Introduction
About a year ago, I received a very pleasant surprise when I learned about an article published in La Memoire, a publication of the Société d'histoire et généalogie des Pays-d'en-Haut, which is based in Saint-Sauveur, Québec. I first learned about it from Suzanne Demers, who has helped me with several blog posts and is a member of the society. When she read the article in her copy of the quarterly, she was as surprised as I would later be.
After hearing from Suzanne, I received emails telling me about its publication from Francine Chassé, the vice-president of the Society and chair of its Historic Committee, and from Doris Poirier, the author of the article. They then kindly mailed me a copy of the edition of La Memoire that contained the article and have given me permission to publish it in the blog in French and in my English translation. Thank you both!
In reading the article, you'll see why I received such a nice surprise when I saw what Doris had written.
Dennis Doiron, Gardiner, Maine, March 2022
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Small suitcase, big discoveries
When a story makes history
by Doris Poirier in
La revue LA MÉMOIRE, November 2020, No 155, p.16-19.
Société d’histoire et de généalogie des Pays-d’en-Haut (S.H.G.P.H.)
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Foreword
When you have a diary as part of your family's history, you are truly fortunate. Many of the families that emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century kept strong connections with their relatives that remained “là-bas” in Québec. They would visit them there from time to time, no matter where they were in the province. This diary falls within the fields of ethnology and social history. It is an undeniable family legacy, one that offers a bit of history to many of us.
Upon discovering and reading the account of her travels, Odélie Demers (and her father) become close to us. We imagine her experiencing everything at her own pace, including the joys of again seeing members of her family. We warmly thank Madame Doris Poirier for having shown us the travel diary, and with it, a facet of our history which connects us a little bit to the four corners of Québec.
Francine Chassé, Vice-President, S.H.G.P.H.
Saint-Saveur, Québec
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Let me tell you about an event that allowed me to discover some unexpected family connections with an American family. It involves the family of my husband, Poirier on his father's side and Demers on his mother's side. His two grandfathers were pioneers who participated actively in the development of the village of La Doré in the region of Lac Saint-Jean. His paternal grandfather, Henri Poirier arrived there in 1889 with a group of settlers with the goal of establishing a new settlement north of Lac St-Jean.
The Settlers’ Sawmill
His maternal grandfather, Télesphore Demers, arrived in La Doré in 1904 having come from St-Hilaire-de-Dorset in the Chaudière-Appalaches region. He had just bought a sawmill powered by a small dam on the Rivière aux Saumons in La Doré. He constructed a house and arranged for his family to join him. His family was comprised of his wife, Démerise Létourneau, and three young children, including the youngest, Marie-Laure, the mother of my husband, who was only four months old.
Télesphore Demers and Démerise Letourneau, the parents of Marie-Laure.
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The sawmill was built in 1889. It operated and provided the livelihood of successive Poirier-Demers families until 1976. At that time it was still owned by a member of my husband’s family, his brother Raymond Poirier. The sawmill is now owned by a nonprofit organization which runs it as a tourist attraction and historical site known as the Moulin des Pionniers à La Doré. I encourage you to visit the internet site, which will without doubt give you the idea of visiting the sawmill, which is the last sawmill in Québec from that era that still functions. All of this leads to telling you that my brother-in-law Raymond, the last owner of the sawmill, was also the last owner in the family, with his wife, of the large house built by his maternal grandfather in 1904. This house had seen four successive generations of Poirier-Demers, and now provides a home for owners outside of the family. In effect, after the death of his father in 1968, Raymond became the owner of the family house in which his widowed mother continued to live.
And thus his wife, my sister-in-law Lucienne, a descendant herself of one of the founders of La Doré, lived several years with her mother-in-law who possessed the family records of the Poirier-Demers family. With great foresight, the two of them together went through all the old photos and documents, and my sister-in-law wrote down what her mother-in-law told her about the people, places and events in them. After the recent sale of the old family home in 2017, my sister-in-law gave me a suitcase full of the family archives, knowing of my interest in family history and genealogy. She asked that I be the guardian of them and to put them to good use.
The Sawmill of the Pioneers of La Doré in Lake Saint-Jean today.
Closed in 1976 as a business, it is still an operational sawmill managed by
a non-profit organization: Moulin des Pionniers de La Doré.
https://saguenaylacsaintjean.ca/attrait/quoi-faire/moulin-des-pionniers-de-la-dore.
(Photo: Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec)
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The contents of the blue suitcase
I commend my mother-in-law and sister-in-law for reminding us that the “old” are truly walking libraries. We should ask them questions, listen to them and take down notes if we don’t want to lose our history when they are gone. I use the word “old” knowing well that I am going to irritate the politically correct who fight so hard to kill words, but we should continue to use the word “old” and say it with all the respect that it merits. I allow myself to say this since I have joined the club.
Let’s get back on track and return to the small, blue suitcase. I started to become aware of its contents, of its numerous photographs and documents of all kinds. One document very quickly attracted my attention. It was a copy of a travel notebook written by Odélie Demers, which began on June 21, 1898, and ended on July 12, 1898. It was written on 75 pages of a small, lined notebook commonly used by students at the time. The cursive handwriting was remarkable, it was beautifully and carefully done, with only the rare grammatical error.
To provide some background, Odélie was the cousin of my husband’s grandfather Demers. She lived in Sanford, Maine, in the United States where her father had emigrated with his wife and their nine children in 1890 to work in the mills. We are speaking here of the time of “le grand exode,” the great exodus of French-Canadians who left their country of birth for economic reasons.
Wedding photo of Odélie Demers, 28, and Napoléon Dubois, 35,
January 3, 1900, in Sanford, Maine.
(Unknown photographer)
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Odélie Demers' travels, then those of her father's
Returning to Odelie’s travel diary, she describes each day of her trip to Canada with her sister Éva to see family and friends left behind eight years earlier. Before leaving the Province of Québec, they had lived in St-Fortunat in the region of Estrie, where Odélie had taught in a country school when she was a young girl. She was 27 years old at the time of her trip.
The diary is full of details that tell us about the daily life of people at this time. It was moving to read and seemed precious to me as something with historic value. So I spoke about it to our vice-president and chair of the historic committee, Madame Francine Chassé. It clearly piqued her interest, and she wanted to see it. It was with pleasure that I sent her a copy.
Francine read it with great interest. Because she wanted to know more about the town of Sanford, she did research on the internet. You can imagine her surprise when she saw a blog entitled notes-de-voyagequebec.blogspot.com. In reviewing the blog, she found the entirety of Odélie's travel notes that we possessed, and even another complete travel diary written by Odélie’s father, who was also named Télesphore Demers.
His trip took place in 1908. In it he writes daily about his travels to Québec with his wife from June 4 to October 5, 1908. The diary is on 121 pages of a lined notebook. Odélie’s father even visited La Doré at Lac Saint-Jean where he stayed several days with his son who had opened a general store there.
He faithfully describes daily life and the people that he meets. Several times he visited the home of his nephew, my husband's grandfather (the other Télesphore Demers), who was the owner of the sawmill. The author of this blog, Monsieur Dennis Doiron, is a descendant of this Demers family.
After viewing Monsieur Doiron's blog, I dug a little deeper in my suitcase and found that we also possessed a copy of part of the travel diary of Odélie’s father, the part where he had stayed with his son in La Doré. But it didn’t stop there. At the blog site, there was an email address to connect with Monsieur Doiron.
I thus wrote to him at the beginning of March 2020 to tell him about all this. He was very happy to hear about it and told me that he was planning a trip to Québec with the idea of going to La Doré in the springtime to learn about the places and the descendants of the Demers family there. But then, the pandemic arrived. I imagine with all that we are living with now this project is no longer possible, but I hope it will be only a short delay. We could help him as guides, since a large part of the Poirier-Demers family still lives in La Doré and the region.
On his blog, Monsieur Doiron explains that his ancestor Télesphore was able, in part, to write his travel journal because he had received an education, something that was rare at the time for a son of a farmer. He had received four years of schooling in a country schoolhouse, an école de rang, but he often wrote by the sound of the words. It was, thus, his daughter Odélie who rewrote with correct grammar and spelling the story of his trip in 121 pages of a lined notebook. Indeed, when I compare copies of their travel notes, the same careful handwriting is in both.
I feel that the two travel journals illustrate well what some historians have said, that among French-Canadians there is a deeply grounded belief in a duty to remember our past, the devoir de survivance, so that we safeguard our collective French identity in North America.
Our ancestors made it their duty to transmit their history and their experiences to their descendants. According to some historians, this sentiment has existed since the British conquest of Québec, but became stronger after the rebellion of the Patriots and the Durham Report. Can we speak of our fear of disappearing as a people of French culture and language in North America? Let's say simply that the battle is still being fought.
So that you might appreciate the historical richness and flavor of the two journals, I will provide some extracts from them and add some of my own comments. Let's begin with Odélie's notes in the summer of 1898. She and her sister Éva are visiting their uncle's home in Saint-Samuel-de-Gayhurst, now Lac-Drolet. She describes that she has spent part of the morning with her uncle and her cousins in a rowboat on a lake. She then writes:
On our return to the house, we found our dinner ready and we ate everything with a good appetite while discussing going on an excursion in the afternoon. Around one o'clock, we went to pick strawberries on the property of Mr Théberge. We came back at four o'clock with a good amount, as the pickings were excellent.
In this excerpt, I noticed two things. First, the mother hadn't herself gone on the morning boat ride. She cooked the meal, which was entirely normal. To keep the house and feed the family was a full-time job. Second, for families living in the country picking wild fruit was an important activity related to making and storing jams and jellies for the winter. But it was also as much a social activity en plein air for the entire family and among friends, which was often accompanied by a picnic.
Here is another extract that tugs at my heart. She tells us about the "relevée" or the digging up of the old graves and moving them from the old cemetery in St-Fortunat to the new one. Here is what she wrote:
In opening the coffin of Cyrille Noël, they noticed that he was turned on his side, which led to the belief that he was buried alive.
This sentence reminds us of the history of the cholera epidemics in Québec when the cause of death was often uncertain, and it was necessary to bury the dead several hours after death to control the contagion.
And here is the last extract from Odélie's journal, which I find particularly heart warming:
After supper, Hilaire and Fortunat went to prepare a swing (une balancigne) and invited us to try it.
This was heartwarming because during my childhood in Lac Saint-Jean, these were the words that one used, to swing (se balancigner) on a swing (une balacigne). I don't know if these expressions are still in use or on their way out.
As for the travel notes of Odélie's father, they are both delightful and informative. I was struck particularly by the part where he stayed in La Doré from August 9 - 22, 1908. He was an American from Sanford, Maine, named Télesphore Demers, Sr. He was visiting his son, Télesphore, Jr, the proprietor of the first general store in La Doré.
Another Télesphore Demers (the grandfather of my husband) is part of this story. He was the proprietor of the sawmill in the village and was the nephew of the American. In La Doré, to distinguish between the two cousins, they were called Télesphore moulin (sawmill) and Télesphore magasin (store). Remember at this time that the same first names were frequently used. Among other customs, the name of the father was often passed on to one of the sons.
The two Télesphores in front of the old sawmill in La Doré in 1906. Télesphore moulin (sawmill) at right, and Télesphore magasin (store) at left. Télesphore moulin is with his wife, Démerise Létourneau, and their children.
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Télesphore Demers, also called Télesphore magasin, with his wife Lucienne Deschenes and their children before the general store that he owned in La Doré.
(Photo, coll. personnelle, famille Demers, Doris Poirier)
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What struck me particularly in Télesphore's notes in La Doré are the almost daily events connected with the church and to religious traditions. It should be mentioned that his son's store was located in front of the church. Here is an example:
June 13. The weather is again good. At eight o'clock, the parishioners are starting to arrive for the mass, just like we see throughout Canada, with wagons filled with people. After the mass, a small pig is sold at auction for the souls in purgatory, which reminds us so much of the real, le vrai, Canada.
This is all so charming. All this is to say that the travel notes of Odélie Demers and her father Télesphore moved me deeply. I am well aware of the importance of the suitcase which was confided in me, and I will try to find in it other small treasures with the goal of sharing them.
Doris Poirier
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In her article, Doris Poirier refers to the Durham Report, with which most readers in the United States will be unfamiliar. It was written in 1839 by John George Lambton Durham, usually referred to as Lord Durham, who was the Governor General of Canada in 1838. He had been tasked by the British Government to analyze and make recommendations on political affairs in Canada following the failed rebellion of 1837, which had been led primarily by French Canadians. The report remains notorious because of his recommendation that the British government pursue a policy of complete assimilation of the French population into English Canada - meaning especially that English should be the only official language and that the French-speaking population should become English speakers. Perhaps the two most remembered sentences from the report which rankle French Canadians to this day, are:
There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history, and no literature.
Durham, John George Lambton. Report on the affairs of British North America 104. London, England. (Collections of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec: https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/4197363?docref=QORTMoNsq_LNUS55GaCFPA&docsearchtext=Report%20of%20Earl%20Durham.)
Ironically, the report has served strengthen the resolve of French Canadians to this day to protect their culture and language.
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