Some people are lucky in the way that their families were so involved with their town that it seems every newspaper had a picture of at least one aunt, uncle, or sibling.
The Simard family, on my paternal side, is nothing of the sort. In documents I seen thus far, shared online by the town historical society and other people who grew up in the area, I had never seen a picture of family members with the Simard surname.
Until now!
I can’t begin to describe how ecstatic I was to see this page of the local mill’s newspaper from way back when share photos of my great-grandparents and their brood of children. I never – to my knowledge – met my great-grandfather, but did meet Meme a handful of times. I remember her as a petite, lovely old lady who only knew French. She had 12 kids, including two twins and a set of “Catholic twins.” This page from Paper Talks is the first time I’ve ever seen her as a young mother, and also the only time I’ve ever seen a picture of all twelve kids together.
With so many dreams and schemes boiling away in my mind, I can only hope to find the fortitude to take the reigns of this New Year “With presence of mind, and courage amounting heroism” of my 3rd great-grandmother, who was “plucky” as all get-out.
Dorcus White is one of my maternal 3rd great-grandmothers. She was born in 1855 in Weld, Maine, the youngest daughter of Captain Ira White (1817 – 1880) of Weld and Catherine Watson (1824-1860) of Bridgton, Maine. In 1873, Dorcus married Greenfield Preston Corburn of Carthage, Maine, who was ten years her senior.
Searching for anything about Dorcus’ family has been an interesting endeavor. The family resided in Weld, a very small town in Franklin County. Few digitized records from the town have been transcribed, meaning any information that is sought after needs to be done in person or digging through the digitized tome of town records. (Transcribing these records is a task I have begun as, well, I’m digging through them often enough so I might as well do it while I research!)
In a bid to try to find information out about the family, I started searching in the online newspaper archives. I wasn’t sure if I would find much, but thankfully the name “Dorcus” wasn’t a popular one in Maine around that time, and I was able to find one of the most fantastic pieces of family history!
The article from the Oxford Democrat is short – not really an article at all, but more of a mentioning in a “goings on” column, as was common during the time period. Found in the edition printed on the 4th of February, 1870, was the following:
4 February 1870 – Oxford Democrat
“A plucky girl in Weld names Dorcas White, was met in the road by a wild cat, which was being pursued by her brother, who had been hunting it with a gun. With presence of mind, and courage amounting to heroism she took her shawl from her shoulders, threw it over the vicious beast and held him till her brother came and dispatched him.”
At 15 years old – 15! – she wrapped a wild cat in her shawl and held it until her brother shot it.
How did this gem get forgotten? How did no one think that Grandma Dorcus deserved to have such a memorable moment be handed down through the years?
While I can only imagine how traumatizing the entire incident might have been, what better story to be thrown about regarding the tenacity of woman in the family?!
This has been, by far, the most fascinating piece that I have yet found in my research.
I grew up in the White Mountains of Western Maine, in a mill town where I knew nothing of the rich ancestry, heritage, nor history of my family and hometown. It’s hard to mourn what you never knew, and so I went to college knowing practically nothing of the place and people of where I was raised.
After college, my husband and I bought a small place in Central Maine. The date of the deed claimed that the house was built in 1920, but the saw marks on the wood in the basement led me to believe that the building was older. I put the idea of researching the house in the back of my mind – and life got busy. Kids, chickens, gardens, fox attacks, and all sorts of adventures kept me from finding the time to dig back into the history of our house.
It wasn’t until we went to expand one of the gardens that I thought about it again – the number of bricks that the tiller was kicking up had me scratching me head. I began tracing back the deed to the house. As the list of names and dates grew longer, I started thinking about the genealogy of place, the people who have called a building home and the history it has seen, and also began researching the names of the people who had lived here before us. It didn’t take long to piece together rough sketches of the stories of these people, but perhaps more importantly, it didn’t take long to realize that my intuition was right: the date on our deed was wrong. To make a long story short, our house was built for a spinster when her father died and sits in the middle of an old brickyard.
No wonder we harvest more bricks than potatoes.
The build date of the house, found through hours of deed, census, and tax map research, is around 1886. That’s a fair shade earlier than the 1920 written on our deed.
In retelling my adventures in hunting down my home’s history to others, a thought occurred to me: I knew more about my house’s genealogy than I did my own.
It was time to get to work tracing my own roots. I knew my paternal family was French. I knew my maternal grandfather’s family was from Nova Scotia. I knew my maternal grandmother – a Wing before marriage – was a descendant of a family that had their own nation-wide family reunions. What I didn’t know was….well….a lot. Who were the Vaughns in Nova Scotia? Where did my father’s side come from? Why did any of them end up where they did?
These were the normal questions that anyone searching for their family comes across. The answers have led to me dig deep into Acadia’s deportation, Loyalist land allotments, the history of the Rumford paper mill, Francophone harassment in Maine, heartbreaking stories of death, and inspiring tales of beating the odds. Each answer brought more questions.
Since then, I’ve worked to slowly piece through what stories are known to find the stories still buried. It’s been an arduous journey as not many in my family are willing to talk about the past. Those who might have been a bit more at ease to do such have passed to the other side of the veil. This being the case, I’ve set to finding out as much about my genealogy as I can, and in some way feel as though I’m rebuilding the foundations of my family brick by brick, regardless to how they were originally kicked aside.
