Submitted by Gloria Pelletier Onstad
Weyburn Branch, SGS member
When I began this adventure of researching family history in 1976, I wasn’t able to consult with my dad about his family. At first, the only information I gained was what my mother knew. My parents were Joseph Robert ‘Bob’ Pelletier (1903-1941) born in Edmonton, NWT (shown in the photo above, in a photo from 1941) and Mabel Rosella East (1908-1976) born in Arthur, Ont. They were married in December 1928 in Vermilion, Alta.
You see, I last saw my dad when I was six years old, when we all lived in Edmonton. In 1939 he joined the army when war was declared, and was sent to England as a driver in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. In July 1941, he died in England as a result of being run into by a truck during a blackout.
I found his military record and have visited his grave in a military cemetery in Woking, England. If you have a Canadian soldier in your family, the Canadian Virtual War Memorial online is a great resource.
My father’s parents were Gilles George Pelletier (1868-1945) born in Rimouski, Quebec, and Evelina Duplessis (1877-1954) born in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA. I wrote to some older relatives and asked questions about the family’s history. I learned that along with hundreds of French-Canadian families, Evelina’s parents, Raphael and Elise Duplessis, had moved from Quebec to the New England states to get jobs in the cotton mills, which were numerous at the time.
However, the hardships they experienced there must have persuaded them to find a better life elsewhere, so they moved to the Canadian prairies in 1882 and settled in the rapidly expanding community of Edmonton, Northwest Territories.
George Pelletier met Evelina Duplessis when he resided in the Edmonton boarding house operated by her mother, Elise. George and Evelina were married in Edmonton in 1898.The 1901 Canada Census for Edmonton West shows George Pelletier is a carpenter, and wife Evelina is mistakenly listed as born in ‘NWT’. (Of course, Alberta wasn’t a province until 1905.) There are often mistakes in records or in their transcription, so information always has to be compared with other records.
In the 1911 Canada census, Evelina’s birthplace is correctly stated as USA, and the Pelletier family had grown to five children, including seven-year-old Robert, my father.
By 1923, both the Pelletier and Duplessis great-grandparents and grandparents, as well as all the Pelletier grandchildren (with the exception of my dad and his older sister) moved to Portland, Oregon. The attraction, apparently, was the milder weather and many job opportunities.
My Pelletier great-grandparents were Augustin Pelletier and Celanire Hudon, both born in Quebec. After I acquired a computer and had access to the Internet, I happened to type ‘Pelletier’ into a search engine, and to my happy surprise, up came a website devoted to the descendants of Pelletier families who had left France to settle in what was then known as New France, today’sprovince of Quebec. The site is called ‘L’association des Familles Pelletier’.
As I scrolled down the names of descendants of one family line, I was surprised to see the names ‘Augustin Pelletier’ and his spouse ‘Celanire Hudon dit Beaulieu’. I immediately contacted the professional genealogists who had devised this website and told them what I knew of the descendants of Augustin and Celanire right down to my brother Jack and me. The genealogists were extremely happy with this new information.
As a result of this connection, I was able to trace back seven generations to a jolly (apparently!) fellow named Guillaume Pelletier who was born about 1598 in Perche, France, and his spouse Michelle Mabille. They and their 14-year-old son Jean emigrated to Quebec village, New France in 1641, Guillaume working as a carpenter before acquiring farm land.
The biographies of both Guillaume and Jean are written in fascinating detail on the website and, luckily for me, there is an English translation.
In 1991, the 350th anniversary of Guillaume’s arrival in Canada, some of the many descendants unveiled a memorial in Beauport, Quebec, to commemorate the event.
The Weyburn Branch - Saskatchewan Genealogical Society normally meets on the second Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m. at the Weyburn Public Library; new members are always welcome. (All meetings are suspended for the time being.)
Sources:
Information from M. Pelletier Walker, E. Pelletier, A. Duplessis
1901 Canada Census of Edmonton West
1911 Canada Census of Edmonton West
Websites:L’association des Familles Pelletier, Sillery, Quebec
Canadian Virtual War Memorial
Military Heritage, Library and Archives Canada
