Page 8 - Fortier Family History

suffered a devastating fire which destroyed priceless artifacts from the fur trade era as well as the archives containing many back-issues of the local newspaper. I was informed, sadly, that the issues from September to December of 1963 and 1964 were among those that went up in smoke and no microfilm copies were ever made. Well, I still have the memory of it at least. We lived in Mooseheart, separated from one another during the week, from October 1, 1964 until January 26, 1968. Each of us received a set of new clothes with our own “serial number” stitched into every garment. All of our serial numbers started with the letter “F”. Mooseheart kept meticulous records, and they still had our records on file and my mom’s original Canadian Passport when I contacted them in 1994. I guess they were holding onto it so she would not flee back to Canada. Among other tidbits of information I received in that letter from Mooseheart in 1994: I was the 5597th child admitted to Mooseheart. I was baptized in Canada on October 28, 1962, Roman Catholic, just as most “French Canadians” were. In addition, it says my grandmother (Doris) had Rheumatic fever, that my grandfather (Ed) suffered from ulcers, that I was treated for Impetigo on October 1, 1964 (the day we entered Mooseheart they quarantined me), and on May 5, 1964 a doctor reported that I was anemic and needed to eat more meat. He also noted that my testicles should descend soon (yikes!!!, they did, whew!). It went on to say my dad was born in Port Coldwell, on October 6, 1939. Hmm, they never lived in Port Coldwell, they lived in Coldwell near the Trans- Canadian Highway 17. Port Coldwell was down the hill and over the tracks from Coldwell on the water front, it was a harbor port for logging and later commercial fishing. Today few traces of the old bustling villages there remain other than some old housing foundations. For the most part, both Port Coldwell and Coldwell are abandoned “ghost towns” really. Just two of the many former fur and commercial fishing “towns” found scattered across northern Ontario. Some family members say he was born in Port Arthur, which later merged with Fort William and became Thunder Bay, Ontario in 1970. My great aunt Mary Michano Lees told me he was born at home in Coldwell and that her mother, my great grandmother Agnes Finlayson Michano helped deliver him. I did an Ontario Vital Statistics search for his birth certificate in the late 1990s, they found nothing. I contacted the late Father William Maurice of St Joseph’s in Fort William (Thunder Bay, Ontario) in 1998 and he provided a post-humous Certificate of Baptism for Walter, dated December 14th, 1998 for a man born in 1939. Better late than never I suppose. Father Maurice had compiled handwritten genealogy records of births, baptisms, marriages and some deaths of individuals from several generations of many families from Long Lake, Heron Bay/Pic River, and Mobert Ojibway First Nations in Northern Ontario going back to the early to mid 1800s. Walter’s mother, Doris Michano shows up in those records when she married my grandfather Lucien Edward Fortier in 1936 because she was a band member from Long Lake Ojibway Band #58 and later moved to Coldwell, near the Ojibways of the Pic River First Nation and southeast of the town of Marathon, ONT. Those records include the births of Ed and Doris’ first three children, all boys; Russell 1938, Walter 1939 and Robert Arthur, better known as Butch, born in 1941. It even includes my dad’s and mom’s marriage on June 1, 1957. Both were about 4 months shy of turning 18 years old. Both were Libras, as am I and my son Jimmy (Oct. 4 1993). After my mom got remarried to Robert Hinz in 1968 we finally left Mooseheart and settled in a small house in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton. “Doris Michano” and “Agnes Finlayson,” my mother would answer back after I asked her the names of my grandmother and great grandmother (on Walter’s side) when I was a young boy in Wheaton. Those names somehow sounded “Canadian” to