Reference Note R127

[R127] - MONTREUIL, Pauline
 
Note Creation 2007.08.18
Last Changed 2007.08.18
I N D E X
01 - Letter From David BRODEUR To Pauline MONTREUIL
01 - Letter From David BRODEUR To 492x1060,, Pauline MONTREUIL
Aug 5, 2007

Dear Pauline :

So kind of you to let me know of your father's death in April. My brother Paul (18 mos older) got the word from another sister, I believe, and I'm sure I can't name more than two of you. This split in the Webster (MA) Brodeurs goes back to 1912 at least, when my father Paul Adrian (nee Adrian Paul)(1894) told off the Fr. Can. Catholic priest in Lowell (MA) where itinerant father Hermanigilde settled for a few years in his around so.New England post-loom fixing days (Slater Mill, Webster). Casting Catholic reliquaries in plaster and selling them door-to-door, Hermanigilde involved his older daughters in collections--at least Anna and Hilda (later known as Concorde). Accordingly got his high school a year each at Sommerville (MA), Providence (R.I) Lowell and Portland (ME) where he grad. in 1917. By then, sev of the girls were lapsed Catholics. My mother Sarah (age 102) is Protestant. Father made a show of going to church with the family when we were young, but I could--as a little boy--tell that his lip synching of hymns indicated his heart was not in the Congregational Church either.

In fact father boasted of being a free thinker. He had a magnetic personality, was almost always upbeat, but his agnosticism made him a frightened man near death (1967). His brother Camille, a fine singer, did become a dedicated Protestant. I visited him in Cleveland at age 15.He had a small car mechanics business, and a daughter (my age) who is now a semi-invalid in Cleveland (Leila Jeanette).

Due in part to to the split, we never got together in any reunion type gathering. I saw Anna (as I recall) twice--17 years apart. We got regular annual visits from Rachelle, on her treks to Sanibel. In 1982 I alwo saw Rachelle in Ottawa. With mother, and Evette at her lake house with her (theb) new husband, a Czech. We missed Marcelle and Paul in telephone calls.

I must report that the Brodeurs of your grandmother Anna's generation had pretty hot tempers! The most notable exception, and the sweetest person in her own right, was Bella (b. Annabella) the calligrapher, m. to Gustav Lange, a widowed calligrapher, like herself. Bella did the illumination as well as anyone in NY, perhaps better. It was likke seeing the Book of Kells. Old Gus was a fine man and I enjoyed visitint them in Lex. Ave. I was the last of the whole family to see Hilda alive--visiting here in Tacate (Mex) not far SE of San Diego, jjust before she remove nto India--against doctor's orders--and died the following spring in Chandagrah (1968)--six mos after my father died.

If you can forgive me for not having a computer, E-mail, etc., which I find tedious and impersonal (PCs, that is) perhaps you will tell me about your siblings. I met your father's NY Aquarium days.


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