One never knows what Google will provide.

Being here in Maine without the home comforts of a scanner or a camera, I am at the mercy of the internet for images this week. So, as would be expected, I half-heartedly typed in the name of my Great Aunt 'Emma Tourangeau' this morning knowing that I would likely find nothing in the picture department. Although Aunt Emma was a bit of a celebrity in southern Maine when a resurgence of interest in French Canadian heritage began happening in the 1970's, I doubted whether the beautiful portrait of her from an old interview she did for Yankee Magazine would have been transferred onto the journal's website.

I was right, there was no picture.

But what I did find on Google was astonishing - excerpts from Aunt Emma's Island Cookbook Featuring Old French Canadian Recipes comes up first! Since she was born in 1884 (and died at the ripe old age of 101 in 1985) she would have no idea of the jealousy that her Google-positioning might inspire amongst the net-climbers vying for the top line. In fact, she would likely laugh and launch one her pithy phrases that I find dotted throughout her journals, written in all CAPS horizontally, perpendicular to her small, neat writing on the facing page: "AT THE VERY BEST A PERSON COMPLETELY WRAPPED UP IN HIMSELF MAKES A SMALL PACKAGE."

You said it, Aunt Emma...

She would know. She took care of (and buried) all eight of her siblings and both her parents by the time 1985 had rolled around. In Aunt Emma's journal that I have with me she carefully inscribes each of her family's birth and death dates. When I walk to actual site of St. Hyacinth's cemetery in Westbrook where four generations are buried, I walk amongst the graves of the extended family. For me, a glimpse into a tiny corner of Quebec migration begun over 150 years ago is provided by Aunt Emma's lists and by the beautifully foreign names I encounter: Amable, Ancienne, Ludger, Regina, Dominique, Virginia, Arthur, Delia, Blanche, Theodore, Alaric, Hormidas, Ovide.... they go on.


So why Westbrook? There have been theses written on the French Canadian presence in this small town outside the city of Portland, but let me just say the name S.D. Warren. Good guess - it's a paper mill. The Tourangeau story is repeated in some form many times over in numerous Maine mill towns but the Tourangeau story is perhaps unusual because of the extraordinary number of family members who made S.D Warren their second home after Emma's father, Joseph Ludger (originally from Cap-Sante, Quebec), had risen to the position of Foreman there since his arrival in 1879. In 'Warren's Standard', a company newsletter, the boast was that 'the Tourangeaus have piled up a total of 234 years for the S.D. Warren company.' However, in the lengthy family history meticulously compiled by my relative, Paul Tourangeau, Joseph Ludger's early days were not so easy: he was 'the first French Canadian invited to work as a tender on a paper machine (Third Hand No. 7) and worked long and hard just to keep the family name 'Tourangeau' and not 'Tronso' [as his uncle had chosen].'

Ninth on the Google listing, below the link to Aunt Emma's beignes and 12-hour buckwheat cakes, is a pdf of Prof. Michael Hillard's article "Labor at 'Mother Warren': Paternalism, Welfarism, and Dissent at S.D. Warren 1854-1967" in which he quotes Aunt Emma describing how, after her father suffered what was ultimately a fatal accident (he was pulled into one of the machines and lost his right ear, if that gives you any idea...) John E. Warren personally came to her father with a paper for him to sign declaring that he would never sue the mill. According to Emma, instead of being hurt by Warren's seeming callousness, her father cried and said, "Mr. Warren, you did enough for me and my family. Why do you ask me - why do you fear I'm going to sue you - I'd never sue the company." S.D Warren paid the medical bills but offered no other compensation at that time, except to promise that any time there was a Tourangeau who needed work, they would have a job waiting for them at S.D. Warren.

And there was.