Robert William Dehais
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: Abt 1887
Christening:
Death: in Glens Falls, New York
Burial:
Cause of Death:
AFN #:
Spouses and Children
1. *Christella (Abt 1889 - )
Marriage:
Status:
Children:
1. Robert Joseph Dehais (1920-1989)
2. Shirley Dehais (Abt 1918- )
Notes
General:
According to my aunt's essay in a book written by her senior citizen class, the Dehais family varied the spelling of their name greatly. Her husband had an uncle, employed at the paper mill in Glens Falls at the time when he married, named Eli Daha, pronounced Dayha. There may ahve been a cousin in Glens Falls named Arthur Deha; this was unclear. If he had an uncle named Eli then there must have been more than two children born in this family. I also believe that my cousins had first cousins on their father's side living near Glens Falls somewhere east of Lake George.
Joe in one of his most manic moods told me that his father's father was a train engineer of some sort on the railway that ran north through the Adirondacks from the Glens Falls area, was brilliant, lost his job during the Depression for being a Mason, went to northern Canada looking for gold, found gold, came home with a small amount of it to care for his family, and therafter was a blacksmith in Queensbury, who liked to draw calculus equations in the dirt floor of his shop because if he was putting together a boat, "I have to know where to put the stove, don't I?" My mother's father's grandfather was supposedly run out of Ireland for being a mason; he got into serious trouble for reasons that had nothing to do with being a Mason and were entirely his fault, and never left IReland. A cousin of my grandfather's who supposedly defrauded him and disappeared actually was a very well known investment consultant for a major Montreal paper and died there. Joe spilled the long concealed family secret that night about the family history of manic depression, which is the most important thing anyone has ever told me, but I don't know how much else that he said that night is true. If the gold strike story is true than his father's family also carries manic depression - but it may not be true.
According to my aunt, her husband did some casual research in Europe, adn discovered that the name traces to France and Belgium and exists in a number of forms, and they spell it the way it is currently spelled in this section of the family in Belgium. Nevertheless she also said that Uncle Bob's immediate forebears came from Three Rivers, Quebec, to the Adirondacks, and then to Fort Edward.
At one time the family may have owned a farm in Queensbury.
Read, the family is almost certainly French Canadian. The entire Dehais family are liars, including my aunt, who learned it from her father, and then married someone worse. As a Clinton County, New York County Historian explained it to me, French Canadians were the "Niggers" of upstate New York, and they often did everything conceivable to disguise their ethnicity. My aunt, her husband, and her children can't tell the truth about anything to save themselves. This would be where my uncle's family learned this pattern of behavior. Trois Rivieres, which my aunt learned to call Three Rivers because her father managed paper mills there as a young man, is a very old French Canadian town. There were several French Canadian families named De Hayes and De Haies. The pattern of people in my uncle's and his father's generations still changing their names in ways logically consistent only with hiding from creditors or the police, is extreme even for French Canadians in upstate New York, but that is how my brother in law's ancestral French Canadian families acted in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and maybe this is just part of the family pattern of inability to ever be truthful about anything.
Only members of two ethnic groups ever lived in Quebec - the French, and the English, and they mixed extremely rarely.
There weren't even many Jews in Quebec. It is extremely unlikely that a family with a common French name from rural Trois Rivieres stems from Belgium.
Usually French Canadian ancestry is extremely easy to trace. Uncle Bob could easily have traced it - in Canada, not in Europe - if he had wanted to, and of course he only searched in Europe because he didn't want to know, because that would have involved caring, and telling truth, probably without parental permission.
It's often hardest to trace in upstate New York, but even there records exist and it can be traced, and record keepers are often helpful. French Canadians were Roman Catholic without exception, and the Catholic Church kept excellent records which have for the most part been published, even compiled in databases that are coming online through 1800, and people on Rootsweb's French Canadian lists are extremely helpful about doing lookups. One day one of Billy's descendants will learn how to give a hoot, and will want to research it - especially as Billy has married a French Canadian woman and the family now live in Maine where it has never been any shame to be French Canadian, and the main ethnic identity of the children if they only knew it is - French Canadian. Even my brother in law is half French Canadian - and probably only one quarter English and Scotch Irish. They should know that the trail picks up between the northern Adirondacks and Trois Rivieres. They will have no trouble tracing all lines of ancestry to the villages their emigrant ancestors left in France in the 17th century.
I found them in the 1930 census, but could not find them in the 1900 census, in 1910, nor in 1920, probably because their name was the original ameba. I did find a family near Buffalo, in Lewiston, Niagara County, in the 1930 census that may have been related to them because the names Arthur and Robert both figured prominently in teh family.