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| Mary (small child in front), 11, & Dora Roberts (2nd row, 2nd from left), 19, Winchendon, MA. |
Group of workers in Glenallen Mill. Smallest girl helps her sister Dora
Roberts in mill. Lives at 13 Woodlawn St., there are 13 in the family, five or six working. Apparently prosperous. In this
group is also Corinne Cuillette. Location: Winchendon, Massachusetts, September 1911, Lewis Hine.
"It made me very sad to see her at the mill. I knew my father went to work when he was young.
His mother got very sick, and he had to quit school in order to stay home and take care of her and his brother and sister."
-Ann Webb, daughter of Mary Roberts
"My
mother was just happy all the time. No matter how bad things were, she was still happy. Things must have been really rough
during the Depression. She did complain once, because she had to go down to the welfare, where she got oranges and apples.
All we had to eat sometimes for supper was bread with milk and brown sugar. My mother cried sometimes because there was nothing
more to give us. -Geraldine Richard, daughter of Mary Roberts
"By 1848, Winchendon Springs had grown to be almost
as large as Winchendon village. In 1870, Joseph N. White went to Canada and hired twenty-six men from Ottawa to work in the
mill at Spring Village. The following year he visited Montreal and hired another group of people to come work in the mill.
From that time on, the influx of French people into the neighborhood continued for several years. Mrs. Mary Bosworth, present
Postmaster of Winchendon Springs and former secretary to Nelson D. White, remembers his telling her that the first French
family to come to Winchendon was the Alverez Roberts family." -The Winchendon Years, Lois Greenwood
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Lewis Hine took most of his child labor photos under considerable
duress, since mill owners would not have looked kindly on his investigative work. He tried to engage his young subjects in
conversation, hoping to gather information such as names, ages and how many years they had worked at the mill. He scribbled
down some notes and typed them out later. His notes were often incomplete, and names were often misspelled. Eventually, they
were used by his employer, the National Child Labor Committee, as captions for the photographs. Occasionally, the Committee
took liberties with the wording when they published them in journals and periodicals.
That doesn't make my research any easier when I am trying to identify the children.
In this photograph, the caption mentions Dora Roberts, but Hine doesn't tell us if she's in the picture. Even worse, he points
out Dora's young sister, but doesn't tell us her first name. Thankfully, my research filled in the details.
The Robert sisters were two of 14 children born to Alvares
Peter Robert (later Roberts, which I will use from here on) and Parmelia Guertin, who were married in St. Simon, Quebec, on
February 2, 1875. According to the 1880 census, Alvares entered the US in 1873. He returned to his hometown two years later
to marry. Further census information lists his immigration year as 1869 or 1870. Their first child was born in Quebec in 1878,
after which Mrs. Roberts and baby joined her husband in Winchendon. Interestingly, one more child was born in Quebec, in 1883,
and another was born in Maine, in 1897. All the others were born in Winchendon.
Among them was Mary, born May 27, 1900, the youngest of Dora's sisters, a fact
that confirms that she was the unnamed sister in the photograph. When I contacted two of Mary's daughters, they recognized
her in the photo, and also spotted Dora. According to the 1900, 1910 and 1920 censuses, Mr. Roberts continued to work in the
Spring Village mill, first as a loom fixer, then as a stationary engineer. Dora, who was born on May 11, 1892, worked as a
spinner, and Mary worked as a winder. Their mother, Parmelia, died on March 13, 1916. Mary was only 15 then. Their father,
Alvares, died on April 24, 1933.
Dora
married twice, but had no children. Her first husband was Eugene Ryan, a box factory worker, whom she married in 1925. He
died in 1939. Her second marriage was to Dolphus Dumas, a leather worker, who already had five children. Dora died in Ayer,
Massachusetts on January 29, 1971, at the age of 78. She is buried with her first husband in Calvary Cemetery in Winchendon.
Mary married Adolph Lefebre on June 7,
1920. He was a moulder in a foundry. They had five children. Mary died in Winchendon on May 13, 1964, two weeks before her
64th birthday. She is also buried at Calvary. Her husband died four years later.
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| Calvary Cemetery, Winchendon, Massachusetts, 2009. |
Interview with Mary's daughters, and many photos
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