Scott Crevier's Family History Scott Crevier's Family History
I need to start by explaining the title of this page. It might have been more accurate to add a couple of more names to that title. Oliver Champeau and Mary (Gokey) Champeau are my 2nd great grandparents. But this story also involves Sophia Douville, Oliver's 2nd wife and my step 2nd great grandmother. Unfortunately, that's as simple as this information will be. It gets more complicated than that. Much more complicated.
Everyone has grandparents and 2nd great grandparents and the like. Quite unremarkable actually. But this generation of my family, 4 generations before me, had some pretty interesting relationships.
About 25 years ago, my aunt on my Dad's side gave me some tidbits of info about how her ancestors are related to my Mom's ancestors. Those tidbits remained just that, tidbits, for over two decades. Now, with a bit more time on my hands and access to more resources, I decided to dig deeper and figure this out.
This story includes a few people in my family who are still alive and doing well. So, for clarity, I'll use my Aunt Jan's first name only (no dates, locations, etc) and I'll also use my Mother's first name, Meredith, who is in the same generation as Jan (though Mom died in 2012). Everyone else in the story is from generations before my mother. If you're in my family, then obviously you know exactly who I'm talking about.
It's going to be clear from the outset that you'll need a diagram to understand this, but I can't guarantee that the diagram will make it any clearer. The relationships in my 2nd great grandparents' generation are very complicated. So, I'll just get into it.
Oliver's 2nd wife is Sophia, whose 2nd husband Alexander had a stepsister Angeline who married Oliver's brother Joseph.
Yeah, I know. You can re-read that as many times as you like (maybe even a little slower); it won't help. 😃 But that's not all.
Oliver and Joseph (mentioned above) had another sibling, Eliza. Alexander (mentioned above) had a brother named Frank, who was Eliza's husband.
Still feel like you need a diagram? Fine, let's give that a shot. This diagram is wide, so you may need to click on it and zoom in a bit. Or if you're on a traditional computer, try making your browser window wider.
As you look at the diagram, note that I used red and green lines so that you can tell who were siblings. In addition to those colors, I also entered the letter "A" in the boxes of siblings and the letter "B" in the boxes of another set of siblings. Looking closely, you can see that a double line connects a married couple. This is important because there are several people with 2nd marriages.
Consider these two facts:
Simple enough, eh? Well, Jan and Meredith married brothers. Since Meredith and her husband were my parents, that makes Jan and her husband my Aunt and Uncle.
This one's not illustrated in a family tree, but strangely enough, Meredith's Aunt Leona (Oliver and Mary's granddaugher) lived next door to Jan's parents (Alexander and Sophia's granddaughter) on Gray Street in Green Bay for many years.
I suspect that these families were tight. They were probably good friends who lived near each other and helped each other out. If something happened on one farm, they all pitched in to help them recover. They probably knew each other well and trusted each other. So when there was a death or a divorce, they simply turned to each other to fill that void.
Now, I don't know if all the second marriages mentioned were due to death or divorce. It was pretty common, back in the day, that if a woman died and her sister was unmarried, she would marry the widower. So the specifics of this family don't really suprise me, except for the fact that there were so many entanglements in that one generation.
It sure was fun to trace and diagram.
