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Margaret Anne Jordan LaBelle (1925–2021): A Life Story

Margaret Anne Jordan LaBelle (1925–2021): A Life Story

Posted on by genealogic

My grandmother Margaret died last month. Obituaries are expensive, so hers was kept fairly brief. I completely understand that decision, but I also think people deserve to be remembered in more complexity than two paragraphs can offer. So I decided to write Margaret’s Life Story. Aided by the collection of documents, photographs, and memories people shared at the funeral, I’ve been able to put together an extended narrative and photo essay that will, I hope, honor her legacy and help her descendants learn about her life and times long into the future. 

I am posting this today because it would have been Margaret’s 96th birthday. 

An Active Childhood

Margaret Anne Jordan was born April 17, 1925, in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was the eldest child of Basil and Isabelle (Daly) Jordan, who had married in St. Paul the previous July. Margaret grew up on the east side of St. Paul with her younger brother Patrick. She attended St. Patrick Catholic School through eighth grade and then Johnson High School.

Portrait of Margaret and Patrick Jordan, ca. 1929.
Margaret and Patrick Jordan, 1929.
The Jordan family ca. 1932.
Margaret and Patrick picture in a photo booth.
Margaret and Patrick photobooth shot, ca. 1936.
The 8th grade graduating class of St. Patrick Catholic School. Margaret is farthest right in the front row.
The 1939 8th grade graduating class of St. Patrick Catholic School. Margaret is farthest right in the front row.

As a child, Margaret spent a lot of time with her maternal grandparents, Ed and Jane (Reynolds) Daly. In 1924, while Margaret was in utero, her grandparents had moved from a farm near Beardsley, Minnesota, into a house on Edgerton Street, just two blocks away from their soon-to-be granddaughter. 

Some of Margaret’s most lasting childhood memories were of her grandfather. Ed had a job as nightwatchman for the Twin City Rapid Transit Company, which operated the streetcar system in Minneapolis and St. Paul. As an employee, he could ride for free. On his days off, he would ride around town visiting friends and chatting up the waitresses at his favorite restaurant on the corner of University and Snelling. When Margaret was nine or ten, she regularly accompanied him on his social rounds. She got to explore the city and meet all sorts of people. Her grandfather would jokingly introduce her as his “chaperone.” 

Grandpa Ed Daly with Margaret and Patrick, summer 1928.
Grandpa Ed Daly with Margaret and Patrick, summer 1928.
Passengers board a streetcar in St. Paul with the Cathedral of St. Paul in the background.
Passengers getting onto streetcar at west entrance to Selby Tunnel, St. Paul, ca. 1929.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10732818.

Another distinctive memory Margaret had from around the same age was of clandestine meetings at her house. For sixteen years, from 1928 to 1943, her father Basil worked at the enormous St. Paul Union Stockyards in South St. Paul. During most of his tenure he was a teamster. Early in the Great Depression, he struggled to get enough hours, often working only half days, and Margaret’s mother Isabelle got a job at a local restaurant to help make ends meet. By 1937, Basil had the opposite problem, routinely putting in 60 to 70 hours a week—without overtime pay. (Basil’s compensation record and the rest of his personnel file are archived at the Minnesota Historical Society.) 

The secret gatherings Margaret remembered her father hosting were organizing meetings for the union. Basil’s union activities were part of the broader Twin Cities labor movement of the ’30s. Based on the Minnesota Historical Society’s photograph collection, strikes at the stockyards took place in 1932, 1933, and 1938. Basil may also have taken part in the Teamsters strike of 1934, which was centered in Minneapolis. Margaret and Patrick knew about their father’s meetings but were sworn to secrecy. 

Teamsters lined up at the St. Paul Union Stockyards, 1929.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10669809.
Member of the workers’ organizing committee speaks during a 1938 strike at the stockyards in South St. Paul.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10729180.

On November 11, 1940, Margaret was 15 and a freshman at Johnson High. It was a warm morning, so she wore only a skirt and blouse when she left her family’s house on Payne Avenue for her one-mile walk to school. But by the time she had to make the long walk home, a blizzard was raging. She recalled wrapping newspapers around her legs in a futile effort to keep warm. Like many other Minnesotans that day, Margaret survived the Armistice Day Blizzard—but barely. This experience too stuck with her for the rest of her life.

Two women in skirts caught on the streets of Minneapolis during the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10750540.

At school, Margaret was a very active student. She took part in Spanish club, bowling club, archery, and was on the Board of the Girls Athletic Association. She was part of a traveling folk dancing group and was also a talented speed skater. Margaret was especially proud of the school letter she earned for athletics at a time when most girls were discouraged from participating in sports. 

A class photo from high school.
Margaret's high school diploma.
A snapshot of her high school diploma.

Margaret graduated from Johnson High in 1943. This was in the middle of World War II. Many of her male classmates went off to basic training and then to Europe or the Pacific. Margaret started working as a Rosie the Riveter. Every day she travelled to Holman Field, an airfield across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul. She and several thousand other workers—mostly women—retrofitted B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with high-altitude oxygen and ventilation systems and new, top-secret H2X radar systems.

Margaret (back, facing left) and four other women in a training fuselage, perhaps photographed by staff from the Office of War Information (OWI), at the Northwest Airlines modification center at Holman Field. According to the names written on the back of Margaret’s small photo print, the women in the picture were Carol(?) Boger, Margaret Jordan, Alice Anderson, Dorothy Reiter, and Audrey Hane.
Retrofitted B-24 taking off from Holman Field.
A modified B-24 takes off from Holman Field.
Northwest Airlines via NWA History Center

In the fall of 1943, Margaret’s father Basil quit his job at the stockyards. He, Isabelle, and Patrick moved to Durand, Wisconsin. Since Margaret had a high-paying job at Holman Field, she stayed in St. Paul. She moved in with the family of her aunt Bessie at 331 Geranium Ave. Bessie’s husband Martin Aasen was a butcher at a Swift & Co. packing plant in the same South St. Paul stockyards complex. 

Margaret’s grandfather Edward Daly had died in 1937, but her grandmother Jane Daly now lived with Bessie, Martin, and their 11-year-old son—Margaret’s cousin—Dick. Jane had early-onset dementia, and Margaret helped Bessie care for her until her death in 1945.

Margaret and Patrick with their mother Isabelle (Daly) Jordan and grandmother Jane (Reynolds) Daly, ca. 1932.
Margaret with her mother Isabelle when she was a single, young working woman living with her aunt Bessie.

When the war ended in 1945, all the men came back from overseas. For the rest of her life, Margaret bitterly resented being forced out of a good-paying job and into the role of homemaker. But that’s what she did, and she did it well. 

A Wife and a Mother

Two of Margaret’s good friends from school were Dorothy LaBelle and Dorothy’s first cousin Marge LaBelle. Margaret had met Dorothy’s older brother Gerald back in her school days. She started seeing him after he returned the Pacific. Margaret and Gerald wed on June 20, 1946, at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in St. Paul—their home church.

Gerald LaBelle in Navy uniform, probably during the winter of 1943—after he enlisted in November ’42, but before he left for basic training? He enlisted with his friend Don Wagner, who married Gerald’s sister (and Margaret’s friend) Dorothy LaBelle in June 1943.
Gerald worked as a machinist aboard the USS Matanikau, a training and transport aircraft carrier in the Pacific, from September 1944 to October 1945. Note his insignia, which shows his rank as Aviation Machinist Mate 3rd Class.
Love birds ’46.
Happy newlyweds.

Five children followed between 1947 and 1958: Gerald, Jr.; Greg; Maureen; Mark; and Ross. Their early years of parenthood were a challenge. Little Jerry, Jr., was born with cerebral palsy after a difficult childbirth. Then, as a small boy, he contracted polio. In 1951, Margaret and Gerald made the difficult decision to appoint a state guardian for Jerry. He lived the rest of his life in state hospitals or group homes before his death in 2005. (This was many years before in-home care for someone with significant disabilities was an option like it is today.) 

Margaret and Gerald with baby Jerry, Jr., 1947.
Margaret with children Greg and Maureen, 1952.

In 1953—after a very brief residence in Belvidere, Illinois—Margaret and Gerald bought a house at 388 Geranium Avenue East in St. Paul, less than a block from the home of Margaret’s aunt Bessie. Margaret would reside in that house for the next 62 years. 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret was a busy mother and an active member of St. Patrick’s Church. As a mother, she did all kinds of creative arts with her kids. She made doll cakes, fancy sugar eggs for Easter, and marzipan candies in the shapes of fruits and vegetables. She was a cub scout den mother. At church, she helped organize and run the fall festival and spaghetti dinners, and she served as one of the “church basement ladies,” cooking countless meals for church functions. If that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, she also occasionally worked as a department store clerk. And she was a regular hostess. Her extended family—especially her many paternal cousins—were regular guests in her home.

LaBelle family portrait, 1954.
Margaret and kids in front of the Tetons during a trip to California to visit Gerald’s parents and sister, August 1961.

On Her Own

Then, in 1969, Gerald abruptly left the family. The ensuing divorce and annulment left lasting scars on everyone in the family, but especially on Margaret. In fact, the divorce went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, where it helped establish case law that is still studied by prospective lawyers today.

In a few short years, Margaret effectively lost her whole family. Her mother Isabelle had died of ovarian cancer in 1967. Her husband abandoned her in 1969. One by one, her children left for the Air Force or college or to live on their own. And now she had to support herself.

Margaret's diploma from the University of Minnesota.
Snapshot of Margaret’s diploma from the University of Minnesota.

In June 1973, Margaret earned a two-year Certificate of Liberal Arts from the University of Minnesota. At age 48, this was one of her proudest accomplishments. She had also recently begun a new job at West Publishing Company. Margaret supported the company’s traveling salesmen, making sure they had everything they needed while on the road and arranging supply shipments as needed. It wasn’t the professional career she had envisioned for herself in 1945, but it paid the bills. And she made several good friends there. Margaret stayed at West Publishing until she retired in June 1990. 

Margaret with her daughter Maureen and father Basil, Christmas 1976 at her house on Geranium Avenue.

Besides working, Margaret rededicated herself in her Catholic faith. She continued to volunteer at church, and she became a member of the Legion of Mary, an association of Catholics dedicated to spiritual and social welfare through prayer and apostolic works. 

After she retired, Margaret went on numerous pilgrimages to important Catholic sites in North and South America, often with her friend Ceile Swenson. They visited sites up and down the U.S. East Coast and in South Bend, Indiana. In 1994, they visited Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and a year later traveled to the Shrine of Betania in Cúa, Venezuela, the location of thousands of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and a Miracle of the Eucharist Host. Then in 2000, they traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to join the studio audience as Mother Angelica filmed an episode of her famous TV show, which was broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). While in Alabama, Margaret and Ceile also stopped at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and the newly built Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, both of which—like the EWTN network—had been established by Mother Angelica.

A few years later, Margaret took a different kind of trip. In 2004, when Margaret was 79, she had the pleasure to visit Ireland with her cousins Colleen and Cindy. Margaret was enormously proud of her Irish heritage—every branch of her family tree traced back to the Emerald Isle—so this was the trip of a lifetime for her.

A very cold and wet Margaret visiting the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, 2004.
Margaret’s Irish heritage touched every corner of the Emerald Isle. This map shows the (known) locations Margaret’s immigrant ancestors left behind in Ireland.

Inevitably, age eventually caught up to Margaret. In 2015, after 62 years in her house on Geranium Avenue and 90 years(!) as a member of St. Patrick’s church, Margaret moved into Cherrywood Pointe of Forest Lake. She lived independently until age 92, and then in assisted living until her death.

When she was in her 90s, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren enjoyed celebrating each birthday with her (except for her 95th, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Her family brought brunch, played games, and kept counting higher every year! 

Margaret with seven of her eight great-grandchildren celebrating her 91st birthday in April 2016. (An eighth and final great-grandchild would be born in 2018.)

She was a tough woman to the end. She survived a heart attack at age 85—followed by a triple bypass and surgery to clear her carotid arteries—a stroke at 86, and numerous serious illnesses in her 90s, including influenza. Even in her last week of life, she told visitors she planned to get better. The hardest part of her final years was the dementia which took hold after her stroke. But while her short-term memory failed, she could still remember details about being a child and young adult. During one visit in October 2019, I recorded her talking about her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. That discussion informed some of this story. 

Margaret Anne LaBelle died peacefully in her sleep, March 9, 2021, at Cherrywood Pointe of Forest Lake, following two months under the compassionate care of Ecumen Hospice.

A Difficult Life, But a Life Well Lived

A simple narrative like this can never capture the full picture of a person’s life. Margaret had a wide range of hobbies and interests. A true Minnesotan, she liked to fish. She loved reading, especially biographies and histories. From an early age, she had a fondness for painting, sewing, and gardening. She loved clothing and jewelry and collected all sorts of outfits over the years.

Margaret was generous—almost to a fault. She supported dozens if not hundreds of charitable causes in her life (perhaps including a few fraudulent ones). At Thanksgiving, she would gladly invite anyone in the neighborhood who had no place else to go. Even late in life—when she was well into her 80s—Margaret offered a room in her house to someone in need.

She was predeceased by her parents, brother Pat, and son Jerry, Jr. She is survived by her children Greg (Johnny), Maureen (Wes) Vanek, Mark (Jenny), Ross (Joni); grandchildren Erik (Jennifer) LaBelle, Carrie (Tim) Hill, John (Pam) Vanek; and great-grandchildren Ally, Cece, Lucy, and JJ LaBelle, Carson and Caleb Hill, and Eliza and Lena Vanek, as well as other family and friends. 

Margaret was buried Friday, March 12, 2021, in Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights, next to her son Jerry LaBelle, Jr. Paul bearers were Ross LaBelle, Wes Vanek, John Vanek, Carrie Hill, Erik LaBelle, and Ally LaBelle. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, only Margaret’s immediate family attended the funeral. Margaret went out as she came in, a proud Irish Catholic. Father Tom Fitzgerald led her funeral service. And, at Margaret’s request, the service was full of Irish music: “Danny Boy,” Carrickfergus,” “Into the Mystic,” the ancient Irish hymn “Be Thou My Vision,” and the jig “The Irish Washerwoman,” among others.

Choosing a Baby Name from the Family Tree — The Results!

Posted on by genealogic

It’s been just over six months since our second child was born, and I owe my blog readers a follow-up post about what name we chose!

In my earlier post, I wrote about some of the characteristics we looked for in names for our children. Obviously, as a genealogist, it was important to me that the names come from somewhere in our family tree. We also took into consideration popularity, cultural origin and meaning, spelling, initials, and more.

So what did we choose for baby #2?

Meet Lena Maureen.

A More Difficult Decision

We still had our boy’s name from the first time around, and we still liked it. Since we weren’t going to find out the sex ahead of time, we had to pick another girl’s name to cover that possibility. Choosing another girl’s name was much harder than the first time around. With our first child, my wife and I both liked the name Eliza and agreed on it without much discussion. This time, when we shared our short lists for another girl’s name with one another we found zero overlap. And Lena wasn’t on either list!

The reason Lena wasn’t on either list is that none of our ancestors were formally named Lena. The name emerged late in the game as I combed through the family tree again looking for a compromise.

Helen Clauson protrait, wearing traditional Norwegian garb.

The top name on my wife’s list was Helen, after her great-grandmother Helen Clauson (1884-1963). Looking at Helen more closely I had something of an epiphany. In the U.S., she went by Helen, but she had been baptized in Norway under the name Jakobine Helene Klausdatter. Listen to how that sounds in Norwegian (click the speaker button under Norwegian). Yah’-ko-bee’-nah Heh-leh’-neh.

I then recalled that a number of our other ancestors up several different branches of the family tree were nicknamed Lena. There was German immigrant Helena “Lena” Schultz (maiden name Krieg or Krug or Knag or something; ca1801-1887), my wife’s 3x-great-grandmother. There was also Melina “Lena” Marier (1883-1955), a 2x-great-grandmother on my French-Canadian side. And on my dad’s Old-Stock American side can be found the similar name Laney, belonging to my 4x-great-grandmother Laney Dunham (ca1817-1887).

Jakobine Helene Klausdatter’s baptism record. Sogn of Fjordane fylke, Gulen i Gulen, Klokkerbok nr. B 3 (1884-1907), Fodte of dopte 1884, side 7.

1865 Minnesota census, Woodland Township, Wright County, Minnesota, p. 3, family no. 23, family of Henry Bremer. Image snipped from digital version on Ancestry.com.

1900 U.S. census, Oneka Township, Washington County, Minnesota, sheet 9B, family no. 151, household of Camille Marrier. Image snipped from digital version on Ancestry.com.

Harrison County, Ohio, Marriage records, 1828-1840 Vol B, p. 310. Marriage of Nelson Whitten and Laney Dunham 29 Sep 1833, recorded 15 Nov 1833. Image snipped from Familysearch.org.

1910 U.S. census, Ashley Township, Stearns County, Minnesota, sheet 3A, family no. 40, household of Peter Steffes. Digital image from Ancestry.com.

I liked Lena as a name better than most of the names on my wife’s list. What really sold me was that we had found a single name that drew from our daughter’s German, Norwegian, French-Canadian, and English heritage. Now we were talking! My wife liked the name too, and it helped that it derived from her top choice Helen. (Later, after we had agreed on Lena as the name, I was reminded that my biological father’s grandmother Helen Steffes [1905-1977] had been called Lena as a girl. This name draws on nearly every branch of our daughter’s family tree.)

Of course, we still needed to agree on a middle name. And we still had to check all the other naming factors to make sure we didn’t overlook something.

Passing the other tests

The middle name was easy enough. Since our first daughter’s middle name came from my wife’s close family (Pauline, after my wife’s feisty grandma), our second daughter’s middle name would come from my immediate family. It came down to a decision between my mother’s name, Maureen, and my paternal grandmother’s middle name, Lucille. I still like Lena Lucille, but I ultimately decided my mom deserved the honor. She has done a lot in her lifetime to build and maintain family relationships, despite some significant challenges. Passing her name on to Lena serves as a legacy to how important family has always been to her. Plus, the name Maureen is an Irish variation of Mary, so Lena’s full name effectively represents nearly all of her heritage: Norwegian, German, French-Canadian, English, and Irish (with a Czech last name!). Only a direct link to her Dutch ancestry is missing.

Lena also fit most of our other criteria quite nicely.

Popularity—According to Social Security Administration data, Lena was the 304th-most popular baby name in 2017. (For comparison, Eliza ranked 212th in 2014, the year before she was born.) It’s definitely not a Top 10 name, but it’s also not unheard of. People are familiar with it. Perfect.

Functionality—Lena is short and easy to spell. It’s cute for a kid (we call her Lena Bear because of all her hair!) and will look just fine on a resume when she’s applying for jobs.

Initials—L.M.V. doesn’t spell a word. If pronounced, it doesn’t sound like a word. The acronym doesn’t have any widely known associations. All good things!

Meaning—Though Lena has been a common nickname for centuries, it ultimately derives from several other more ancient names. Most often, Lena is a short form of Helena or Magdalena, names which have different origins. Helena—which is the relevant source in our heritage—derives from Greek Helene. In Greek, the name possibly means “light” or “torch,” or more specifically “corposant,” which refers to the electrical glow also known as St. Elmo’s fire that sometimes appears on ships masts and other elevated things during storms. The name’s most famous bearer was of course Helen of Troy, beauty of beauties, whose abduction (or elopement) instigated the Trojan War.

The name Laney derives from the same root. Laney is an English diminutive of the Arthurian name Elaine, which itself is an Old French form of Helen. (If instead Laney Dunham’s given name was actually “Adelana,” as it was recorded only once, in the 1860 census, then the root would be the Germanic element adal meaning “noble.”)

The name Magdalena originated with the Biblical character Mary Magdalene, whose second name means “of Magdala,” a town on the Sea of Galilee. I have a least a dozen distant French-Canadian ancestors named Marie Magdeleine, but they’re not the reason we chose the name Lena.

Much more relevant was the given name of my 2x-great grandmother Lena Dupre. She was baptized as Marie Melina Marier and gave Melina as her name on her marriage license. Apart from official documents, she was called simply “Lena.” The name Melina, like Melissa and Melanie, derives from the Greek word meli, meaning honey. Melina is a diminutive form meaning “little honey.”

Taken together, these meanings further convinced me that this was the right name for our daughter. Our Lena would be a light to the world, and not just any light, but a kind seen only rarely, under exceptional circumstances. She would be noble and forthright but also sweet (like honey), her heart filled with kindness. She would be bold and beautiful like Helen of Troy, and maybe just maybe change the course of world history as much as that Helen did. Whether any of this actually pans out waits to be seen. These ideals, at least, will shape how we raise her.

Spelling and Pronunciation—All of our ancestors spelled the nickname Lena the same way—L-E-N-A—so there wasn’t any debate here. The real underlying issue, as we’ve discovered, is pronunciation.

If there is an area of concern with the name Lena it is ambiguous pronunciation. Admittedly, this did not occur to my wife and me. When we discussed the name, we both used the same pronunciation: lay-nuh. We assumed (wrongly) that since we were native speakers of American English, we must have picked this up correctly. However, since Lena’s birth, many people have initially greeted her as lee-nuh. The automated appointment reminder from the doctor’s office says lee-nuh. Yes, we were aware of the old Ole and Lena jokes, which used to be especially popular here in Minnesota. In those jokes, the accent of Scandinavian immigrants is exaggerated for effect [Oh-laaaay and Leeee-nuh]. But our generation doesn’t use them. They’re finally on their way out.

I suspect my intuitive pronunciation of lay-nuh is due to my being much more tuned-in to the name’s European origins than most Americans. In Europe it’s leh-nuh or lay-nuh. In my head, lee-nuh would be written Lina.   A comment by user HungarianNameGeek on Babynamewizard.com’s page for “Lena” states the issue succinctly:

The letter ‘e’ has two possible values in many European languages: /eh/ like in ‘set’ (or the Greek letter epsilon), or /ay/ like the vowel in ‘say’ (or the Greek letter eta). Thus, from Europeans you’re about equally likely to get LEH-na or LAY-na. It’s really only in English that LEE-na is a possibility, due to the Great English Vowel Shift; in most other languages, you’d need to write it as Lina to get it pronounced with an /ee/.

My first guess would be LEH-na, I think, but most likely I’d try to wait for someone else to say it first – and then I’d promptly forget which version it was.

If you can have a Zen attitude that LEE-na, LEH-na, and LAY-na are all correct, just in different languages or accents, then Lena is a lovely name. (I especially like it as a nickname for Magdalena or Helena.)

Look at the ancestors from whom we drew the name. The only one we believe pronounced her name lee-nuh was Lena Marier. In her case the /ee/ sound derived from a full name (Melina) where the sound was represented by ‘i,’ as one would expect from people whose native language was French. I knew Lena Marier pronounced her name lee-nuh, but because Melina is much less common than Helena or Magdalena AND is spelled with an ‘i,’ I assumed it was the outlier.

Anyway, we decided just to go with the Zen attitude. If having her name slightly mispronounced the first time she meets someone is the worst thing in her life, then our Lena will be doing just fine. We’ve told several friends to think of it as we do, as a nickname for Helena or Magdalena or Adelana, and that has seemed to help.

Mini Ancestor Bios

The final piece of the naming puzzle was to examine the lives of the ancestors who carried the name. What inspiring stories about them can we share with our daughter as she grows up? Here are brief biographies that give a glimpse into the lives and characters of the four women who most directly inspired our daughter’s name.

Jakobine Helene Klausdatter Hantveit was born in 1884 on Hantveit farm in the municipality of Gulen, Norway. She grew up looking out over Gulenfjord not far from the site of the ancient Gulating. As a girl, she spent her summers up in the mountains on a seter, a seasonal pasture farm, where she helped milk the goats.

Wedding photo of Louis Olai Henricksen and Helen Clauson, 1909.

One of her schoolmates in Gulen was a boy named Louis Henrickson. Louis came from a very poor family—so poor, in fact, that he and his sister Lise were raised by an uncle. According to their daughter Marvis, “after their schooling [Helen and Louis] wanted to get married, but Helen’s parents did not feel that Louis was good enough for her.” So in 1906 Helen’s parents shipped her off to America to live with her uncle near Glenwood, Minnesota. An emigration record from Bergen, Norway, reports that Helen was going to America for bedre fortj, “better fortunes,” which from her parents’ perspectives meant better marriage prospects. According to Marvis, before Helen departed Louis gave her a friendship ring.

In what must have been a great surprise, Louis arrived in Minnesota just a year later. Apparently too poor to pay his own way, he had nonetheless made it happen. He had found an old friend who already lived in Minnesota—not far from Helen as it turned out—who was willing to pay his passage. (Had Helen secretly contributed?) Once in Minnesota, Louis put the carpentry skills he had learned from his uncle to work to earn a living. He found Helen, who was earning her own keep working in a laundry in Glenwood, and the two of them married there in 1909, far beyond the reach of Helen’s parents. They “lived happily ever after,” wrote their daughter Marvis.

Helena “Lena” Krug/Krieg/Knag (her maiden name is difficult to read and/or appears different in different documents) was born somewhere in the northern German region of Mecklenberg around 1801. In Germany she married Heinrich Schultz and together they had at least three children. The Schultz family emigrated in about 1857 or 1858, settling first in upstate New York. Her son Ludwig enlisted to fight in the 57th New York Infantry during the Civil War.

After Ludwig mustered out in 1864, Lena and her family moved west to settle near the village of Waverly in Wright County, Minnesota. I believe the Homestead Act drew them west. After Heinrich died in 1867, Lena finished the Homestead process. According to one of the Schultz children, soon after their arrival in Waverly, the family “conducted a boarding house for laborers engaged in laying the railroad tracks through the village. Among their patrons was James J. Hill,” Minnesota’s most famous railroad tycoon. Lena lived with one or another of her children in Wright County until her own death there in 1887.

Marie Melina “Lena” Marier was born in Centerville, Minnesota, in 1883, the first of fourteen children of Camille Alphonse Marier and Marie Angelique Forcier. Her mother was just 16 years old and her father 18 when she was born. Though Lena’s mother’s family had been in Minnesota since 1847, Lena’s father and all of her grandparents had been born in Quebec. When she was 18, Lena married Oliver Delphis Dupre, an American-born man who also had fully French-Canadian heritage. French was the family’s primary language while Lena was growing up, and indeed for her whole life. Lena’s eldest daughter Alice reported that she didn’t know any English until she started school in about 1908.

Lena Marier Dupre’s life was arguably the most challenging of any of these women. The Dupres were dirt poor. As a married couple, she and Delphis lived on a small farm plot right next to railroad tracks in a two-room house that lacked insulation. Lena’s daughter Alice, born in 1903, remembered,

The only heat we had upstairs would come through a small grate above the wood heater that was downstairs. Believe me, we didn’t play around when we were getting dressed. . . . We survived several winters there. There were no iceboxes for the summer, only the flowing well or spring.

We led a happy life there on the farm, but it was a lot of work for my mother. In order to cook she had to get the kitchen range quite hot, . . . and most of the time it was three meals a day. She had big washings and a lot of ironing. My father had help [farmhands] too, his dad stayed with us, and now and then his brother (my uncle Evod and his wife Stella) would come for a while, especially in the summer. So we were quite a few around the table, and if there were too many, the children would have to wait until the grown-ups were finished.

In 1918, Delphis was killed in a hunting accident, leaving Lena with eight children ages three-months to 14 years. To help the family survive, she took a job “at the hotel in Forest Lake [since] she could walk there. . . . When there was extra soup left over, the hotel keeper would give it to her.” While Lena worked, teenager Alice took care of all the younger kids. Alice never went back to school. Later, to help the family survive, Lena “bought a sewing machine and sewed for [our family] and for others.” Things finally got a little easier once more of Lena’s children were old enough to help support her. She got them through the toughest years.

More accurately titled “Marier five-generation, 1932.” Lena is in the middle, age 49. On the left are her grandfather Damien Marier (age 93) and father Camille Marier (67), and on the right are her eldest daughter Alice Dupre (29) and grandson Gerald LaBelle (my grandfather, 10).

Laney Dunham was born around 1817 probably in Smithfield, Jefferson County, Ohio. (The 1860 census hints that her full name might have been “Adelana,” but all other records show her name as Laney.) Her parents had migrated from western Maryland to Jefferson County in eastern Ohio during the first decade of the 1800s. In 1820, her father purchased federal land a little bit further west in Harrison County, Ohio, and Laney grew up on a farm there. In 1833, she married Nelson Whitten, a young man from a neighboring family.

Laney (Dunham) Green’s gravestone in Swiggett Cemetery, New Salem Township, Pike County, Illinois. Photo from Ancestry.com, uploaded by user claymont 13 Nov 2013.

The Dunham, Whitten, Carnes, Nelson, Chaney, and other related families were early converts to the United Brethren Church. In fact, Laney’s brothers Abel and Joshua Dunham both became ministers for the church. We don’t know what Laney’s political beliefs were, but if they were anything like the men around her she was probably a reformer and a strong supporter of the Union cause in the Civil War. Her brother Abel was known to be a staunch abolitionist and was later a proponent of the temperance movement. Her son Nathaniel Whitten volunteered for service in Company I of the 33rd Illinois Infantry regiment in September 1861, and was discharged for disability in 1863.

Arguably the defining feature of Laney Dunham’s life was widowhood. Her first husband Nelson Whitten died when he was only in his 30s. It is unclear where he died. Sometime in the late 1840s, Laney and possibly Nelson joined a caravan of extended family who all went west to buy farmland in Pike County in western Illinois. Perhaps during the journey and certainly within a few years of their arrival in Illinois, Nelson died, leaving Laney a widow with five young children. Laney married again in 1850 to Andrew Gansley, a man twenty years her senior. Within a few years he died, and Laney remarried again in 1854. Her third husband, Henry Green, was almost twenty years younger than she was—young enough to enlist in the Civil War. They had one child together in 1856. In September 1861, Henry joined his stepson Nathaniel Whitten in the 33rd Illinois Infantry. He was killed a year later near Bolivar, Mississippi, as the steamboat he was on was fired on by 2,000 rebel soldiers perched high above on the Mississippi River levee.

Laney had lost three husbands before she turned 46. If there was any consolation, it was that her last husband had died in the line of duty. For the rest of her life she received a widow’s pension of $8 dollars per month. She never remarried.

 

When I think of words that describe these four women, several come to mind: perseverance, resourcefulness, independence. In an era in which women’s lives were largely controlled or defined by fathers and husbands, each of these women demonstrated the ability to survive on her own and to make her own decisions. Helen Clauson was adamant enough about her choice of marriage partner that her parents sent her across an ocean to prevent it. The two of them found a way to be together anyway. The other three women survived as widows for decades. Lena (Krug) Schultz completed her husband’s Homestead claim. Lena Marier worked impossibly hard to keep her eight children fed and clothed after her husband’s accidental death. Laney Dunham endured the deaths of three husbands, but still had the courage to get up every morning to live another day. I certainly don’t wish my daughter to endure the same struggles these ancestors faced, but if she faces her own struggles like they did, with perseverance, resourcefulness, and independence, she will find success and happiness.

(Whew, all this about a baby name? I guess it’s just who I am.)

Another Blue Christmas

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The Christmas holiday is supposed to be a joyous time of year. Families gather to give gifts, share stories, delight in children, and be merry through the darkest days of the year. Unfortunately, the past several years haven’t been so merry for our family.

Nesteby family Christmas card, 1957 or 1958. My wife’s late grandmother Martha Nesteby Van Loy is seated front and center.

Many a Blue Christmas

On Christmas Eve 2010, we were at my in-laws’ house when my parents called to tell me my grandfather had collapsed and might not make it. We changed plans, drove six-and-a-half hours to Grand Island, Nebraska, and were at my grandfather’s bedside when he died at 11:30 Christmas Eve. Not exactly the gift Santa was supposed to bring.

Last year my aunt died suddenly the day after Christmas. She was just 61. Once again, our holiday plans changed. New Years weekend was spent not with friends and champagne but rather attending her funeral in Sioux Falls and helping my cousins clean out her house. The deaths of my grandfather and aunt mean Christmas will always be tinged with sadness, especially for my dad.

We made big plans with both sides of our family this year. Our daughter is two, so this is the first year she’s old enough to get super excited about Christmas. Everyone was looking forward to it. We were going to spend the days before Christmas with my wife’s family in Mankato. On Saturday the 23rd, we would all drive to tiny Lucan, Minnesota, (pop. 180) to celebrate Christmas with my mother-in-law’s family. My wife would get to see her ten aunts and uncles, many of he first cousins, and Grandma Martha, matriarch of the family. Martha just turned 84 on December 20th, so it would be a double celebration. Then we would spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my immediate family. Finally, the 26th would be a day just for us. My wife and I were excited to have a day off without our two year old. We intended to see the new Star Wars movie.

Unfortunately, the holiday curse struck again this year, and with a vengeance. First, on December 21, my grandmother’s brother Pat passed away. My grandmother is 92 and has a failing memory. The death of her only sibling has been quite hard on her. In a terrible cycle, she forgets it happened and then learns about it all over again. It’s really disheartening.

Then the next morning my mother-in-law called to tell us that my wife’s grandma Martha had died suddenly overnight. We were planning to spend time with her in Lucan the very next day. The family still go together in Lucan on the 23rd, but it was a somber Christmas gathering as Martha’s 11 children arranged her funeral instead of working on plans for the family reunion that had been scheduled for next summer in honor of her 85th birthday. Christmas itself was still fun (that’s the purpose of two-year-olds), but the joy was tampered by shock and emotional exhaustion. On the 26th, instead of seeing Star Wars, we drove back to Lucan for Martha’s visitation. The funeral and burial took place on the 27th, a frigid day as we awoke to a temperature of 14 degrees below zero.  And of course, our two year old came down with a fever. (Par for the course at this point.) At least our car started.

Look for the Silver Lining

I have tried to find silver linings in this seemingly endless series of unfortunate events. For one thing, Christmas is a time for family. Deaths too bring families together. It is as if the deceased knew their families would be better able to grieve together and to support one another because they were already planning to be together for the holidays. Indeed, by making us think about losing a family member, all of these Christmas deaths set our holiday priorities in high relief. It’s easy, especially with children, to get caught up in the excitement of giving and receiving gifts. But Christmas is about family first and gifts a distant second (or, for some people, God first, family second, gifts a distant third). Yes, we get nice things for Christmas, but they mean little without the important people in our lives.

That was Martha’s philosophy. Martha’s greatest gifts—and she would have agreed—were her children and grandchildren. She has 54 living descendants and another one on the way (the baby my wife and I are expecting in April). When you add in her five siblings, a dozen nieces and nephews, and all of the spouses and in-laws who spent time with her, you see how many lives she touched. It’s a pretty remarkable family for such an unassuming woman from Lucan, Minnesota.

The final silver lining I draw from deaths around Christmas is this: The holiday is supposed to be one of hope—the birth of a savior, anticipation of the longer and brighter days of spring, hope for the future embodied by giggling children. We find hope when we look not at the life we lost, but at those still living and yet to be born. In Martha’s case, that’s a lot of wonderful people.

Mr. Hans Von Sphikenshpokenblunggerfungger

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I am working up a research proposal to identify all the tenants who lived in Minneapolis’s oldest house between 1853, when the first family moved out, and 1905, when the Hennepin County Territorial Pioneer’s Association bought it with the intention of turning it into a museum. Today I stopped in the special collections room at the Minneapolis Central Library to read through a 1983 research report, newspaper clippings, and other materials about the history of the house.

To my surprise, an article published in the February 13, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Journal carried the headline, “DO YOU REMEMBER SPHIKENSHPOKENBLUNGGERFUNGGER? He Was Listed in First Minneapolis Directory of 1859, Preserved at Godfrey House.” I will be relying heavily on the Minneapolis city directories for my research, so I already know my way around them. When I checked the city directory from 1859-60, sure enough, there was Hans Von Shpikenshpokenblanggerfungger. According to the directory, he resided, on Main Street near the sidewalk.

Minneapolis City Directory, 1859-60
Snipped from Commercial Advertiser Directory, for St. Anthony and Minneapolis; To Which Is Added a Business Directory, 1859-60 (St. Anthony and Minneapolis: H. E. Chamberlain, 1859), pg. 118.

Who was Hans Von Sphikenshpokenblunggerfungger? He can’t be found in any census records. Was this a case of atrocious spelling of a long German surname? Was it the whimsical alias of a local comedian? The 1927 newspaper article provides the answer. “Hans was really a joke of the publishers. He never existed save in their fancy, but his name was a byword in the pioneer homes of the time.” Perhaps it was a derisive nickname used by Yankee residents for German and Scandinavian immigrants in the city (though there wen’t that many yet in 1859; most residents were from New England or upstate New York).

The moral of the story is, you never know what real or fictitious people you will run across when doing genealogy research!

Choosing a Baby Name from the Family Tree

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Mrs. GeneaLOGIC and I are expecting!

You know what that means. It’s time to dive into the family tree to find potential baby names.

How people choose names

Naming a child is a special event. The name we choose will shape other people’s first impressions of him or her from day one and it will affect our child’s self-identity as s/he grows up. It’s a big decision. We took it seriously with our first child, a daughter named Eliza, and we’re taking it seriously again. But how should we choose the best name?

Some people choose names that are popular at the moment. We all know the names that were popular when we went to school. Linda and Bob? 1950s. Jennifer and David? 1970s. I bet you can guess my age pretty accurately if I I tell you is that I was high school friends with triplets named Amanda, Megan, and Sara.

Other people name their children after famous or important contemporary figures. How many of you have a George Washington [Surname] or Thomas Jefferson [Surname] in your family tree? One collateral family in my tree contains sons named John Wesley Nelson, Columbus Washington Nelson, Henry Clay Nelson, George Washington Harrison Nelson, and Zachariah Winfield Santa-Anna Nelson, among others. In the last instance, the parents obviously couldn’t decide which Mexican-American War general they wanted to honor and decided to reference them all.

Zachariah Winfield Santa Anna Nelson's name cropped from his death certificate
Zachariah Winfield Santa Anna Nelson’s name cropped from his 1921 death certificate. Virginia Death Certificates, Ashby, Shenandoah County, primary registration district 851a, file 4446. From Virginia, Death Records, 1912-2014 on Ancestry.com.

Many names from European cultures originally carried a literal meaning. Today, people generally don’t know the underlying meaning of most names and only go searching when expecting a baby. But even though people don’t know such meanings by heart, they still affect which names many parents choose for their children.

Biblical names like John or Elizabeth derive from Hebrew and in their original language typically spelled out the child’s relationship to God: Yochanan, “Yahveh is gracious,” or ‘Elisheva’, “My God is abundance.” Most Western versions of Hebrew names passed into common use via a Bible written in Greek or Latin, and so we have inherited Johannes (Latin from Greek) and John rather than Yochanan, and Elisabet (Greek) rather than ‘Elisheva’. For many Christians through the ages, the underlying Hebrew meaning was less important than the name’s association with important Biblical characters.

Other familiar English names originated from archaic forms of Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic, or Slavic languages. They likewise originally carried a literal meaning or referred to nature or divinity. Frederick, for example, derives from two Germanic components, frid “peace” and ric, “ruler.” Fiona comes from the Irish word fion, meaning “vine.” Danica was a Slavic personification of the Morning Star, Venus. And so on.

Immigrant groups from outside Europe are adding new names to America’s pool of names and meanings every day. To give just one example, a state congressional district here in Minnesota recently elected former Somali refugee Ilhan Omar as its representative. Fittingly for a politician, her given name means “to state something eloquently” in Arabic. Several names more commonly found in African-American families, such a Imani and Tariq, also derive ultimately from Arabic words and may reflect a much older link to the Muslim communities of East Africa.

For genealogists, family names are especially important. Because our family trees are bigger and we often know them by heart, we typically have more family names to choose from. We can dig deeper into the past to find the best fit. Indeed, one of my stipulations is that the names we choose must come from somewhere in our child’s direct ancestry.

Baby GeneaLOGIC's family tree
Baby GeneaLOGIC’s family tree.

Having said that, choosing a family name is just one of several important factors. There are practical things to consider like spelling in elementary school and job applications as an adult. Here are the general criteria we are using to choose names for for our children, in rough order of importance. (We never formally spelled it out like this. This is essentially a summary of many conversations over dinner and before bed.)

  1. A name we both like
  2. Goes well with our last name (probably no alliteration)
  3. From a direct ancestor (ideally a person who led an interesting or inspiring life)
  4. Sounds cute for a kid AND respectable for an adult. It has to look good on a resume.
  5. Standard spelling. Sorry to all the Jaiessuns out there, but why make a simple name more complicated?
  6. Not in the Top 10 most popular. No offense to the Lindas of the 1950s or the Liams of today, but we don’t want our child to share his or her name with half the school room. A certain degree of individuality is a good thing.
  7. Not too obscure for the United States in the 21st century. (The flip side of #6.)
  8. Ancient/original meaning is fitting and aligns with our values
  9. Initials don’t spell something unfortunate

This genealogist’s first attempt

We named our first daughter Eliza Pauline. It was important to me as a genealogist to find meaning in the names we chose from the personalities or life histories of the namesake ancestors. Ultimately, that’s why we do genealogy, isn’t it? Our ancestors don’t care whether we remember them. They’re dead. But we find meaning in their lives. They help us figure out our place in the world. They may have passed skills or personality traits down to us. They can teach us how to live (or how not to live). Choosing a name of an ancestor for a new child reflects how we, as parents, understand our heritage right now.

The name Eliza comes from my side of the family and Pauline from my wife’s. There are two Elizas in our daughter’s direct ancestry.

Eliza Nelson Carnes headstone in Swiggett Cemetery, New Salem, Pike County, Illinois.
Eliza Nelson Carnes headstone in Swiggett Cemetery, New Salem, Pike County, Illinois. Image posted on Findagrave.com by user Linda Simpson Davidson 03 Dec 2012; photograph taken May 2008.

Eliza Nelson is my 4x-great-grandmother on my dad’s old-stock American side. She was born around 1810 probably in Frederick County, Maryland. I don’t know many details of her life. In fact, I only have three primary sources that give her name: an 1831 marriage record from Harrison County, Ohio; the 1850 census from Pike County, Illinois; and her gravestone, erected presumably in 1857 when she was buried.

Eliza Kinney was born to Irish immigrants in Canada around 1845. She is my 3x-great-grandmother on my mom’s Irish side. Eliza moved many times in her life. As a girl, she traveled with her parents from Canada to Vermont and then to northern Pennsylvania. In 1864, alongside her new husband James Daly, she moved west to settle with her new family in southern Wisconsin. She left her parents and many siblings behind in Pennsylvania. Only five years later, Eliza was on the move again, this time traveling farther west to cut a new farm out of the prairie in southwestern Minnesota. By age 30, Eliza had already made five major cross-country moves—all without automobiles and mostly without trains. Later in life, Eliza’s family made a final move, another 100+ miles northwest to a farm near the South Dakota border. This Eliza is also a bit of an enigma. After her husband’s death in 1913, I can’t find her again. Her gravestone, marked “1845-1931,” is the only evidence of her whereabouts after 1913.

Though we don’t know much about the personality of either Eliza, we can still draw meaning from their stories. Both Elizas were migrants, especially Eliza Kinney. Like her namesakes, we hope our daughter Eliza goes where life takes her, or rather, takes her life where she want it to go, wherever that may be. Like her ancestors, we hope she grows up to change her own circumstances for the better.

Family photograph of Pauline Shoultz outside home, 1940s.
Family photograph of Pauline Shoultz outside home, 1940s.

Pauline Shoultz was my wife’s grandmother. We know a lot more about her personality. Even though she was an “old” grandma (she was almost 71 when my wife was born) my wife and her sister got to spend a lot of time with Pauline while they were growing up. I also got to know her a little bit before she passed away. She was a spirited if uncompromising woman of fully German descent. My wife remembered her this way. “She wasn’t like other people’s grandmas—polite, sweet. She was a spitfire with her own sense of humor. Grandma Pauline wasn’t a proper lady. She liked sports and hanging with the old guys at the coffee shop. She said a lot of really funny things, intentionally and unintentionally. At the same time, she was an emotional rock, steadfast and determined.” These qualities helped her live to be 98 years old.

When our daughter Eliza Pauline is a little older, we’ll explain to her why we chose the names we did. We’ll teach her about her ancestors. We’ll share our desire for her to grow into an adventurous, independent woman who is also kind, loving, and loyal.

Great family names . . . for someone else’s child

Yes, we like old family names. There aren’t a lot of Elizas or Paulines these days, but both names fit the resurgence of names that were popular around 1900.  Of course, not all old family names make good names in 21st century America. My wife’s 2x-great-grandmother was named Svanhilde. It’s a unique old Scandinavian name that was first documented in the 18th century in the same county in western Norway where our Svanhilde lived. (Her grandmother, born in 1775, was also named Svanhilde and may have been the first recorded bearer of the name since the Viking-age sagas.) I have teased my wife about naming our next child Svanhilde so much that she is frankly tired of the humor. (I think she’s taking our naming duty more seriously than I am.)

With Svanhilde at the head of the list, here’s a list of old family names we will not be using for our next child (but that I like to threaten to write on the birth certificate while my wife is still recovering):

Svanhilde Mathiasdatter portrait
Family photograph of Svanhilde Mathiasdatter (1841-1914), after whom we will NOT be naming our next child. (Sorry, Svanhilde. I’m sure you were a lovely lady.)

Female

  • Svanhilde
  • Olga
  • Josephte
  • Ambjør
  • Euphroseine
  • Orlaug
  • Jacquette

Male

  • Ladislav
  • Asbjørn
  • Ole
  • Václav
  • Mareen
  • Désiré
  • Burgess
  • Vavřinec
  • Gunnar
  • Livinus

Yes, all of these are given names in our future child’s direct ancestry. Most of them sound distinctively “ethnic” in 21st century America. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, searching the Social Security baby names lists for a few other “ethnic” names from our family tree, I discovered that more than 550 American girls were named Ingrid in 2008 and more than 650 boys were named Johan in 2016. Bridget is an evergreen name of Gaelic/Irish origin.

That said, such names do tend to raise questions about where a person is from. Svanhilde, Ambjør, Orlaug, Asbjørn, and Ole are all Norwegian in origin. (They’re “old” names in Norway now, too.) Gunnar is Swedish. Désiré and Livinus are Dutch/Flemish. Ladislav, Václav, Vavřinec, and Olga are names of some of my Czech ancestors. Josephte is a distinctively French-Canadian female name while Euphroseine is a Greek name carried by a handful of my female French-Canadian ancestors. Mareen was a French Huguenot man who settled in colonial Maryland. Burgess is an archaic given name of Scottish or English origin and the given name of Eliza Nelson’s paternal grandfather. All are interesting names for different reasons, but none fit our family in this time and this place.

So which name will we choose for baby #2? Well, you’ll have to wait for a birth announcement! We still have the boy name we chose from my wife’s first pregnancy (and we still like it). We recently agreed upon another girl name. I think we also recently agreed that, just like our first pregnancy, we won’t find out the baby’s sex until s/he is born. We like the mystery. Doing it the old fashioned way also makes naming the child a part of the birth event itself. I still remember calling Eliza by her name for the first time right after she was born. It was moment I’ll never forget.

What’s up with “dit” names?

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Anyone doing French-Canadian genealogy eventually runs across “dit” (pronounced “dee”) names. Meaning “called,”  the “dit” name functioned like an alias or a second surname. It could be used together with the regular surname or as a substitute. Sometimes the “dit” name was not necessary and was left out of certain records. Not all French-Canadian individuals or families had a “dit” name. So where did “dit” names come from? How were they chosen? A cousin of mine recently asked me me about the origin of a specific “dit” name, that of Francois Forcier dit Nadeau (1740-1800). I thought I would share my findings with all of you, since they help answer the broader questions posed above.

Francois Forcier dit Nadeau's name cropped from the parish record of his 1761 marriage.
Francois Forcier dit Nadeau’s name cropped from the parish record of his 1761 marriage to Agathe Hebert. Source: “Québec, registres paroissiaux catholiques, 1621-1979,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G993-Z96D?cc=1321742&wc=9RLD-DPG%3A21947601%2C21947602%2C21947603 : 16 July 2014), Saint-Michel-d’Yamaska > Saint-Michel-d’Yamaska > Baptêmes, mariages, sépultures 1727-1775 > image 216 of 368; nos paroisses de Église Catholique, Quebec (Catholic Church parishes, Quebec).

In general, “dit” names became common in French Canada as a way to help distinguish different branches of the same family. The founding population of French Canada numbered only about 20,000 settled immigrants during the French period, and due to the colony’s early gender imbalance, only about half of those individuals left behind descendants. All of our French-Canadian heritage thus goes back to the same 10,000 or so founders. That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually not that many families, only a few thousand. As the years progressed, the population expanded rapidly from this small founding stock. A few of the original settlers already had 5,000 to 10,000 married descendants by the year 1800! As you can imagine, some families had dozens of people alive at the same time who shared the same handful of common given names: Joseph, Francois, Jacques, Pierre, Louis, Jean, and Jean-Baptiste; Marie, Marguerite, Magdaleine, Louise, Josephte, and Francoise. This was the case with the Forcier family.

The Forcier family in Quebec goes back to a single couple, Pierre Forcier and Marguerite Girard, who married in about 1670. Pierre and Marguerite settled on a farm in the parish of St-Francois du Lac, a few miles inland from the south shore of the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Trois-Rivieres. Pierre and Marguerite had four surviving children, including two sons, Joseph-Antoine and Jacques. These two men each fathered four sons of their own who left descendants. As the family grew through several generations, many younger Forciers moved into the neighboring parish of Yamaska. Within three or four generations, by the 1730s and 1740s, the Forcier families of St-Francois du Lac and Yamaska faced the dilemma of how to keep everyone straight without each person needing to recount his or her full lineage. “Dit” names were one solution.

How did a person choose a new “dit” name? In our case, why Nadeau? Historically, “dit” names had many sources. Some were nicknames given to soldiers. Some were descriptive. Jean Lehay dit Hibernois, for example, was an Irishman taken captive in upstate New York during King William’s War. After marrying and settling down in New France, he was given the “dit” name Hibernois, “the Irishman,” a name many of his descendants continued to carry. Sometimes the “dit” name derived from the mother’s family. One branch of the Petit family carried the “dit” name Gobin. The founding couple of this line was Francois Petit and Jeanne Gobin.

Francois Forcier dit Nadeau appears to have chosen (or been given) the “dit” name Nadeau in honor of Olivier-Francois Nadeau, his godfather and uncle-through-marriage. Francois Forcier was born and baptized June 13, 1740, and Francois Nadeau was listed as his godfather. Marguerite Forcier, Francois Forcier’s aunt, was his female sponsor. Two years later, on April 3, 1742, Olivier-Francois Nadeau married Marguerite Forcier.

Baptism record of Francois Forcier with Francois Nadeau's name highlighted.
Baptism record of Francois Forcier, 13 Jun 1740 at St-Michel d’Yamaska. I have highlighted the two places his parrain (godfather) Francois Nadeau is named.
Source: “Québec, registres paroissiaux catholiques, 1621-1979,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L993-Z98D?cc=1321742&wc=9RLD-DPG%3A21947601%2C21947602%2C21947603 : 16 July 2014), Saint-Michel-d’Yamaska > Saint-Michel-d’Yamaska > Baptêmes, mariages, sépultures 1727-1775 > image 71 of 368; nos paroisses de Église Catholique, Quebec (Catholic Church parishes, Quebec).

The Forciers ended up with three distinct “dit” names: Nadeau, Gaucher, and Mette. (I haven’t researched the origins of the other two “dit” names, but gaucher means left-handed.) Most of Francois’s descendants continued to use the “dit” name Nadeau (though it’s not included on every record). The three “dit” names helped keep different branches straight. Unfortunately, as the families grew even more, even these three extra names could not  provide enough variety to sort out all the problems of identity within the Forcier families of Yamaska. Take, for example, this excellent research case in which the author tried to identify which Pierre Forcier from Yamaska was the one who ended up working for the American Fur Company in La Pointe, Wisconsin, in the 1830s.

“Dit” names in the USA

Photo or drawing of Jean Baptiste Forcier
Portrait or drawing of Jean Baptiste Forcier, cropped from image with his wife and daughter, uploaded by Ancestry.com user NettyeLaP 25 Jan 2014.

When French-Canadians emigrated to the United States, they typically stopped using a “dit” name. They almost always reverted to using just a single surname. Be aware, though, your French-Canadian immigrant ancestors might have chosen either their traditional surname or their “dit” name as their permanent surname in the United States.

Francois Forcier dit Nadeau’s grandson Jean-Baptiste Forcier dit Nadeau (pictured at right) chose to drop Nadeau in the United States. He became simply Jean Baptiste Forcier. But Olivier Pichet dit Dupre and his brothers all chose to keep the “dit” name Dupre instead of Pichet. Likewise, Joseph Petit dit Gobin became Joseph Gobin.

If you’re struggling to find the connection between your ancestor in the United States and his or her family of origin in Quebec, plug the surname you know into this search bar to find associated “dit” names. You can also review a list of name variations and “dit” names here. This might be the breakthrough you need.

A Professional Roadtrip with a Family History Stop

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Professional Relationships

This past weekend I attended a three-day retreat for professional genealogists. The retreat provided a chance for professionals from around the country (including several industry leaders) to discuss anything and everything related to our field. Among many other things, we discussed ideas for working better with clients, ways to improve our businesses (from time management tools to marketing), opportunities for collaborating and subcontracting with other professional genealogists, the ever-changing roles of various national organizations, and the need for a national conversation about ethics and DNA testing.

The secluded setting and lack of a formal schedule encouraged discussions that were challenging, wide-ranging, and honest, but always respectful. Between sessions, we got to know each other on a more personal level. For the most part genealogists work in isolation. The retreat helped create the close professional social network many of us seek but which is hard to develop during the hustle and bustle of conferences. The relationships I formed over the weekend will no doubt be important to my professional life moving forward. Perhaps just as important, I can already see a few of them becoming personal friendships too.

Personal Family History

Like any self-respecting genealogist on a road trip, I had to find a connection to my own family history along the way. And I did. The retreat was held in rural Michigan. To get there from where I live in Minnesota, I had to drive through the Upper Peninsula and across the Mackinaw Bridge. On my way home, I decided to stop at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City. The current fort is a careful reconstruction based on archaeological findings. It is located on the south shore of the Straits of Mackinac, where the original fort sat from about 1715 until the 1780s when the British moved it to Mackinaw Island. Several of my French-Canadian ancestors engaged as voyageurs in the Pays d’en Haut. While most of them were sent to Grand Portage/Fort William or still farther north and west, some of them no doubt stopped at Michilimackinac on their way.

Perhaps most notably, I am a direct descendant of Olivier Morel, Sieur de LaDurantaye, who was the first French commandant at Michilimackinac. He was stationed near the mission of St. Ignace on the north side of the Straits of Mackinac from 1683 until 1690, years before Fort Michilimackinac was constructed on the south shore.

Fort Michilimackinac. Photo by author, August 2017.

Sainte Anne Church at Michilimackinac. Photo by author, August 2017.

The fort’s history and my family history come together most closely in the reconstructed Sainte Anne Church, which is inside the fort’s palisade. In October 1746, a baby girl named Agathe was baptized in the original Sainte Anne’s at Michilimackinac. Her mother was “Marie Charlotte, a woman Savage baptized last year” and her father was an unknown Frenchman. However, evidence suggests that her father was probably fur trader and local rapscallion Charles Hamelin, who was based out of Sault Ste. Marie.

According to an inventory conducted after her husband’s death, Agathe Hameline married a French-Canadian voyageur named Joseph Normand in 1761 somewhere in the Illinois Country (perhaps at Fort St. Joseph in modern southwestern Michigan). Their first three children were baptized at Fort St. Joseph in August 1768, among them my ancestor Marie Josèphte Normand. In 1773, when Marie Josèphte was about eight or nine years old, the family moved east to the Province of Quebec, settling west of Montreal. The Normands remained in the east for the remainder of their lives. By the time Marie Josèphte’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren moved to Minnesota 1873, memory of their western ties and Native American ancestry seems to have been lost. At the very least it was obscured. Racial mixing carried a much different social meaning in late 19th century United States than it did during the French fur trade era.

If the part-Ojibwe girl baptized at Michilimackinac in 1746 was indeed the same Agathe who later married Joseph Normand (the case is strong but not definitive), then she is my 7x-great-grandmother. Visiting the reconstructed church on the very site of her baptism opened a window into a life—and a culture—generations removed from present experience. It is as close as a living descendant can come to being present in her story.

The Obsolescence of Microfilm

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For anyone who called herself a genealogist in the past century, spooling microfilm onto a special microfilm reader and scrolling through its pages was a rite of passage. Finding a record of your long-lost ancestor hundreds of pages into the roll was something to celebrate. But it’s the beginning of the end of the microfilm era. A major sign of the transition appeared a couple days ago.

On Monday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) announced that it would suspend distribution of microfilm rolls on September 1, 2017. The church, which incorporates genealogy into its theology, owns about 2.5 million rolls of microfilm full of genealogical data from all over the world. For the past 80 years, the church has distributed microfilm rolls to designated research centers upon request, to the great benefit of genealogists everywhere.

Microfilm has so many benefits. It condenses information and saves archival space. It allows users to see faithful copies of original documents without risk of damaging the originals (and with very little risk of damaging the microfilm itself.)  It allows the contents of parish record books and other large documents to be sent through the mail at minimal cost. Its material components decay very slowly.

But these are not exclusive benefits. Many of them apply to digital information too. And that, indeed, is the future for LDS collections. According to the official LDS statement, “The change is the result of significant progress made in FamilySearch’s microfilm digitization efforts and the obsolescence of microfilm technology.” The church has already digitized more than 1.5 million microforms, with most of them available online at FamilySearch.org for browsing or searching. The rest, says the statement, “should be digitized by the end of 2020.” Three-and-a-half years of waiting isn’t that long for genealogists. I mean, we’re already halfway to the release of the 1950 census on April 1, 2022, and that seems (to me at least) like it’s just around the corner.

For me, the discontinuation of microfilm distribution raises two questions, one immediate and practical and one more general. First, why not continue distribution of undigitized rolls until 2020 for the sake of accessibility? The whole point of both microfilm distribution and digitization is accessibility, right? Well, LDS has a solid answer to this  question on a related FAQ page. Below is their  explanation. I included it in full because it gets to the heart of the bigger issue of obsolescence.

The microfilm industry has been in decline for a couple of decades since the advent of digitization. The cost of vesicular film used to duplicate microfilm for circulation has risen dramatically while demand has decreased significantly. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult and costly to maintain the equipment, systems, and processes required for film duplication, distribution, and access. It is not feasible for FamilySearch to continue the microfilm distribution service for longer than it already has. Meanwhile, digitization is nearing completion and many of the records FamilySearch has not yet digitized are available on other websites accessible to FamilySearch patrons. By reinvesting resources in digital efforts, FamilySearch can accelerate and improve electronic access.

Microfilm is dying for economic reasons, plain and simple. Microfilm technology is now a niche market. Production equipment, replacement parts, and people with the proper skills to maintain microform technologies are all harder to find, which puts a premium price on the whole niche. It is easy to understand how the church arrived at its current solution.

John in the Minnesota Historical Society Library
Researching family history using microfilm in the Minnesota Historical Society Library.

The other question raised by the LDS discontinuation of microfilm distribution is about the future of microfilm itself. The technology is still widely used in libraries and archives around the country (and LDS microfilm collections will continue to be available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City). I still use microfilm all the time at the Minnesota Historical Society to search for death certificates, naturalization papers, historical Minnesota newspapers, and more.

Microfilm has a few advantages not shared with digital images. Most notably, microfilm is an analog technology. All you need to read it is a good light source and a magnifying glass. Digital archiving, in fact, presents a much more complicated system of preservation in the long run. File types and software change frequently, so that obsolescence is just as much of a threat to digital media. And just like physical objects, digital objects decay with use. Obviously, the advantages of digital media (color, share-ability, ease of access) more than compensate for the new challenges it presents. Yet I wonder if―because of its simplicity―microfilm will continue to have a place in libraries and archives, including genealogical archives, for decades more. Maybe the end of ordering LDS microfilm rolls isn’t quite the end of the microfilm era.

Following Family History in Old Minneapolis

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I recently led my mom and the rest of my immediate family on a fun day exploring family history in our own backyard. We toured of part of the region to which my mom never thought she had any special connection: the city of Minneapolis.

My mom always knew she had deep roots in Minnesota, especially to the city of St. Paul and its suburbs. She grew up in St. Paul. Her mother grew up there. Her maternal grandfather worked for years in the stockyards in South St. Paul. My mom also knew that some her father’s French-Canadian ancestors had lived in St. Paul’s northern suburbs of Little Canada and Centerville for generations, and she had an inkling a few of them had once been in St. Paul, too. (Indeed, one family was among the very first to stake claims in the future state capital in 1837, and in 1841 they donated half the land for the Catholic church that gave the city its name.)

When I first asked my mom and her brothers if we had any direct ties to Minneapolis—the western “twin” of the Twin Cities—they didn’t know. They didn’t think so. I was disappointed by that answer. I grew up in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities. When we went into “the city” for a concert or a baseball game or the farmer’s market, it was almost always to Minneapolis not St. Paul. My dad worked in one of the skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis. When people from outside Minnesota asked me where I was from, I usually said Minneapolis. As I researched my mom’s family, I wanted to have some relationship to the city’s history. That’s where the action was when I was growing up. That’s where most of the action has been for a century and a half.

Since the 1850s, Minneapolis has been the beating heart of the regional economy. While St. Paul grew into a major city because it was the head of navigation on the Mississippi River and the state capital, Minneapolis grew even bigger because it had the Mississippi River’s only natural waterfall. St. Anthony Falls powered the city’s industries, transforming it into a global saw- and flour-milling superpower by 1880. Its mills processed grain from southern and western Minnesota and the Dakotas and timber from the vast north woods. (Recognizable brand names from this era of Minneapolis history include Pillsbury and Gold Medal Flour.) If my family’s collective memory was all we had to go on, then our family story remained peripheral to the story of Minneapolis. They lived in St. Paul and in the metropolitan area’s agricultural hinterland, but not in industrial Minneapolis.

Minneapolis skyline and west bank riverfront from across the Stone Arch Bridge. Note the Gold Medal Flour sign above the old Washburn mill complex. The ruined building next to that is the former Washburn A Mill, built in 1880, now home to Mill City Museum. Photograph by author, 2008.

St. Anthony Falls from the Stone Arch Bridge. The geological setting beneath St. Anthony Falls is precarious. Indeed, it threatened the existence of the falls itself. In the late 19th century the falls was put beneath a concrete apron to stop its natural upstream erosion. Photo by author, 2008.

However, as I researched our LaBelle ancestors (the surname my mom and uncles were born with), I discovered that, in fact, three generations had lived, worked, fell in love, and died in the heart of the Minneapolis Mill District over the course of more than thirty years.

What follows is, first, a narrative of my family’s ties to the St. Anthony Mill District of old Minneapolis, and second, a rundown of the LaBelle family history tour on which I recently led my family.

Coming to Minneapolis

The story of the LaBelle migration to Minneapolis is long and complicated. I won’t detail it all here. It was a case of serial migration that lasted at least thirty years, from 1848 to 1878, and included three generations of migrants. The patriarchs were two brothers, Pierre (b: 1799) and Alarie Lebel (b: 1801). (The name had been spelled Lebel in Canada ever since Nicolas Lebel arrived in New France in 1654. LaBelle became the standard form in the U.S.) The migration started from a single spot—their family farms near Gentilly, Quebec—but it ended in towns across the northern United States. Descendants of Pierre and Alarie helped construct the final stretches of the transcontinental railroad in Wyoming, logged and sawed timber in northern Wisconsin, ran a saloon and grocery store in Bay City, Michigan, and became laborers and carpenters in Minneapolis. One descendent named George LaBelle ran the largest automobile-based transportation company in the Twin Cities in the mid 1920s and in 1928 was a founding partner in the Allied Van Lines cooperative.

My direct ancestral line brought up the rear. Patriarch Alarie Lebel was already an old man—a 65-year-old widower—when he first came to the United States in 1866. It appears he was cared for in turn by his various children. He settled first with the family of his son Uldorique (Roderick) in Brown County, Wisconsin. That’s where some of Alarie’s nieces and nephews (Pierre’s children) had settled in the late 1840s. By 1880, ol’ man “Alarie” had moved to Bay City, Michigan, where his daughter Adeline and her husband Patrick Pelletier ran a grocery store. Only in 1881, when Alarie was 80 years old, does he show up in the Minneapolis city directory for the first time. By 1881, Minneapolis made the most sense for Alarie to be cared for by his children. In the preceding decade, his children Ovid, Noah, Philonese, Olive, and Roderick had all moved to the city.

Alarie’s eldest son Ovid Lebel (b: 1831) is my direct ancestor. It appears he was the last member of the family to leave Quebec. My hunch is that Ovid was in line to inherit the family farm in Gentilly. Word from relatives must have convinced him and his wife Rosalie Goudreau that they could do better in America. Or perhaps Ovid believed he needed help caring for Rosalie, who began showing symptoms of some sort of mental illness in the early 1870s. (More on this below). Ovid and family came to the United States between 1875 and 1877, settling first in Houghton County, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, and then trickling into Minneapolis during the summer and fall of 1878. Among the children Ovid and Rosalie brought with them was their sixteen-year-old son Ferdinand (b: 1862), my great-great-grandfather.

A Hard Life Along the Riverfront

Ovid LaBelle’s obituary, published in Minneapolis’s French-language newspaper Echo de L’Ouest, 13 Jun 1913. On microfilm at the Minnesota Historical Society.

The LaBelles needed work and Minneapolis needed workers. Upon arriving in the city, Ovid’s family moved straight into the heart of the mill district on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Ovid and the couple’s older sons found plenty of work as day laborers. The family couldn’t afford much for living quarters. In fact, the LaBelles’ first residence in Minneapolis was the oldest house in the city. Ovid’s 1913 obituary states quite clearly (in French) that “35 years ago he resided in the Godfrey House, the first house constructed in Minneapolis.”

Nowadays, the Ard Godfrey House is preserved as a museum, a memorial to the earliest Euro-American settlement at St. Anthony Falls. In 1848, prominent early Minnesota businessman Franklin Steele hired Maine native Ard Godfrey to build the first dam and commercial sawmill at the falls. As part of the deal to bring Godfrey west, Steele agreed to build a house for Godfrey and his family. According to a 1983 report on the house’s history, two French-Canadians, Charles Mousseau and James Brissette, built the small but surprisingly spacious five-bedroom home for Godfrey’s family to live in. The house stood on the east side of the river in an area that would be incorporated as the city of St. Anthony in 1855. The Godfrey family vacated the house in 1853 in order to move across the river to Minneapolis. There Ard Godfrey built a new home and mill just below Minnehaha Falls. (St. Anthony and Minneapolis merged in 1872.)

When the LaBelles arrived in the late 1870s, the Godfrey house remained in practically its original location near the riverfront. By then the dense St. Anthony mill district had been built around it. Nobody yet cared that the house was historic. It was simply old and probably a little rundown. It certainly was not in a desirable location. The area was noisy and dirty. On the same block could be found two iron foundries, a machine shop, and a warehouse, according to an 1885 Sanborn insurance map. Yet the fact that the home had five bedrooms and was close to so many industrial jobs made it a suitable boarding house. Newly arrived immigrants piled in family upon family.

When the 1880 census was taken, 28 people from six families were enumerated at the one and only address on the 100 block of Prince Street (site of the Godfrey House):

  • Ovid and Rose “Label” and five children
  • Oliver and Mary Juneau with three children
  • Ovid and Rose’s son Edward Label with his wife Josephine and three children
  • Ovid and Rose’s son Alfred Label with his wife Adele and one child
  • Joseph and Caroline “Belajah” [Belanger?] with two children
  • “Joashem” [Joachim] and Adeline “Turvil” with two children. Joachim Duteau dit Tourville was Ovid LaBelle’s maternal uncle, the younger brother of his deceased mother Genevieve.

All of the adults in the house had been born in French Canada. The adult males were all recorded as laborers. Since city directory listings for 1879 and 1880 suggest Ovid and Edward LaBelle had not moved from their original address in the city and since we know the Godfrey House was on the 100 block of Prince Street, we can safely conclude that these 28 people were all living in the Godfrey House in 1880. Each family probably rented a single room in the house while sharing use of the kitchen wing.

Cropped from 1880 U.S. census, Minneapolis election district 231, pg. 23. Accessed on Ancestry.com.

Another resident of the Godfrey House around this time was Zephirin Poisson (b: 1853), a French-Canadian man who also hailed from Gentilly. In America, he usually went by the name Frank Fish. His address in the 1879 Minneapolis city directory—Prince St. near 2nd Ave. SE—is identical to the address given for Ovid, Edward and Noah LaBelle. Zephirin’s first wife, Delia Tourville (b: abt 1849), was a daughter of Joachim and Adeline. Delia died in 1882, and in 1883 Zephirin married his second wife, Ovid and Rosalie LaBelle’s daughter Olivine (b: 1867). The LaBelles, Tourvilles, and Poissons obviously knew one another going back to Gentilly, but I suspect Zephirin and Olivine first noticed one another while they both lived at the Godfrey House in 1879. In any case, when Zephirin and Delia moved out of the Godfrey House later that year, they moved just a couple blocks east, to 419 Southeast 2nd Street, where they resided with several other members of the LaBelle family: Louis, Noah, and their families, as well as patriarch Alarie when he arrived in Minneapolis in late 1880 or early 1881.

The LaBelles were obviously poor. Ovid’s next residence near the corner of Polk and Winter Streets, where he lived continuously (with one exception) from 1881 to 1896, was first recorded without a street address simply as “near the junction of the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad.” Old city maps show that the house was literally in the middle of a railroad junction. Several other listings mention that Ovid lived “in the rear of building” at that address, which likewise suggests poverty. The railroad junction still exists, but the street grid has long since been removed for safety. Polk St. and Winter St. no longer intersect.

Davidsons’ Pocket Map of Minneapolis, 1886, with annotations for LaBelle residences mentioned in the text. Original at Hennepin County Library. Digital version online at Minnesota Digital Library.

Sudden Passions

Ovid’s wife Rosalie Goudreau LaBelle also moved to the house by the railroad junction in late 1880 or early 1881. However, her stay was much shorter. Rosalie suffered from some kind of mental illness. She was diagnosed with dementia, though I suspect modern doctors would call it something else. Since the early 1870s, she had been a difficult person to live with. She sometimes broke out in “sudden passion[s]” and “threaten[ed] others with injury.” Barely a year after they settled in Minneapolis, in December 1879, the family sought to have Rosalie committed to the state and placed in an insane asylum. She was committed by the probate judge but remained at home with her family until 1883. On June 29, 1883, she was sent to the Minnesota Asylum for the Insane in St. Peter.

Doctor’s notes tell us that she did ok there in the following years. A note from August 1884 says she was “very pleasant and quiet . . . contented and apparently happy.” A year later she was described as “slightly more irritable” but by 1886 and ’87 she was “fat and hearty” and “fat and happy.” From a modern perspective of mental health, perhaps the most telling indication of her well-being at the asylum was the statement made in 1884 that she “is very quiet but this may in part be due to the fact that no one in the hall can talk French to her.” Social isolation could not have helped her state of mind.

After four years, three months and two days in the asylum, Rosalie was released from the hospital and returned to Minneapolis to live with her family. Her condition had “improved” but she was not fully “recovered.” The final notes, from October 1, 1887, read, “seems pretty well received by friends on trial today,” which I take to mean that her friends and family were happy to see her again when she appeared in court to be evaluated for potential release.

Big Changes

Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, June 2017. Photograph by author

Universalist Church, 1857. Public Domain, from Minnesota Historical Society via Wikipedia.

The old St. Anthony section of Minneapolis transformed around the LaBelles in their first decade in the city. Between 1880 and 1886 three of the most iconic parts of the St. Anthony skyline were constructed.

First, in 1877, the year before my branch of the LaBelle family moved in, the area’s French Catholics had purchased a twenty-year-old Greek Revival church from the First Universalist Society of St. Anthony and renamed it Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. The church was located a little more than a block west of the Godfrey House on Prince Street and became the LaBelles’ parish church as soon as they arrived. Between 1880 and 1883, the French Catholics significantly reshaped the structure, “adding a transept, apse and front bell tower with three steeples,” according to Wikipedia. It looks much the same today as it did in 1883.

Second, in 1880, a few blocks to the east of the church and directly across the street from the LaBelles who lived at 419 S.E. 2nd Street , construction began on the world’s largest flour mill. Opened in July 1881, the Pillsbury A-Mill  remained the world’s largest flour mill for more than 40 years. I try to imagine the awe the LaBelles must have felt as they watched the six-story behemoth rise from the shoreline. I wonder whether they participated in the intricate dance of workers, machinery, and railcars that took place every day as tons of grain were shipped in and thousands of barrels and sacks of flour were shipped out of the mill. I envision conversations they had about how different their lives were in Minneapolis than they had been on that small farm in Gentilly.

Finally, the most eye-catching structure on the St. Anthony riverfront was built right next to the Godfrey House in 1886. In 1885, Minneapolis boosters organized an industrial exposition fair to be held the following year. Minneapolis had just lost out to St. Paul as the permanent home of the Minnesota State Fair, and Minneapolitans wanted to show off the industrial power of their city. A mostly vacant square between the Godfrey House and Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church was chosen as the site of the new Industrial Exposition Building. The building was completed in August 1886, and the initial 40-day fair attracted almost 500,000 visitors. The building later hosted the 1892 Republican National Convention. However, like so many showpiece buildings constructed for big events rather than long-term functionality, the exposition building struggled to find a purpose after the fair exhibitors left in 1893. The Exposition Building was torn down in 1940. (Wikipedia)

Industrial Exposition Building photographed from Pillsbury A Mill ca1890. I have highlighted the Godfrey House. Public domain via Wikipedia Commons.

St. Anthony Falls and  east riverfront, ca1905. Stitched together from three Library of Congress Negatives. Public Domain. The Pracna building, home to the bar Pracna since it was built in 1890, becomes relevant later.

At the start of 1887, the St. Anthony skyline was rather impressive. The LaBelles no longer resided in the Godfrey House, but most of them still lived in St. Anthony, within a few blocks of their original landing spot. They continued to attend Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

Life and Death

Rosalie returned from the asylum to the LaBelle household in the fall of 1887. She had missed the wedding of her daughter Olivine in 1883 and son Cyrille in 1886, but she returned in time to see three more of her children tie the knot. Daughter Celina married Edward Wilson ca.1889, son Ferdinand wed Rosalie Roy in 1891, and daughter Ermine married Victor Langlois in 1892.

My great-great-grandfather Ferdinand took a different occupational path from most of his siblings. After his brothers toiled all day as laborers packing bags of flour into railcars at the Pillsbury Mill or as lumbermen guiding river-borne logs into the city’s sawmills, they could stop by the saloons of Adolph Eisler or Solomon Robitshek and find Ferdinand behind the bar. Ferdinand worked as a bartender in Minneapolis for at least a dozen years and perhaps as many as twenty years. It was at one of these establishments (or a nearby restaurant) that he met his future bride.

A copy of Ferdinand LaBelle and Rosalie Roy’s wedding picture in author’s possession. Ferdinand and Rose are in front. The two behind are their friends and witnesses Carrie Beaudette and Louis St-Armand.

Rosalie Roy, or Rose King as she sometimes anglicized her name, grew up on a farm in Corcoran Township, twenty miles northwest of Minneapolis. Rose moved to Minneapolis to find work when she reached adulthood. A family story says she met Ferdinand at the restaurant where she worked. Perhaps the story confused which half of the couple worked in food service or maybe they both did. Perhaps they even worked at the same establishment. Unfortunately, Rose never appears in a city directory as an independent young woman, so the family story is all we have to go on.

I like to think Ferdinand and Rose hit it off because they could each tell stories about the challenges of living with mentally ill parents. Family stories passed down the generations tell us that Rose’s mother Desanges (Bolduc) Roy wept every time an animal was killed on the farm. We may sympathize with her desire not to harm animals, but such feelings did not make for a very good 19th-century farm wife. Rose’s father Elzear, we are told, went “religious crazy.” His religious fanaticism got so bad that his wife and children eventually drove him out of the house. He disappears from records after 1880. I think I have identified him in Minneapolis in 1888 and in Copley near Bemidji in 1900, in each case working as a teamster. But I can’t be 100% certain the records are for the same Elzear. In any case, Rose could match Ferdinand for stories about a dysfunctional home life growing up.

Ferdinand and Rose’s wedding took place at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. Their first five children were baptized there during the 1890s.

Ovid LaBelle watched his family grow exponentially during the 1880s and 1890s. But along with marriage and birth comes death. At least a dozen LaBelle children in Ovid’s extended family died young during the 1880s and 1890s, including Ferdinand and Rose’s daughter Delima. Ovid’s father Alarie Lebel, patriarch of the family, died in September 1890, age 89. After decades of living with his various children, Alarie’s final year was spent in a Minneapolis “inmate home for the aged.”

More surprising was the death of Ovid’s wife. Almost as suddenly as she had returned, Rosalie (Goudreau) LaBelle died. I was incredibly fortunate to find Rosalie’s death in the parish register of Our Lady of Lourdes (on microfilm at the Minnesota Genealogical Society). The books containing the parish’s burial registers before 1910 are lost. However, a single sheet of paper—two facing pages—survives from one of the older books, containing the last few burials of 1892 and most of 1893. Rosalie’s death was first one recorded in 1893. (Two other LaBelle relatives are listed on the second line of each page: Emma Bazinet, daughter of Calixte Bazinet and Olive Lebel [Ovid’s sister], and Dolphis, son of Joseph Lebel and Anne ??? [Ovid’s nephew Joseph and his wife Eleanora, per cemetery records]).

Riverfront property was valuable property , so Our Lady of Lourdes did not have its own cemetery. Most if not all of the LaBelles who died in Minneapolis were buried in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. The cemetery is located on the 2700 block of Central Avenue, two-and-a-half miles north of the St. Anthony Falls riverfront. It was the primary burial ground for Catholics of many nationalities who lived in the old St. Anthony part of Minneapolis. Remarkably, none of the LaBelles buried at St. Anthony’s Cemetery has a gravestone, They were apparently too poor to afford such luxuries. Perhaps the graves once had wooden crosses, but if they did they have long since disappeared.

Lost History

Two events obscured all of this Minneapolis family history from later generations. First, in late 1899 or early 1900, my great-great grandparents Ferdinand and Rose LaBelle decided to return to their agricultural roots. They left Minneapolis behind to purchase a small farm near Centerville in Anoka County. That farm is where my great-grandfather Alfred LaBelle was raised and where the family linked up with other French-Canadian families that had been in Centerville for several generations. Al had been born in Minneapolis. His baptism is recorded in the parish register of Our Lady of Lourdes. But Al was just an infant when his parents moved to Centerville, and it seems he never knew where he had been born.

Second, in March 1913 Ferdinand’s father Ovid LaBelle moved from Minneapolis into the Centerville home of another of his sons to live out the remainder of his life. He died two months later. Though Ovid had spent most of the previous 35 years in Minneapolis, he died and was buried in Centerville. Ferdinand and Rose are also buried there. To anyone taking just a cursory look back at this family line, it appeared they had always lived in Centerville.

Retracing Their Steps

Two weeks ago, I took my wife, daughter, and parents on a fun day exploring all of this history. Here’s a rundown of what we did, beginning with with two images for reference.

St. Anthony Falls and east riverfront, ca1905. Stitched together from three Library of Congress Negatives. Public Domain.

I marked up this screenshot from Google Earth to match up landmarks with the 1905 photo and to show where we went on our walking tour of old St. Anthony Main.

Pillsbury A Mill, June 2017. Photograph by author.

  • Tour of the Pillsbury A Mill.
    We started the day with a 90-minute guided tour of the Pillsbury A Mill led by staff from the Minnesota Historical Society. Located less than two blocks east of the Godfrey House’s original location, the Pillsbury A Mill was the largest flour mill in the world when it was constructed in 1881. It held the title for decades thereafter. The 1881 city directory lists several LaBelles, including patriarch Alarie, at 419 2nd Street SE, across the street from the magnificent new mill.  The mill has recently been remodeled into artist lofts. It was an A+ tour, and it looks like an amazing place to live.
  • Lunch at Pracna.
    Pracna is the oldest bar still in operation in Minneapolis. It opened for business in 1890, which means Ovid, Ferdinand and/or Rose Roy might have dined there. In fact, considering they coexisted for so many years in the same neighborhood, I am confident one or more of my ancestors had a drink at Pracna more than a century ago. In the 1905 photograph snip below, it appears Pracna was build right next to the Godfrey House. However, Pracna sits on Main Street, while the Godfrey House is half a block back on Prince Street. Ferdinand never worked at Pracna, but since he spent about 20 years as a Minneapolis bartender, I had a drink in his honor. (I ordered a Hamm’s, the most historic local brew on the menu. It was first brewed in St. Paul in 1865.)
  • Tour of the Ard Godfrey House.

    Ard Godfrey House, June 2017. Photograph by author.

    The Godfrey House is still standing after 168 years, though it has been moved three times in order to preserve it. It now sits in Chute Square, about a block from its original location. The Woman’s Club of Minneapolis owns the house today, and it is open for guided tours on summer weekend afternoons. As I described above, through sheer genealogical fortune, I believe I identified all of the boarders in the Godfrey House in 1880. Though I wasn’t looking for answers about the Godfrey House, since the records about my own family paint a fairly clear picture that they were there, I knew I could help the Woman’s Club fill in the story of the house. When we visited, I donated copies of the documents that link the LaBelles to the house. I also included a copy of an 1885 Sanborn Insurance map and a few parish records from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church that help show how both  the LaBelles and the house fit into the greater community during the 1880s.

  • Attempted visit of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church.
    We tried to visit Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, but our timing was poor. Saturday afternoon around 2:00 is prime wedding time at a Catholic church, and we chose not to saunter down the aisle in our shorts and t-shirts admiring the architecture in the middle of their ceremony. A plaque outside the church says it is located near the spot where Franco-Belgian Father Louis Hennepin became the first European to see the falls of the Mississippi in 1680. Father Hennepin named the falls St. Anthony after his patron saint Saint Anthony of Padua.
  • Drive past the former Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged.
    Now remodeled as an apartment complex, the former Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged was where Ovid LaBelle spent his final years, excepting the last two months when he moved to Centerville. The Home was both yet another legacy of the family’s poverty and a reminder of how much private charities helped out in an era before Social Security. (Location)
  • St. Anthony’s Cemetery.
    To restate what I wrote above, land along the Mississippi River shore was prime real estate, so most churches in old St. Anthony did not have their own cemeteries. LaBelle patriarch Alarie died in 1890 and was buried there. Ovid’s wife Rosalie Goudreau LaBelle died in 1893, and I have to believe she was buried there too. Ferdinand and Rose LaBelle lost an infant daughter named Melina later in 1893. She was also buried there. In fact, more than 15 LaBelles were buried in the cemetery during the 1880s and 1890s. Astonishingly, NONE of them have a headstone or a marked grave of any kind. The families must simply have been too poor to afford them. The only evidence for their presence at St. Anthony’s comes from the cemetery’s register of burials, which ocassionally matches up with surviving parish records from Our Lady of Lourdes.

Corned Beef and What? An Artifact of Culinary Genealogy

Posted on by genealogic

Isabelle Daly Jordan, 1950s.
Isabelle Daly Jordan, 1950s.

My parents are gradually cleaning out their basement. They’re offloading things from my childhood onto me and making the tough decisions about which of their own belongings they want to keep for sentimental reasons and which can go. They’ve also inherited stuff from multiple branches of the family, and I get to pick through most of it for things I think are interesting artifacts of family history.

One of the things my mom recently set aside to show me was a recipe hand-written by my great-grandmother Isabelle (Daly) Jordan. I have previously written about the persistence of ethnic culinary traditions in America using the examples of Isabelle’s grandparents William and Mary Reynolds and her husband Basil Jordan, all Irish-Americans who loved potatoes. Isabelle indeed cooked a lot of potatoes. But at the same time, she was as much a woman of twentieth century middle America as her Italian-American, Swedish-American, fill-in-the-blank-American neighbors, and she modernized her cooking accordingly…

…for better and for worse. Isabelle’s recipe is a mid-century classic. Have a look.

Isabelle's recipe for "Corned Beef Salad"

When your lead ingredients are corned beef and lemon jello, you know you’re in for a treat! Mix in mayonnaise, green peppers, olives, and hard-boiled eggs, let chill until firm, and you’ve cooked up the perfect space-age dinner for your family! Yum! It was probably supposed to look something like this.

But actually turned out more like this.

This recipe is now a little family treasure. Isabelle probably copied it out of a friend’s cookbook (perhaps this one) and we can suppose she made it for her family at least once.

A few years ago, my wife and I had a good laugh at a cookbook full of similar recipes that my grandmother Verla had once used. We 21st-century gourmands scoffed at the notion of suspending shrimp in jello and took pleasure in our culinary superiority. But I have no idea which of the recipes in the cookbook Verla actually prepared as food for her family on a regular basis. The fact that Isabelle took the time to hand copy this recipe for her own use makes it that much more special.

My wife and I are not alone among millennials ridiculing the culinary choices of our mid-twentieth century ancestors. For example, there are Pintrest boards dedicated to unearthing “Unfortunate Gelatin” and other “Unfortunate Food” from mid-century recipe books. A few brave people have been bold enough to test some of the worst recipes and report their findings to the world. Blogs like Mid-Century Menu, and Dr. Bobb’s Kitschen (whose authors gelatinized up something very similar to Isabelle’s recipe and produced the second photo above), make for excellent reading. (Neither my wife nor I like olives or hard-boiled eggs, so this is not a recipe we plan to try any time soon.)

The historian in me remains fascinated. Why would people—urban and rural alike—turn away from wholesome farm cooking in favor of high-tech “food products” like jello and TV dinners? Was the convenience and cultural capital really worth it? Regardless, I think the writers at Mid-Century Menu have it right. “Like it or not, these horrible recipes are part of the culinary evolution of our country.  The pilgrims didn’t just come across the water on the Mayflower with their heads stuffed full of Asian fusion cuisine. It was a long, painful and sometimes disgusting road that lead to our current national gourmand status. Most people like to forget about it. I think we should embrace it. Yeah, at one point it was the height of fashion to have sour cream mixed with powered french onion soup mix at your party. Let’s acknowledge it and be proud.”

Recipes like Isabelle’s Corned Beef Salad are part of our shared American heritage. They were produced at a specific time and place and in a specific cultural context. By cooking these recipes for their families and sharing them with their friends, our ancestors were part and parcel of that history. If you inherited recipes or cookbooks that document it—or even better, if your family still makes salads suspended in jello—then you, like me, are the proud owner of a unique artifact of family history.