My mother’s ancestry was a mystery to me and to her. She knew her father, of course, but they never talked about her grandfather nor anyone else further back. I was able to fill in a few blanks for her by researching on Ancestry. Later, I found documents tracing our heritage all the way back to rural France in 1638.
Arthur John Rochon, my grandfather, was born at home January 1, 1890. His mother named him Arthur John, but when his father registered the birth, he gave the name Luke Roch Rochon. Arthur did not discover his legal name until age 54, during WWII, he applied for work at the Ford City B-29 Plant in Oak Lawn, IL. The government informed him of his real name.
His father, Louis Rock Rochon, abandoned the family when Arthur was 12 . The father lived down the street with another woman, and he no longer supported his wife Marie Louise Rochon and seven surviving children. He sounds like a bit of a son-of-a-gun.
To help pay the bills, Arthur quit school after eighth grade and went to work delivering coal. Child labor laws were still quite loose in 1902. In the coal yard he shoveled coal into a wagon and helped drive a team of horses and the coal wagon into the neighborhoods of Chicago. Each house had a coal chute from the sidewalk into the basement into which he’d shovel the coal. Throughout winter, coal boys worked 10-14 hour per day, in icy, cold weather doing heavy, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous work.
That was the year of the Chicago Coal Famine caused by a strike in Pennsylvania. Coal prices tripled. People were reduced to picking up coal scraps from railroad tracks and burning anything they could to keep warm. Some elderly and babies froze to death in their beds.
By age 20 Arthur was promoted to coal teamster, meaning he drove the horse-drawn wagons. In 1927 he was a chauffeur in the coal yards, when steam and gas trucks had replaced the horses and wagons.
We do take heat and AC for granted now, don’t we? As a six-year-old, I remember my other grandmother in the basement, shoveling coal into the furnace. The chute seemed like a wonderful convenience, but I was afraid of the fiery beast of a furnace.
It was tidbits of ancestral history like this that led me to research as far back as I could. My genealogy finds inspired me to write an historical novel based on my ancestors from France in 1650. Learn alongside me as my book progresses: Click the button.
Jeanne Meeks ~ Fiction Author 