Week 18 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Social. There are few things more social than a close-knit neighborhood filled with people who share a common heritage, which is exactly the type of Franco-American neighborhood in Westbrook, Maine where my mom grew up. The two cross-streets on a hill were (and in some cases, still are) home to Laviolettes, Lavignes, Roys, Gouzies, Bellefeuilles, and Richards. They were all French-Catholics and attended St. Hyacinth’s Church. Many of their children attended the same Catholic school. Families were friends with one another literally for generations. My mother’s best friend growing up was a Gouzie -- a distant cousin through the Duchesnes -- and their grandmothers were close friends. There were many such relationships in that neighborhood.
The first of our family members on the hill were Joseph and Mary Anne (Duchesne) Lavigne. Mary Anne was my great-great grandmother Georgianne’s sister. After the death of her husband, Adam, in the early 1900s, Georgianne (Duchesne) Laviolette joined her sister on the hill. She moved into a large, two-story home with her mother, Sophie (Bellay) Duchesne, and her sons. I don’t know if the house was initially an apartment building -- it may have been converted after a fire broke out in the late 1920s -- but it now has 3 floors with an apartment on each. I imagine Georgianne and Mary Anne spent a great deal of time together, and Joseph Lavigne probably helped out his sister-in-law and mother-in-law, as well as filled in as a father-figure for my great-grandfather, William, and his brothers. William grew up surrounded by his eleven Lavigne cousins.
When William Laviolette married my great-grandmother, Bernadette Barr, they initially lived in Georgianne’s house (they likely had one of the apartments to themselves). My grandfather, Phil, was born there in 1924, and when he was about a year old, his parents purchased the house next door. It must have been fun growing up next to his grandmother, on a street filled with extended family and friends. There are houses on each corner of the intersection of the neighborhood. One house is the family home where the Laviolettes first lived. Gouzies and Lavignes lived on the other three corners. They were all first cousins of my great-grandfather, William Laviolette. Adjutor and Laura (Duchesne) Gouzie lived in one home. The remaining corners were inhabited by Laura’s brothers – Willie Lavigne and Phil Lavigne. Some of the Lavigne and Gouzie children (my grandfather’s 2nd cousins) remained on the street as well, as did my grandfather. He built next door to his grandmother’s house, converting an old barn into a home. My grandfather’s sister, Diane, lived in the house behind his, moved out of state, and returned to the same neighborhood when she moved back. My great-grandfather, William, moved into his mother’s house sometime after her death and lived there until his own death in 1977. My aunt and uncle eventually purchased the home from William’s 2nd wife.
My grandfather remembers annual neighborhood clambakes growing up. When he was a young man, freshly returned from the war, the neighbors would have movie nights in his yard, using his grandmother’s big, white house as a screen. He chuckled when he admitted that some of the movies were dirty.
My mom remembers her neighborhood as idyllic – a true Leave it to Beaver, 1950s experience, minus the mothers wearing pearls and heels when they did their housework. Everyone got along. There were no neighborhood feuds. There were even two war brides on the street – a woman from Japan who married a Tanguay, and a German woman who married a Harris. You would think in a town that was predominantly French, Scottish, and English that there would be prejudice against these women and their families so soon after WWII, but my mom doesn’t remember any (though she did admit that they teased the Harris boy mercilessly when his mother forced him wear lederhosen on special occasions). All the kids played together, while all of the parents socialized. The neighborhood was truly one big family – somewhat literally as many of the children were 2nd or 3rd cousins. No one called the adults Mr. or Mrs. -- they were all addressed as “Aunt” or “Uncle.” The children roamed the neighborhood in packs and were out from sunup until sunset in the summer. One of the neighbors, Ovide Bellefeuille, flooded a field to create a skating rink for the kids each winter, complete with a light so they could skate in the evening. In the summer, that field was used for baseball games, kick-the-can, and red rover. They played hide-and-seek and picked wild blackberries in the woods. On Halloween, the neighborhood kids were out for hours, traipsing all over Westbrook without their parents, returning with pillowcases stuffed with candy, apples, and homemade treats. My mom said she could be halfway across the city trick-or-treating, and when asked her name, people would say, “Oh! You’re Willie’s granddaughter!” Everyone knew everyone else through church or working in the factories.
Christmas Eve was also a community event in the neighborhood. The adults attended Midnight Mass and then visited one another after. My mom’s family opened presents right after church, and many of the neighbors came over to watch them. Food and drinks were plentiful, including some traditional French-Canadian dishes, like meat pie. All the kids anxiously awaited a visit from Santa, played for over forty years by Adjutor Gouzie. He went from house to house in the neighborhood after church, taking advantage of all the "Christmas cheer" offered. In the words of my grandfather, "By the time he reached the last house, Santa was pretty well lit!"
It truly was one of those “it takes a village” communities. If you did something wrong, one of your “aunts” or “uncles” called you out on it, and you’d better listen because they had just as much authority as your own parents. Many houses had an unspoken open-door policy. My Nana Connie, being the social butterfly that she was, always had friends over to chat or play cards. They never locked their door, and it wasn’t entirely unusual to come downstairs in the morning to find a drunk neighborhood teen sleeping it off on their couch. They knew my grandmother wouldn’t rat them out, even if their own parents would kill them. Right up until my grandmother moved into an assisted living community, it was completely normal for someone to walk through her door without knocking to pay them a visit.
What does the neighborhood look like today? My aunt and uncle still live in the original Laviolette home Sophie (Bellay) Duchesne and Georgianne (Duchesne) Laviolette moved to in the early 1900s. My cousins live in the other two apartments. One of my cousins is in a relationship with the girl-next-door, literally. She grew up in the house that my great-grandparents, William and Bernadette, owned. Together, they have a daughter who is now the 7th generation of our family to live in that house (1.Sophie, 2. Georgianne, 3. William, 4. Philip, 5. my aunt, 6. my cousin 7. his daughter). It’s unbelievable when you think about it —that seven generations of one family could live in the same house. My mom’s cousin lives across the street in the house once owned by Adjutor and Laura (Lavigne) Gouzie. My cousins grew up as friends, neighbors, and classmates with their second cousins. The family and community ties have waned over time, and the Laviolettes, Lavignes, and Gouzies no longer dominate the neighborhood as they once did. Many in my mother’s generation stopped attending church and identifying as Catholic either due to negative parochial school experiences or marrying outside their Franco-American heritage. Less and less people in subsequent generations worked in factories either because many of the Westbrook factories closed or their parents sent them to college. Given all of the changes, it’s remarkable that any families, let alone several currently living in that neighborhood, are able to trace their roots back more than 120 years to those same two streets up on a hill in Westbrook.
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