 1960).

Of all the family of Joseph Isidore Gaudet my grandfather, Charles Joseph (April 20, 1891 – November 28, 1960), looms greatly in my memories. He was my maternal grandfather, and he and my grandmother Marie Blanche were asked to accept and raise me when their children had nearly all died of tuberculosis and several years after they were left homeless when their home burned down.

 

Charles Joseph Gaudet was born on April 20, 1891, in Tignish. His father, Joseph Isidore, was 31 and his mother, Mary, was 32. He died on November 28, 1960, in his hometown at the age of 69, and was buried there.

During World War I, as a very young man in his early twenties, Charlie went to work out west, one of hundreds of unemployed young men who went to harvest the vast crops of the Canadian Prairies. On the internet I discovered that a crew of about 30 men was needed in such an operation. Men had to haul water to operate the great engine of the threshing machine. Others were required to feed the harvested grain into the mouth of the machine. Men were needed to handle the stooks, process the grain and to move, store and transport the fruits of the harvest to the granary.

These Harvest Excursions, as they came to be called, were very big business for the western farmers and the CPR Railroad that brought carloads of fit workers from Eastern Canada. This passage from Wikepedia describes clearly how the process worked.

A harvest excursion was a common practice in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century where large numbers of workers would travel to the Canadian prairies to participate in the fall harvest.

There were long severe labour shortages on the Canadian prairies, and these became extreme during the weeks of the fall harvest when millions of acres of crops needed to be brought in during a short period of time from September to October. Thus in 1890 harvest excursions were organized by the Canadian Pacific Railway in which special trains would transport workers from Eastern Canada to the prairie centres. There they be hired by agents and travel to farms across the prairies. The labourers were given low fares by the CPR as the railway knew that they would later earn a great deal from transporting the harvest. The CPR was also the largest landholder in the west and it hoped that some of the excursioners would decide to settle in the west and buy some railway land.

The bulk of the labourers came from Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes but as demand increased workers began to be pulled from British Columbia, the United States, and Great Britain. Wages were high, the highest a labourer could earn in Canada. A season’s work could pull in up to three hundred dollars. As room and board were normally provided the only expense was the thirty to forty dollars for the train trip west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_excursion

 

Charlie worked for the R. W. Mathews Threshing Outfit, and we know this from a photograph he brought home from one of these Harvest Excursions, as they were called. I have not yet been able to locate where it operated. He is third from the left in this surviving fragment of a larger photo.

In the detail at the top, you see the severely handsome Charlie on the back of the hay waggon.

This is the man my grandmother saw and fell madly in love with. In one of her extremely rare moments of shared reminiscences she told me how she was swept off her feet by this handsome man, all dressed as a cowboy, newly arrived home from the Harvest Expedition.

This was at the time that World War I was being fought (1914-18) and Charlie’s brother, Isidore, went to fight. Charlie probably escaped conscription by working on the nationally vital task of harvesting the wheat from the prairies.

Charlie married Marie Blanche Poirier on April 13, 1915, when he was 24. The day before her wedding, Mary Blanche’s starched petticoats drying on the clothesline were eaten by the free-ranging pig. Was this a precursor of things to come? They had 14 children in 18 years. She had been brought up in relative comfort in Palmer Road by a loving family who bought her lovely things, like a special carpet for her bedroom. Her father owned a small coastal schooner that carried merchandise of varying kinds from Miminegash Harbour to ports in the North Shore of New Brunswick. Charlie, with absolutely no resources of his own, married well. Marie Blanche came to live at Joseph Isidore’s house in Tignish and had all of her children there. Tuberculosis was rampant at that time and nine of her children died between 1921 and 1941. Life in Tignish was not easy. In this detail from a group photo circa 1920, we see her with one of her babies, probably the third, Mary Elizabeth, born at that time. I will tell Marie Blanche’s story in my next post.

 

A photo surfaced a few years ago when I was going through my Aunt May’s estate that shows a very young Charlie in an urban setting. He is fourth from the right, looking very laid-back with his hands in his pockets. Perhaps some day the location of this photo might be discovered, but it is possible that it dates to the end of the war and that Charlie was visiting his brother Isidore who would decide to stay in Saint John where he worked at the port. If Isidore is in the picture, I have been unable to identify him.

 

Life as a Fisherman

It is likely that Charlie became a fisherman during the Depression. Clarence Morrissey, a local magnate, had a large fishing establishment perched on the edge of the cliff at the Black Marsh near the North Cape lighthouse. Here lobster was processed in a factory and there were various outbuildings including bunkhouses for the women who worked at processing the cooked lobster.

The whole establishment can be seen in these old photos, one taken from a ship at sea and the other a detail of the first federal aerial photographic survey of the province done in 1935.

Conditions here were extremely perilous, with ramps, barely supported, going down to the water’s edge where the fishing boats, so tiny, could unload their catch. Everything had to be carried manually up to the factory to be cooked and canned.

Children were sent to work here, and Charlie’s daughter Mary Frances – my mother – was taken out of school in Grade 4 and sent here to support the family. She suffered the most horrible abuse from young men who thought nothing of raping a girl who came from a nobody family.

 

Charlie eventually began to fish for the Myrick company at the Tignish Run, or Myrick’s Shore, as it would be called after these Americans had bought nearly all the land and fishing rights surrounding the complicated harbour created by the Tignish River. He is seen here on the left in this circa 1930 photo of a group of fishermen.

Charlie had grown to be a big powerful man who, despite the death of so many of his children from tuberculosis, still managed to look strong and healthy.

Charlie never owned any fishing gear of any kind and was entirely dependant on the gear supplied by the Myricks – a boat, various nets, and great coils of hemp rope. He was expected to spend his winter months mending all the nets, splicing damaged ropes and building lobster traps. The nets for these, which were very complicated things, were all knitted in the kitchen, next to the window. Lobster twine, as it was called – a heavy cotton string – came wound around tubes which had heavy blue cardboard cores which I eagerly collected. Their chief use was to blow bubbles in soapy water until the tube became soggy and clogged.

Label for tinned Myrick lobster.

 

Fishermen went out on the Myrick boats in teams and Charlie used to talk about two men he had worked with in those dangerous days on rough water. One was Charlie Gavin, who in his day was a famous singer of what we now call folk songs, but which then were a combination of old songs passed on in the family or learned in the lumber camps.

Photo from the late Charlie Gavin collection.

In 1966 I spent many hours with Charlie Gavin, hearing his stories of fishing with my grandfather and singing into my tape recorder all the songs he could remember from those days. Charlie would play an extremely important role in the forming of the fishermen’s’ union that finally broke the back of the Myrick monopoly.

Another of Charlie’s fishing partners was Jerry LeClair who lived near the railroad tracks on the corner of the Dalton School grounds. They were great friends and got along very well. I remember this scene exactly from my schoolyard when my grandfather went to help Jerry with the nets. I could have taken that photo myself; the memory is so fresh.

Photo courtesy of Gerard LeClair

 

Life in the Lumber Camps

Starting early in the Twentieth Century when farmland on the Island had been subdivided to absurdity by providing acres for those huge Catholic families, more and more young men – some only boys – went to work in the forests of New Brunswick and Maine, chopping down trees, cutting off the limbs and sending the trunks downriver on huge rafts, on which some of the expert woodsmen rode, jumping from log to log.

Logging, with its romance and danger, inspired many folk songs, the most famous of which is Peter Emberley by John Calhoun, one of the men who drove the injured boy in a sleigh to get help wrote the verses and a local singer adapted them to an old Irish tune. Of all the many wood songs it is the best known and loved. I have a recording of Charlie Gavin singing it.

My name ’tis Peter Emberley,
as you may understand.
I was born on Prince Edward’s Island
near by the ocean strand.
ln eighteen hundred and eighty-four
when the flowers were a brilliant hue
I left my native counterie my fortune to pursue.

I landed in New Brunswick
in a lumbering counterie,
I hired to work in the lumber woods
on the Sou-West Miramichi.
I hired to work in the lumber woods
where they cut the tall spruce down
While loading teams with yarded logs
I received a deadly wound.

 

My grandfather Charlie went to work in the woods, probably of New Brunswick, but perhaps also in Maine. He can be seen here, the figure on the left of the back row, with his beloved pipe. Every fall when he did not have to work for his fishing employers, he would leave the Island and go to the woods for the winter.

Much has been written about life in the lumber camps and the Folklore Department of the University of Maine at Orono has a vast collection of songs and anecdotes collected by students over many years. Books have been published on the subject.

Charlie was, in his quiet way, very musical. Music ran in the Gaudet family, and he would have eagerly learned every song he could in those evening bunkhouse settings in the deep forests. It is said that Charlie sang for his male friends, lubricated by sufficient drink, but he only sang privately, sotto voce, when he was home.

Photo courtesy of Gerard LeClair

 

When I was a small boy, I used to follow him around like a dog and he would work around the place singing to himself. The story I am about to tell you sounds improbable in the extreme but, listening to him as he worked splicing rope in the barn I heard a number of times these words – only partly remembered, of course -that in later life I discovered were from the Romance song in Sigmund Romberg’s great operetta, The Desert Song, written in 1925-26. It was a huge success for a number of reasons and had a run of 465 performances on Broadway. The story is silly fantasy, inspired by a real revolt in North Africa, but romanticised by stories of Lawrence of Arabia and early movies of desert heroes.

I first hear this operetta in my teens and was blown over when the plot moved to the following verses:

 

My princes become what I mold them,
And they stay for the breath of a sigh!
I open my arms to enfold them,
And they’re gone like a breeze rushing by.

Ah, this is a humdrum world,
But when I dream I set it dancing.
When life is gray, I have a way to keep it gay,
Passing the time of day with love.

 

These were the words my grandfather sang in the barn all those years ago! Where did he learn them? It must have been in the lumber camps. This is the great and wonderful unsolved mystery about my grandfather. He was full of enigma, except, well-lubricated with moonshine, this huge man would suddenly take the centre of the kitchen floor when his brother Jerome was playing the fiddle, and light as a feather, made the whole house shake with his step dancing – delicate as a feather in its footwork.

 

A time of Tuberculosis and Death

Between 1916 and 1934 – a period of 18 years – Charlie and Mary Blanche produced 14 children. By 1941 nine of these had died of tuberculosis, except for the second child who died of diphtheria. Here is the sad chronology of those unfortunate children, victims of the epidemic that was raging across Prince Edward Island at that time.

Joseph Isidore, born 1916, died in 1921, aged 5.
Mary Dora, born 1917, died 1923 from diphtheria, aged 6.
Mary Elizabeth, born 1920, died 1937 of tuberculosis, aged 17.
Edward, born 1921, died 1937 of tuberculosis, aged 17.
Mary Genevieve, (Jane) born 1922, died of tuberculosis 1937, aged 15.
Mary Marguerite (Rita), born 1924, died of tuberculosis 1941, aged 17.
Frederick, born 1926, died of tuberculosis 1937 aged 11.
Cyrus, born 1929, infant death at 17 days.
Joseph Arthur, born 1934, infant death, one month old.

 

Rita, just before she died. A locket treasured by her sister Frances.

Only five survived into maturity, and I was born and grew up during their long lives. But what did Charlie think of all these deaths? Where was he during these difficult times? What support did he give his wife and family? We have no idea, but one story told my by grandmother taints the whole quality of those times. The story is short and simple: In a terrible storm, while my grandmother was delivering – unassisted – her most recent baby, she could not go and hold the child who lay alone, coughing blood and suffocating to death from tuberculosis. The truth of things is often unbearably sad.

An appalling story was told to me by my mentor Margaret Conroy, the village librarian. When Joseph Isidore died in 1939, in Providence, Rhode Island, elders of the village acted quickly and burnt down his ravaged house, this livid source of pestilence. By 1940 a fisherman’s shack at Myrick Shore (Tignish Run) was hauled by horses to the triangular corner of a field about a mile north of the village in Christopher’s Cross. That was to be the new home for Charlie and Mary Blanche, and their five surviving children. The sixth, Rita, was dying in the sanatorium.

It was left to Mary Blanche to make the shack into a house. She created walls, using cardboard boxes as wallboard, and in time covered this with wallpaper. She made a large kitchen with two back rooms, a parlour used only for wakes before funerals, and a pantry where dishes and food were kept and meals were prepared. An iron stove was given to them to heat the house and cook the meals. This was Mary Blanch and Charlie’s home around 1944. Marie Blanche is on the veranda, smiling. How often did she have the urge to smile?

She was now in her early 50s, well past child-bearing and those endless deaths.

Life went on for Charlie and he lived in this tiny house with his five children, three of which moved away when war came. When at home, Charlie reigned supreme as lord of all, sitting in his rocking chair which dominated the kitchen. It was sacred and could not be used when he was in the house.

 

Here we see Charlie in this photo taken during World War II with Susan, holding her beloved cat, May, about to be married to a Navy man who would become a Montreal policeman after the war. The boy Gerard, the youngest, who was very athletic, was also a great hunter who brought rabbit to our table in winter, the only fresh meat we ate, and trout when the ice was gone. He too would leave and go to Montreal to become a mechanic.

 

Charlie as husband and father.

There are several pictures of Charlie that survive, showing him with fellow fishermen at the shore, or visiting – and drinking, with his friends, mostly Irish. This photo, perhaps from the 1930s, shows him with a group of buddies passing away an afternoon watching a tire inner tube being repaired.

Photo, perhaps from the late 1930s showing Charlie Gaudet, second from right, with his friends Stephen McInnis, his father Jack McInnis and Alphie Perry.

What does this close-up of Charlie tell us about his character and personality? Did Marie Blanche and Charlie have a social life or was it all babies, tuberculosis and funerals?

Charlie drank a great deal, especially with his Irish friends. They would drop by our house in horse and wagon, or else driving a big dump truck, and furtively make their way to the barn where homemade liquor – beer or moonshine – would be produced. Then they would get drunk and stagger to the horse and cart and be taken home by a horse who knew the way – and the routine.

The Miracle of the Divinely Directed Hammer

As small boy, I witnessed a most extraordinary scene that is burned into my memory. One day, when my grandfather was not at home, a couple of his drinking buddies had tied their horse at the gate and were calmly walking through the yard to our barn. I remember going out to the back porch with Marie Blanche who promptly ordered them off the property.

They laughed and carrying a huge gallon glass jug filled with a brown opaque substance that was probably beer, continued on to the barn, one of them saying, as he went, “Get back to the house, Missy Goody, you old bag.” In a flash Marie Blanche grabbed the hammer and threw it at them. By divine accident the hammer hit the jug which exploded into splinters, spilling the beer on the ground. Without another word, the two men turned around and got into their wagon and drove off.

 

Charlie suffered from drinking bouts, especially at Christmas and Easter, settling-up time at the end of the fishing season, and when elections came around and he was filled with liquor to go and vote for the Conservative Party. (Marie Blanche was a staunch Liberal.) These bouts would last several days and there were monstrous rows in the house. Charlie never physically abused his wife during these events, but they had horrendous verbal exchanges. Charlie knew Marie Blanche’s weak spot: profanity – and so, roaring, he went about the house cursing, swearing and even blaspheming. Those were dreadful times.

 

The Village Seamstress

Time flew. Charlie fished and Mary Blanche gained a reputation as the local dressmaker/seamstress. It was her income that kept food on the table and kerosene in the lamp. This picture taken around 1949 when Gerard was 17 and planning to join his elder sisters in Montreal, shows Charlie, dressed neatly as he liked to do, leaning against the gate and being the benign father of the family.

 

Soon after this picture was taken my mother, around 1952, Mary Frances, arranged to have their converted fisherman shack house moved closer to Tignish on land bought from Jack Perry. Ironically the new plot was diagonally across the road from the site of Joseph Isidore’s former home where they all grew up. The house was moved off land that had never belonged to the family and also it made it easier for me to go to school. For my first years, all seasons regardless of weather, I had to walk a mile and a half each way every day. In winter I followed in the horse and sleigh tracks as in those days the roads were not ploughed because there was no motor traffic. Horse traffic took to the fields.

The house was moved by Marie Blanche’s brother George – a jack of all trades –  by being winched by a rope attached to greased runners along the dirt road. A deep post hole was dug in the middle of the track and a winch was inserted. Then a horse, walking in endless circles, would slowly wind the rope and  inch the house along until the process had to be repeated. It took us three days to reach our new location.

 

A romance reclaimed.

As the 1950s progressed, Charlie retired from fishing. An infection from a cut on his toe turned rapidly into blood poisoning and in no time, gangrene set in, and he had to have his foot amputated. For the first time in his life Charlie found himself a free man with time to enjoy life. Drinking bouts, which had brought so much discord into the house over the years, were now a thing of the past. He sat in the shade of a tree he had brought from the woods and planted, he smoked his pipe, and in the evening friends and neighbours would come over for a card game. Life was also easier because for the first time ever, pensions for the elderly became available from the federal government. At $60 a month life had never, in all his years, been more secure.

 

A few years after we moved to Tignish a family from North Cape, Nelson and Emily Doucette, with their father Jerome, and their two boys Frankie and Gerard became our next-door neighbours. They were a gift from heaven. Frankie and I were in the same class at school. Unexpectedly Emily bore another child, a girl called Andrea, and when she was old enough to rip across the yard to our house, she became my grandfather’s little darling. For the first time in his life, he had time to indulge his love of children to the fullest, unencumbered by death and the need to be away working. I recently discovered this negative of the footless Charlie, on his knees, playing three-legged horse to Andrea’s goading. It was taken in the summer of 1960 and Charlie had perhaps never been happier.

 

That same summer some of the family (Susan and Reg) gathered and this family photo – with Andrea – on the porch steps, shows everybody smiling, a vision never seen before in my entire life to that time. Looking at my radiant grandmother always comes as a shock as the natural set of her face was a deep scowl.

In these last years lived in a highly modified – improved – lifestyle, Marie Blanche and Charlie found again that love that had pulled them together half a century before. It was beautiful to see, and is one of my most treasured memories of that brief time.

 

This is the last picture of Charlie ever taken. I took it before I returned to Montreal in August of 1960. On November 28 he died of a blood clot to the brain.

When life is gray, I have a way to keep it gay,
Passing the time of day with love.

 

Resources

My memory of events in family history is excellent, and this is supplemented by a very large collection of family photos and pictures of other people and things that relate to my story.