Finding a topic for Week 44 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge was a struggle. The topic is Shadows, so we were supposed to write about an ancestor whose story was difficult to tease out of the shadows. After spending this entire week ruminating over which ancestor to choose, I finally settled on Theophile Laviolette, mostly because I’ve been following Laviolette rabbit trails all week. None of those rabbit trails led to Theophile though. I’m afraid I’m at a dead-end with him, even though his story is legendary in our family.
I believe I’ve mentioned before that many of the children of my third great-grandparents, Lazare Laviolette and Emilie Simard, worked for the railroad at one point or another and settled wherever that work took them. A few of their children either temporarily or permanently settled in Westbrook, Maine, including my two great-great grandfathers, Adam Laviolette and Lazare “Ben” Laviolette Jr. Their sister, Marie Anne “Annabelle” Laviolette also lived in Portland and Gorham for a time. Supposedly another sibling, Theophile, lived and tragically died in Westbrook. I can prove through directories, census records, birth records of their children, and newspaper articles that Adam, Ben, and Annabelle lived in the area, but I can’t prove Theophile was ever here. While I can’t verify that his story is anything more than family lore, I’m equally unable to disprove it.
Theophile “Eddie” Laviolette was the next-to-the-youngest child of the 20 children in his family. His parents had 14 together, and his father had 6 children with his first wife. He was born in Carleton, Montreal, Quebec, Canada about 1866 and supposedly found work on the railroad, like many of his brothers. He followed Adam and Ben to Westbrook where the young man settled and obtained a factory position at the S.D. Warren Paper Company. There he met a grisly and untimely death. Theophile was tasked with checking on a vat of chemicals from a catwalk above. Safety precautions were abysmal in factories at the time. The narrow catwalk either had inadequate railings or no railings at all. Theophile somehow slipped from it and fell into a vat of acid below. By the time he was discovered, the acid had eaten his flesh and disintegrated his clothing. The only bits of Theophile ever recovered were a few brass buttons from his jacket.
My grandfather loved telling us that horrifying story! He even rattled a couple of brass buttons in a jar at the end, though whether they were really from Theophile or were something he pulled out for dramatic effect, I’ll never know. The story left an impression on all the young family members who heard it, and since my grandfather shared it with us, it had to be true, right?
Well....keep in mind that this is the same grandfather who told us he changed the spelling of his name from Laviolette to LaViolet because the military, thinking he was Italian, placed him with a bunch of other Italians during WWII, and he grew tired of eating spaghetti. Grampy Phil knew how to spin a tall tale so I’ve learned to take some of his stories with a grain of salt .... yet Theophile’s story always felt true. Grampy included it in his genealogy binders like it was a fact, and it was more than likely told to him by his father, William, or his grandmother, Georgiana, Theophile’s sister-in-law. Was this his father’s or his grandmother’s version of the spaghetti story, or did it really happen?
I tried to find factual evidence to support the story, but there is none. I’ve been unable to locate a death record for a Theophile or Eddie Laviolette, though that doesn’t necessarily prove that it didn’t happen. Vital records weren’t reliably reported to the state of Maine until 1892, and my grandfather estimated that Theophile died around 1885 or 1886. I don’t know if he was told this death year by whomever passed the story onto him, or he just assumed Theophile was around 20 when he died. I can find no report in the local newspapers about an accident like that at S.D. Warren or any of the other factories in the area. Far less horrific factory accidents made the paper, like broken arms or chopped off fingers, so it’s difficult to believe something as sensational as dying in a vat of acid wouldn’t have been reported. I found one mention of a similar accident way, way upstate, but the person had a different name, wasn’t the right age, and managed to survive the incident.
Because I couldn’t prove that he died in a factory accident in Maine, I tried to prove that he lived. The way he died was horrific and gruesome. I’d much rather believe this was a made-up tale told to scare my grandfather, and in reality Theophile got married, had kids, and led a long, healthy, happy life. I’ve chased down several Theophile Laviolettes who lived only to be disappointed that they weren’t mine. Documentation on my Theophile is sparse. I can find his baptismal record, and he’s listed with his family on the 1871 and 1881 Canada census. After that, the trail runs cold.
More likely than not, there is an element of truth in the story of Theophile’s tragic demise. Maybe he went by a different name. Maybe he lived elsewhere. Perhaps the newspaper didn’t report it for whatever reason, or it did and either those pages aren’t yet digitized or my search criteria isn’t working. The name didn’t come up, so I tried different searches like “factory accident,” “mill death,” and “vat of acid” to no avail. Until the information (if it’s out there) becomes available, Theophile Laviolette’s story will remain in the shadows waiting for the facts to someday bring the truth to light.
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