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Family Across the Border

By Maureen A. Taylor

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Like so many French-Canadians and Acadians, some of Marie-Josee Binette’s family left Quebec in the 1890s to seek jobs in the United States. She owns a lovely photo album that documents this move in pictures, but she has no idea who the people are.

Marie-Josee knows that her great-grandmother Elina (Aline) Beaudoin spent several years in Lowell, Mass. with her husband Onesime Deblois. Both worked in area factories. After several years, some relatives stayed in the United States while others returned to Quebec. It’s a familiar story to those of us with French-Canadian ancestry.

From the imprint on this photo, it also appears that someone either lived in or visited the nearby city of Lawrence, Mass. Its nickname is the Immigrant City.

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In the album is this beautiful image of a young couple. The style of her sleeves and dress date the photo to the last years of the 1890s. The photographer, Amos Morrill Bean, appears in Chris Steele and Ron Polito’s A Directory of Massachusetts Photographers 1839-1900 (Picton Press, 1993). He was in business from 1868-1900.

It’s a great picture and I’ve seen poses like this before. While the couple’s hands aren’t touching, it suggestive of a wedding picture. Both the man and the woman wear very nice clothing. On their hands are brand new rings. The light glints off them. The woman wears her ring on the traditional left hand while her “husband” wears his on the right. It’s interesting.

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My favorite part of this picture is the props. Both the man and the woman hold photographs on the table between them. Could this symbolize family that couldn’t be there for the wedding? It’s possible. There are any number of reasons to include photographs as props.

Marie-Josee might find she still has cousins living in this country. Two organizations worth contacting are the American Canadian Genealogical Society and the American-French Genealogical Society. Both organizations have extensive resources on families that moved here, as well as those in Quebec.

Got a mystery photo? Demystify it with help from Maureen A. Taylor’s book Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs.

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