Welcome to my first blog post of 2024’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge! Today’s prompt is “Family Lore” and I have a gross-by-modern-standards story to share that I’ve touched on a bit in previous posts. According to family lore, my great-grandparents, Laura and William, were in love.
If you’re scratching your head, thinking, “So? My great-grandparents were in love too. Why is that gross?” then I’m going to assume unlike mine, your great-grandparents weren’t cousins. I’m not talking about “kissing cousins” either – those who are second cousins or above. Laura and William were first cousins.
My maternal grandparents, Connie and Phil, were “kissing cousins” both figuratively and literally. They were second cousins who married, which I shared in one of my first blog posts two years ago. Connie was Laura’s daughter; Phil was William’s son. To recap, they met at a funeral of a mutual relative in Montreal, which is a shockingly fun story to tell people. Cousins Laura and William were genuinely thrilled about the marriage of their children, and weren’t icked out in the slightest, even though second cousin marriages weren’t as commonplace in the late 1940s as they were in the past.
Laura and William were both first-generation Americans who grew up in Westbrook, Maine. Their fathers were part of a huge, French-Canadian family from Carleton, Bonaventure, Quebec. According to additional family lore, all the Laviolettes worked on the railroad and settled wherever the railroad took them. It brought a few of the brothers and one sister to Westbrook. Laura’s father, Ben Laviolette, took a job at the Dana Warp Mill, while his brother Adam Laviolette – William’s father – continued to work for the railroad as a foreman. The families lived in the same neighborhood for a while, and likely spent quite a bit of time together. Adam died when his children were young, and Ben may have stepped in and helped raise his nephews.
Ben and his family enjoyed a decent, middle-class life in Maine for twenty years, but for some reason he moved his family back to Canada in 1910. According to family lore, the sudden move was motivated by the burgeoning romantic relationship between his 15-year-old daughter Laura and his 16-year-old nephew, William.
My grandfather told me this story, but as he was sometimes prone to exaggeration, I took it with a big grain of salt. I completely dismissed it when I delved into our family history and discovered that Laura’s sister, Marie, married their first cousin, Arthur Pare in 1911. It didn’t make sense for Ben to uproot his family to prevent one daughter from marrying a cousin just to end up in the exact same situation a year later with another daughter.
On a recent trip to Montreal, I visited my Nana Connie’s last living brothers, Jean Guy and Claude – Laura’s two youngest sons. I asked if they knew why their grandfather Ben moved the family back to Canada. Uncle Jean Guy repeated the same story my grandfather told me, and my jaw just about hit the floor when he said he heard the story from Laura herself!
In her old age, Laura’s mind regressed back to her youth. She started speaking almost entirely in English, and when Uncle Jean Guy visited and responded to her in kind, her face lit right up. She thought he was Willie, and started speaking to him as though they were teenage sweethearts.
“So, it was true?” I asked Uncle Jean Guy. “Laura and William had a crush on each other?”
“Oh, it was more than a crush! They would sneak off and meet in secret under the bridge...on Bridge Street, I think? Was there a bridge on Bridge Street in Westbrook? Yes? They met there. If the bridge is still standing, you might even find their initials under it. The things my mother told me when she thought I was Willie…oh, I can’t tell you! She made me blush! My own mother! Can you believe that?”
According to Uncle Jean Guy, first cousins weren’t allowed to marry at the time without permission from the Pope. I’m not sure if that is accurate, given that Laura’s sister did marry a first cousin in Canada. Perhaps it wasn’t a church rule, but a law. Maybe first cousin marriages weren’t allowed in Maine at the time but were allowed in Canada. Whatever the case, Laura and William couldn’t marry. Her father knew the longer the relationship continued, the more broken hearted she would be when it ended. Ben was a soft-hearted man. He couldn’t bear to see any of his children in pain, but especially not Laura who was the youngest child and his favorite. To protect her as best as he could, he made up a lie and told the family he had to move back to Canada for work.
At the time, it probably seemed like their world was ending, but separating the teens was for the best. Even setting aside the fact that they were first cousins, they weren’t compatible. Laura was an extremely jealous woman and William was a philanderer. They would have made each other miserable! In fact, William did make his wife Bernadette miserable by cheating on her constantly. Laura lucked out and married a man who worshipped the ground she walked on.
Fun story - fascinating, not icky! :-) Thanks for sharing.
Exalapha is sure an interesting name - was it common in French-Canadian circles?