There's a cold November rain falling outside of my Massachusetts home, some 60 miles from where these two lint-covered young boys (front row) stood 98 years ago, one looking defiant, the other seemingly unsure of how to look at the camera. Sometimes when I am writing one of these stories on my computer, a snack and a cup of tea at my side, it just boggles my mind to think what our ancestors endured just to survive. One ice cold morning last winter, I took some pictures of this mill, now a street hockey equipment manufacturer, and wondered what it would have been like to work there when Alcide and his family produced denim, mostly for prison uniforms. Then I broke for lunch at my favorite café. Ah, the luxuries of modern America.

This cute boy with the long arms intrigued me. It was obvious that Hine misspelled his name. Nevertheless, I searched the town records for "de Gauthier," and found only Gauthier - lots of them. But his first name was a mystery. Al? Alfred? What was it? So I looked in the census.

I found an Alsid Gauthier in the 1910 census, 12 years old, living at 43 Pine St. in Winchendon, with his widowed father, August, his uncle and aunt, Joseph and Delghira Gauthier, and a bunch of siblings and cousins. I was certain Alsid was the boy. Here's why. Let's assume that the boy told Hine his name was Alcide, a common French-Canadian name, but Hine misspelled it Alside. Later, when the National Child Labor Committee transcribed his notes, they somehow left out the letter "I" in his name. Thus, Als de Gauthier appears in the caption.

It turned out that I was right. In the 1920 census, August Gauthier has remarried, to Emaline, and is living in Barre, Massachusetts with his 11 children, including 22-year-old Alcide, who works as a card hand in a cotton mill. From that point on, Alcide seemed to disappear. I didn't find him in the 1930 census, nor did his name show up in any official death records. So I tried tracking down his siblings.

One by one, I found obituaries for many of his brothers, but none mentioned Alcide as a survivor. I talked to several of the children of those brothers, but they didn't even remember Alcide, who would have been their uncle. I figured that he must have died young. Eventually, I found his father's 1950 death record in the Winchendon town hall, and then his obituary in the Winchendon Courier archives at Beals Memorial Library. It listed Alcide as a survivor, then living in the Worcester County town of Clinton. So I tried some creative research. On the assumption that he got married, I searched the Social Security Death Index for all women named Gauthier who died in Worcester County, and I found a Margaret Gauthier, born in 1904, who died in Clinton in 1986.

So then I returned to the 1930 census and looked up Margaret. There she was in living in Clinton with her husband, Aleade J. Gauthier, who was working at the Lancaster Mills. That was Alcide, of course, his name woefully misspelled by the census taker. I quickly obtained Margaret's obituary from the Worcester Public Library. It said in part: "Her husband, Joseph Gauthier, died in 1964." It also mentioned that she was survived by two daughters, both of whom I found immediately, their addresses and phone numbers readily available in the Internet directories. I talked to both daughters, one living near Clinton, the other in Michigan. They told me that their father was called Joseph. They were astonished to see the photos.