Timothée Adam was only a year old when he lost his father. Born to Charles Pierre Adam and Marie Marguerite Saint Michel on 02 April 1816 in Beloeil, Quebec, he was baptized as Joseph Timothée Adam and was the seventh of eight children born to the couple; his younger sister was born just two weeks after their father’s death in August of 1817. Their mother, who had married at sixteen, was now a widow at the age of thirty, and considering how many small mouths she had to feed, it is not at all surprising that she remarried the following summer.

Although little is known about Marie Marguerite’s second husband, Louis Amable Pineau, after several generations had passed an oral tradition remained that the surname Pineau was somehow linked to the Adam line. Marie Marguerite had no children with Louis, who was ten years her junior, but he was the only father that the youngest of her children would have ever known. Her children would also have known her parents, their grandparents Joseph Michel and Marie Josephe Patenaude, as they spent their later years living in the same parish as Marie Marguerite and her family. Perhaps Joseph, who was born in exile in Massachusetts in 1757 following Le Grand Dérangement, the tragic expulsion of the French-speaking Acadians of Nova Scotia by the British, shared stories of his origins and the family’s eventual return to Canada—or perhaps not.

Timothée married Marguerite Chicoine in Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu, a village just north of Beloeil on the Richelieu River, on 24 October 1837, when he was twenty-one. The couple then moved approximately thirty miles east to the village of Saint-Pie, where Timothée supported his family as a cultivateur, or farmer. The couple’s first ten children (of an eventual sixteen) were born in Saint-Pie, and the family appeared in the census there in 1851. It was noted that they resided in a one-level home made of wood, although interestingly, not all of their children lived within their household. Two of their daughters, who were eight and two, were found with their grandmother in another household in the same community, although perhaps this was only a temporary arrangement.

A decade later, at the time of the 1861 census, Timothée and Marguerite shared their household with all of their minor children, while their two eldest daughters, both married and with children of their own, were enumerated directly before them in the census. All were recorded as residents of Rang Saint-Charles, a rural road that runs southeast of Saint-Pie and south of the Noire River. This was not far from Saint-Paul-d’Abbotsford, where several of their younger children were baptized.

By June of 1865, Timothée had relocated with his family to Massachusetts. One has to wonder whether he recognized the irony in returning to the same place where his grandfather had been born in exile—but what drew him and his family to Massachusetts, a little more than a century after Le Grand Dérangement, was almost certainly the cotton mills. Contemporary news accounts referenced, sometimes scathingly, the “hordes of French Canadians” who traveled by rail from the border crossing at St. Alban’s, Vermont, to Massachusetts, where entire families crowded into tenements and worked at the mills. Indeed, the 1865 Massachusetts State Census places Timothée, Marguerite, and their ten unmarried children, who were between the ages of three and twenty-one, in Ward 8 of Springfield, Hampden County, Massachusetts, where Timothée and the five eldest children were all employed at the Indian Orchard mill.

There may have been another driving factor that caused Timothée to uproot his entire family, however, and that was the potential threat of a military draft in Canada and associated unrest that presumably might have affected his eldest sons. A Massachusetts newspaper printed the following in January 1865: “There is quite a little rebellion in Canada now, and all about a militia draft for frontier service. The French Canadians at Quebec resisted the draft made upon them last week and drove away the officers. Four companies of the volunteer militia were immediately called out and the insurrection will be a short lived one.”

By the time of the 1870 U.S. census, Timothée, by then fifty-four and with nine children still in his immediate household, continued to reside in Indian Orchard but was without an occupation. His six eldest unmarried children, who were between the ages of twelve and twenty, were all millworkers, and their earnings no doubt supported the entire family. Incredibly, the grand total of individuals in Timothée and Marguerite’s multigenerational household, which included their married children and their own large families, numbered twenty-eight.

Tragedy struck in 1878, when Timothée first lost two grandsons who drowned while fishing in the Chicopee River, and then lost his wife of forty years when Marguerite succumbed to consumption at the age of sixty-two. Timothée did not appear in the 1880 U.S. census, but city directories indicate that he resided at 83 Main in Indian Orchard. His unmarried children, ranging in age from fourteen to thirty, were enumerated together on Main Street; perhaps Timothée’s absence was an accidental omission, or perhaps he was traveling at the time that the census was recorded. It is known that he ventured to Dakota Territory a short time later, as he was documented as a parishioner at St. Peter’s Parish in what is now Jefferson, Union County, South Dakota in 1885, along with two of his adult sons and their families. The recent deaths of several family members, including two of Timothée’s adult children and multiple young grandchildren, may have spurred this move away from crowded tenement life.

Timothée is absent from the Springfield, Massachusetts city directories of 1885-1895. He makes a reappearance in 1896, boarding at 69 Main, Indian Orchard; this was the home of his daughter, Marie, and her husband, Gabriel Noel. Had Timothée spent the intervening years with his children in the Midwest?

On 19 March 1897, a newspaper in Sioux City, Woodbury County, Iowa, printed the following: “T. Adams, father of P.P. Adams of Davidson Bros., died while visiting relatives at Indian Orchard, Mass., at the age of 84 years.” Timothée would have been, in fact, eighty years old at the time, but this was not the only misprint regarding his death.

The death register for the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, which encompassed Indian Orchard, does not have a record of the death of any individual by the name of Timothée Adam at that time—but it does name one “Mathieu A. Adam,” son of Pierre Adam of Canada, who was reportedly eighty years, ten months, and seventeen days at the time of his death on 09 March 1897.

The dates are close enough that they might be considered a mathematical error—Timothée would have reached the age of eighty years, eleven months, and seven days at the time of his death. His father’s middle name had been Pierre, and it’s quite possible that that is how he was more commonly known. But “Mathieu”? One guess is that entries on the death register were recorded based on other handwritten records or notes, and that a scrawled “Timothée” was mis-transcribed as “Mathieu,” another French name with a “th” in the middle. His cause of death was attributed to “Old age: Indigestion,” and Timothée’s grave, presumably near that of his wife at the Saint Aloysius Cemetery in Indian Orchard, is unmarked.

His will, filed in Springfield in March of 1896, a year prior to his death, is succinct in regards to his wishes and suggests that he may have spent extended time in the care of his second-eldest daughter Marie:

“After the payment of my just debts and funeral charges, I bequeath and devise as follows. First: To my daughter Mary Noel wife of Gabriel Noel of said Springfield, all the estate both real and personal of which I shall die seized and possessed and to which I shall be entitled at the time of my decease. I purposely give no bequest or devise in this will to my only living children, or the issue of any deceased child, having provided for them in my lifetime and I exclude them and their issue from any claim upon my estate of every nature and description. Second: I direct that my executrix hereinafter named expend the sum of Fifteen dollars for a high mass over my remains.”

Hampden County, Massachusetts Probate Records

So little is known of who Timothée Adam was as a person. He was a French Canadian by birth and an immigrant who may have faced contempt and discrimination in the United States due to his language, faith, and culture. He was a farmer and a millworker—but as his eldest surviving son was a carpenter, one can speculate that Timothée may also have possessed these skills. Two of his younger sons played the fiddle, and another sang; was Timothée musical as well? He was a lifelong Catholic, and desired that a portion of his (presumably not large) estate be set aside in order for him to receive a high mass upon his death. He was the father of sixteen known children, fourteen of whom survived to adulthood, and the names of his eldest sons suggest strong familial bonds: Timothée, Louis (like his stepfather), Joseph (like his maternal grandfather), Pierre (like his father and paternal grandfather). Notable too is the name of his youngest son, the only one of his children born outside of Canada: Prosper, named perhaps in recognition of Timothée’s hopes for his family to flourish in a new home.

Copyright © 2024 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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