Our father never knew his paternal grandparents David Papin and Victoria Goyer Papin. Victoria died in 1893 when she was 29, leaving three small children: Albert 6, Edouard 4, and Marie-Anne Elizabeth 2. David, Albert’s father, married a brave and sturdy woman 8 months later, Elodie Valois, who would live to age 77 in 1936.

From her marriage to David, Elodie gave birth in 1894 to a cousin our family heard a lot about over the years, Marie Anastasie Aline Papin, also known as “Alice” who died in 1986 at the age of 91. To her seems to have fallen a lot of the supplemental child-care in all of the Papin/Pepin families—she shows up in a number of families’ photos and never married. Elodie also bore a son, Louis Joseph Emile Papin, in 1898, who died at age 3 and is the first buried in the family grave that David purchased at the Cemetery of St Laurent.

Aline, or Alice, was a longtime companion of another cousin who was close to her in age, Angeline, the daughter of David’s brother, Joseph Zenon, whom we also heard about from time to time. Angeline married her cousin Emile Meloche later in life and we have a photo of him from when our parents visited them in Canada. (Lucienne says of Emile’s mother, Marie-Louise Papin, who was a sister to David, that “she was very pretty.”)

There was also, I believe, a “Tante Adele”—fascination with variations on names beginning with the letter A, some might say—but so far I cannot determine exactly which part of the family Adele derived from.

Our Aunt Lucienne notes in the family genealogy that Victoria Goyer had been known as a “fine woman” and she briefly depicts the short life of Marie-Anne (1891-1916), whom the family said Lucienne resembled:

She was a young Sister of the Holy Cross—as I am—who was sent to New Bedford, USA. She was ill and sleeping in the convent dormitory when a fire broke out. A fireman was able to take her on his shoulder and get her out, but she suffocated from damage to her lungs by the next day.

Only 18 years old, our grandfather Albert signed his father’s death certificate when David also died relatively young in 1905 at age 47, having packed a lot of life into those few years. David was not only a businessman but also a councilman for Cote-des-Neiges.

Together with his father, Ovide Papin-Baronet—also known as Louis and David—and his father’s brother Léon, David and his sons Albert and Edouard were all forgerons.

The French word covers the various skills of carriage-making, iron forging, foundry and metal working, and blacksmithing—all highly valued skills, later modified when the automobile made its appearance. We do not yet know the exact location of their business, but it was reputed to do a substantial business in the main marketplace of Jacques Cartier Square, as shown below at the beginning of the 20th century:

David purchased a family plot in the St. Laurent Cemetery at the time of the death of his 3-year-old son Emile in 1901. Many of the Pepin family are buried there, including Paul Emile in 1982.

Louis-Ovide Papin-Baronet or David-Ovide Pepin-Baronet, as the great grandfather was variously known, lived to the age of 74. The mother of his 5 children, Ursule, married him at 29 and died at 54. She missed getting to see her first grandchild, Albert, by two weeks.

Edouard, Louis-Ovide’s second son and Albert’s brother, died in 1937 at age 48. He left six children in the care of his widow, Ida Bigras; she may have partly raised the children in Ferme  Neuve, where she had family and Paul Emile would later locate his first business, a sign shop.

It is noteworthy how often in our family grandparents and grandchildren did not live long enough to know each other. Conversely, some long-lived grandparents stood in for parents who were away at work or who died young and, alternatively, step-children were often called on to be godparents to a first, or even second, set of children in a single family.

Especially in the 19th century, the lack of connection between grandparents and grandchildren may well mean that there was a limited amount of knowledge of the family line conveyed between generations. In the genealogy that Aunt Lucienne traced for our mother, Marian, in the late 1980s, she provides an enormous amount of “horizontal” information across both male and female lines beginning with David and his first and second wives—and with Ferrier Labelle and Octavie Filion, parents of Albert’s wife Blanche—but goes no further back than their mid-19th century births.

It was a harsh world where the lives of individual family members depended on the reasonably good graces and generosity of brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces.

At the same time, even in the  earliest years of the French colony, before there were enough relatives to go around, young mothers so often died young that a guardian and tutor for underage children was legally contracted for to ensure that a working parent could continue to work to support the family. We could use more of that sense of social responsibility today!

Given all of the moving our father did over the years, it is impressive that he has so many photos of his family, both immediate and extended, and of his friends.

Unfortunately, names, places and dates are scarce and so the best we can do now is to try to triangulate to date(s) on the basis of ages.

There are only a couple of photos of our father’s mother, Blanche, by herself. She is most often pictured with other family members, or hard at work with animals and children. In the slideshow at the  end of this chapter I have made an effort to include any and all photos where she is in the frame, regardless of the fact that sometimes we do not know all of the people involved.

We don’t know the years for these photos but they show Blanche in the same dress. After all their years of caring for children in the families, one hopes that they both got some time to rest in their later years—the porch behind them looks like a nice one for that.

There is also an interesting wrinkle about her name. It is sometimes given as Marie-Blanche Julia, but Lucienne asserts that her “right name” was Zélia. There are no direct derivations for the name although one can find mention of Greek and even Hebrew roots—meaning “zealous”—and possibly also some association with the saints Cecilia and Solenne.

Zélia is a very uncommon name generally but it did enjoy some popularity in the middle-to-late 19th century, partially due to the renowned French opera singer Zelia Trebelli-Bettini (1838-1892). We don’t know whether our Labelle grandparents made this connection, or another.

Appended to this chapter are Lucienne’s genealogical notes [pdf] in her own hand. We believe she prepared these in response to a request from our mother, who was trying to gather together information for us, her children.

As wonderful as our Papin/Pepin published genealogy is, it does not include all the many branches related by marriage. Lucienne’s effort gives us an exceptional view into the very large number of cousins in the families of her generation.

We know that our father very much enjoyed visiting family in Canada but it must also have been liberating to move to a place that had none. On the other hand, it meant that we grew up without knowing any of the Pepin family except by letters and photos.