52 Ancestors Week 42: Full House

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 42

The theme for Week 42 is "Full House." Builders, homemakers, card players, parents with lots of children... who in your tree does this this theme make you think of? (Remember: There's no wrong way to interpret the theme!)

Cue the shmaltzy sitcom intro.... 

     If you thought the family I talked about in last week's blog was large, well, it was. There's no getting around it. The Coppola family in Haverhill was a large family and getting everyone all sorted is a lot like herding cats. It's easy to get confused when dealing with a family that big. Information can be easily lost and it takes a plucky genealogist with  a caffeine fueled drive to put the pieces back together again. Was it worth it? You bet it was! The trick now is trying to explain everything to everyone without sounding like a lunatic.

  The Coppolas weren't the only large family with a full house in Haverhill, by the way. Not by a longshot. French-Canadian families rivaled Italian families in terms of sheer size and scale. The only difference between the two is honestly the language they spoke within those walls. Families were huge back in the day for a number of reasons and one particular house was just as full as the Coppolas.

Full House: 1880 edition

        A decade before my great-grandmother Henrietta Legault was born, her parents Antione and Lucie were living with Lucie's parents, Pierre Cadran and Marie Eulalie Bibeau on Water Street and they were not alone.

    Living with them were Pierre and Marie's children, Josephine, Clara, Marie, Pierre and Zoe. To make things even more interesting, Antoine and Lucie had their own children with them in the same house!

    Henrietta's three oldest sisters, Lucy, Melvina and Delphine were also living there according to the 1880 US census! If this isn't the making of a 1980s to 1990s ABC sitcom, I don't know what is. You got the young married couple with three young daughters. You've got her parents and five of her siblings with them all living under one roof. When I first saw this I immediately thought of the TGIF sitcom block from when I was a kid. Sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. Though, I get the feeling they didn't have a nerdy neighbor who always invented stuff or even a wise neighbor who always kept his face hidden.

Noah Robidoux and Josephine 
Cadran.

    Life must have been pretty tough for the families. Let's not kid ourselves. Living with the in-laws might have caused problems that weren't easily solved in thirty minutes. And there was probably no laugh track, either. Like many immigrants, Antoine worked at a nearby shoe factory in order to help pay the rent on the house and the conditions were likely very rough.

    If you try to find the house on Google Earth, you won't be able to find it. They all lived on 177 Water Street in Haverhill and these days it's a parking lot. They literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot.  I guess that's to be expected when you're dealing with city and town officials looking to expand their property. It's a shame because I would have loved to have seen the place.

    Though, I kind of wonder if the house Noah and Josephine are standing in front of in the picture is the house she grew up in. It honestly wouldn't surprise me. The picture was taken sometime around 1919 and the Legaults were still living on Water Street then. I like to think it was the Legault house from 1880 just because I'm an optimist.

    I'm honestly not sure how long they lived on Water Street before the 1880 census. From what I've been able to piece together Antoine and Lucie were married in early 1874 and by November of that year their daughter Lucy was born in Quebec. Melvina was born in Albany, New York in 1876 and Delphine was born two years later in Montréal. Could they have gone down to Haverhill some time in 1877 and put down roots there? Hmm....

    Let me pitch a scenario and you guys can tell me if it sounds crazy. Antoine and Lucie got married and eventually ended up in Haverhill. Could Pierre and Marie have asked the newlyweds to come to America? It seems likely. Jobs were opening up in the Merrimack valley and factory bosses loved having immigrants do all the grunt work. Pierre and Marie apparently arrived in America in the 1850s and would regularly make trips to and from Haverhill. So, it stands to reason that Pierre asked his son-in-law to put down roots in Haverhill.

Antione's brother, Felix, granddaughter Evelyn 
and Felix's wife Matilde

       Many of Antoine's brothers and sisters were also living in the valley so I would imagine that played a huge role in settling in Haverhill. However, I still have a few questions. Who was the first Legault to arrive in the city? 

    That's a question for another time. Sure the censuses state the year someone came and everything. But, those can be a bit vague. Plus. you have to consider the fact that not all border crossings were put into records in the 1870s. For this reason I haven't even been able to find when the other French-Canadians in my tree came to America. I just have rough dates.

 

    Anyway, The Legaults and the Cadrans all lived together in that house for many years and by the time of the 1900 census the two families were in different houses. The Legaults, along with myvery young great-grandmother, were living at 211 Water Street. No pic here. It's a Sunoco station these days. Sigh...Gotta love Haverhill. 

    The interesting thing about Water Street is that while many of the city's Italian immigrants lived on High, Washington and other major roads, the French-Canadians mostly lived on Water Street. I think that might have been because it was closer to the factories and as the name implies Water Street runs parallel with the Merrimack. 

I can't say if my great-grandmother ever had memories about Water Street and the houses there. I  can say that  the children who lived in the original house all grew up and had amazing lives with full houses of their own.

    Even my great-grandmother had a full house on her hands after she married my great-grandfather Austin Felker. My grandmother was one of six and now my mother has over fifty first cousins on just the Felker and Legault side of the tree. Remember what I said about herding cats? I have to do it on both sides of my family tree!!

    I definitely have no shortage of full houses in my family tree. Each house was likely full of laughter, love and loud talking. Let's not mince words here. French-Canadians can be just as passionate as Italians. And the wine would still flow. Still, I can't help but wonder what the first Legault house was like with the two families living in it. It's hard to say without a time machine. I do think that the two families somehow made it work in what was undoubtedly a tough situation. They made the most of it and if I could go back in time, I would so make a sitcom out of that scenario! Coming to TGIF: Too Many Legaults!

See ya next time!