Revisiting a Six Year Old Story

 

It was almost exactly six years ago when I began sharing the story of a photograph I rescued from an antique shop up in Gold Country. The picture itself was sweet, containing the cherubic faces of two young boys, the younger barely one year of age. The puzzling part was that the portrait was labeled in French, and likely dated from the earliest years of the 1900s, an odd find from a store in a small town in the northern California foothills.

At that time, I had begun what has become a habit of rescuing old abandoned photographs and researching the subjects of the picture in hopes of finding current-day descendants who might be interested in receiving the orphaned picture. In the case of Emile and Lucien Hallée, the two boys in the photograph, with barely enough details to locate a possible descendant, the generous assistance of a Canadian blogger who spread the word plus the power of social media enabled a happy ending: the photograph made its way home to family.

Ever since that point, I've been totally sold on the thrill that comes from what I call "giving back" to the genealogical community, and have returned several other photographs to family over the years. But it has only been lately that I've been able to share such stories in person. This coming Monday, April 22, I'm privileged to have that opportunity to head up to the same gold rush country where it all began in 1848 to present "The Genealogical Legacy of the California Gold Rush" to the Placer County Genealogical Society. If you're curious or want to hear that story once again (as well as others), I invite you to come along, whether in person for those living in the Auburn, California area, or online for those in time zones in which an evening presentation at seven, Pacific Time, would not be prohibitively late. The Society's website has the information to guide you in accessing the online meeting, and they are very welcoming in inviting visitors to their meetings.

   

The Last Trip Home Is Happening

Some hundred-year-old photographs, when I find them discarded in antique shops, clearly provide all the information needed to send them back home to family.

Others don't.

Some of those others, though, are so precious that I can't bear to leave them languishing in the dusty bin where I found them.

So it was with the circa 1917 photograph labeled with the names of "P. Emile" and Lucien Hallée. On an Azo postcard marked "made in Canada," the handwriting, in French, was obviously the work of a proud parent living far, far from California, the place where I found the photograph.

While I could try my hand at researching the family trees of French-speaking Canadians, resources available to me—despite my international subscription to Ancestry.com and access to the international records at FamilySearch.org—limited my ability to confidently confirm the identity of the children's family. After a while, I began wondering if I would ever be able to return the photograph to family members. I needed help from someone closer to the geographical source of the picture.

That's where Montreal blogger Gail Dever came in. Willing to post an entry about my dilemma on her blog (and Facebook group by the same name), Genealogy à la carte, she also posted an entry in a Facebook group concerned with Quebec genealogy. An answer to the puzzle came back within a few hours of her blog post, describing the right family. One of the blog's subscribers sent the photo and article to a Hallée family, just on the chance that it might be the right family.

It was.

But the recipient didn't speak English, and asked a cousin to translate the message. That's what led that person to respond in delight with the explanation of how the two children in the hundred-year-old photograph were related to her: uncles.

From that point, it wasn't long before she and I were communicating via email. And now, thanks to crowdsourcing and some helpful readers, Gail Dever's willingness to help connect a French Canadian family with a picture of their ancestors has resulted in another photograph making its way back home from the foothills of northern California.

With [a Lot of] Help From my Friends

What do you do when you stumble upon a hundred-year-old photograph and feel the call to return it to long-lost family? You put your genealogical research skills to work and find a way, of course.

But what if that photograph had the information written in a language you don't speak? Ah, that introduces an entirely different problem. There are people from other countries researching their family history, too. After all, we don't have a monopoly on how to trace family trees. But when I find the names I'm seeking in a pedigree chart chock full of words from a language I don't speak, Google Translate can only go so far to help me out.

Especially if the language in question happens to be French. French, after all, is not simply a language. It is a work of art. And it would not be very appealing to the stranger I am accosting—assuring her I only want to mail her a photograph of her father as a child—if my message sounds more like baby talk.

In the case of the adorable children, P. Emile and Lucien Hallée, portrayed at three years and one year of age in an Azo postcard from Canada, my challenge was that they were likely born somewhere in Quebec. Thankfully, I have a world subscription to Ancestry, so the initial research is no problem—besides, I can access Canadian records via FamilySearch as well. But I could not find these children in any family trees at Ancestry that fit the description or the date parameters. And the trees on Ancestry for any family Hallée were written entirely in French.

While that's a roadblock for me, at least that was an encouraging clue.

The only thing I can think of, when stumped like this, is to call for help. So I did.

When I think of Quebec, Canada, and genealogy blogging, of course I think of Gail Dever, whose blog, Genealogy à la carte has been on my daily reading list since at least 2014. I've been in touch with Gail before. She is, after all, known for her active participation in several social media venues, including her Genealogy à la carte Facebook group, her informative Tweets, and her boards by the same name at Pinterest. Gail would be just the person to help me out.

I've long been convinced of the power of crowdsourcing. Blending crowdsourcing with social media supercharges the potential exponentially. When we're stumped with a problem, never underestimate the ability of others to come up with an answer. So, when those two adorable Hallée children had me stumped, I turned to Gail Dever. Could she? Would she?

Just this Monday, she did. Including the hundred year old photograph of the Hallée children—and the inscription with their names included on the reverse—Gail put out a plea for help to her readers. I'm sure Gail has readers from around the world, but because she is located in Montreal, hers was the perfect origin to issue an all points bulletin for descendants of this French-speaking family.

I don't know if there is sainthood for genealogists who go above and beyond the call of duty—although there is Rockstar Genealogist status and induction into the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa Hall of Fame—but Gail has my vote for going above and beyond. Not only did she blog about the photo, she posted it to her Facebook group and included it in her Twitter stream.

But it was the one more thing above all that which may have brought the answer. Emailing me barely two hours after her original post went live on Monday, she asked, "Mystery solved?" That morning, Gail had also posted the entire story to another pertinent Facebook group, the Quebec Genealogy group. A member there responded, 

Donat Hallé married to Marie Tardif: Paul-Émile born in Thetford Mines, Oct. 4 1913 and Donat Lucien born in St-Isidore, Aug. 29, 1915. Paul-Émile married Irène Longchamps, Lucien married Rita Bilodeau. Both are dead.

The member then went on to name the children of our two babies, Paul-Émile and Lucien, and noted that two of their children—now obviously adults, themselves—might be on Facebook. I took a look. Sure enough, it appears to be so—two of the named descendants each having a Facebook page which includes the other's name among their "friends." The only drawback: everything on those pages is written in French.

We're working on that part.

Above: Photograph from Canada of Paul-Émile and Lucien Hallée, found in an antique store in northern California; hopefully soon to head back home to family in Quebec.

 

When Spelling Becomes the Villain in the Story

If someone in Montreal spelled his surname Hallée, how would people pronounce his name, once he moved to California? Would the resultant mispronunciation still be spelled the same way? Or would mispronunciation lead the unsuspecting hearer to mangle how the name is written?

I've seen that metamorphosis occur in the case of other immigrants, arriving on American shores from a place where English was, at best, a second language. Americans have not, historically, been the most careful to listen to nuances of other languages. Nor were government officials—I'm thinking census enumerators here—the most careful at replicating proper spelling as it might have been rendered in the fatherland.

So how would a census taker write down a name like Hallée? Would it be reasonable to expect that Hallie would be the result? How about Halley? Or Hally?

In trying to find the source for the hundred year old photo postcard of the two adorable children, Emile and Lucien Hallée, it occurred to me that their adoring mama might have sent the card off to a relative in California who also might have possessed the same surname. Just in case, I looked to see whether there were any Hallée families in California.

The result? While there was indeed one Raoul Hallée, born in Canada in 1912, he lived far from the northern California hills where I first discovered the photograph.

There were, however, several other spelling variations for that same surname here in California. I'm tempted to broaden my search from the properly-spelled Hallée to the wide world of spelling permutations, out in the wild west—or at least a vicinity closer to the west coast region where that darling photograph ended up abandoned in an antique shop.

Such a task, though, will complicate matters. Yes, I can use wildcard symbols in my searches, but that widens the universe of possibilities quite a bit—maybe even a bit too much. Spelling can indeed become the enemy of the unassuming researcher who just wants to find the right answer.

Maybe spelling isn't the only adversary in this search, though. To see clearly to an answer, it takes being careful about how to choose one's assumptions.

Of course, this is an example of one of my assumptions—that the photograph was sent to a family member with the same surname. Perhaps it was sent to a former neighbor—as we saw in the case of Thirza Browne Cole's collection of memorabilia from her childhood home in Greeley, Colorado. But in this case, it was encouraging to discover that there was, indeed, such a name as Hallée, both in Quebec, and in California. And yet, it will take far more than just that encouragement to be able to send the photo of P. Emile and Lucien Hallée back home to family, no matter where they live.

Yes, We Have a Keeper

I'm not sure why I was surprised to find a postcard inscribed in French at that northern California antique shop where I rescue abandoned family photographs. After all, people from around the world flocked to Gold Country after the California gold rush made international news—and quite a few of them settled there afterwards. Still, it somehow seemed a novelty to me, so I bought the picture postcard, intending to find a way to send it home to family, one hundred years later.

Now that I'm actually trying to figure out just who that family might be, I'm getting concerned that I won't be able to make it to mission accomplished. After all that self-talk last Friday—a pep talk designed to convince me to keep going on this project—I realized the first step needed to be to take that handwritten surname out for a test drive on the genealogical websites at my disposal.

My first step was to put "Hallee" through its paces at Ancestry.com. Thankfully, it did turn out that there is such a name in Quebec, Canada, the geographic area I'm guessing was home for the family at that time. Correct that: the name was likely written as "Halleé," possibly explaining that slight dot (or dash) above the double "e" in the postcard, which had at first made me think the handwriting was signifying "Hallie" rather than "Hallee."

With that good news confirming that I am on the right track to assume the word Hallee affixed to the bottom of the postcard was the surname for the children posing for their photograph, I then proceeded to test the waters further. Next question: could there be a Lucien Hallee? How about a P. Emile Hallee?

There were, indeed, such hits to my searches. In fact, I found more than one instance of each name. The problem was: I couldn't find any one family in Quebec province that included both children's names. I could find a Hallee family with a Lucien. Or an Emile.

Worse, once I took a good look at the actual document, I discovered one census record transcribed as Hallee was likely for a Vallee family. Another disappointment was that I found a Lucien Hallee in Find A Grave memorials—born in May, 1915, the poor baby was gone in just one brief year.

I did find a Paul Emile Hallee in the Find A Grave memorials, but his date of birth was slightly beyond what we had determined would be a latest possible date of birth—this one was born in 1920.

I even found a family tree on Ancestry.com which included both a Paul Emile and a Lucien Hallee—but Lucien was uncle to Paul Emile. That would never do, of course, because the postcard had signified that Lucien was the younger of the two children, certainly not the case here.

Of course, I can take my search to FamilySearch.org, as well as to FindMyPast and MyHeritage, since I hold a subscription to each of these sites. And I have other thoughts about getting creative in this unusual search.

In the meantime, though, something else came up over the weekend, which requires us to shift our attention to some unfinished business from previous photograph rescue missions for tomorrow's post.