Ancestry Magazine

One of my most difficult experiences in conducting genealogical research involved finding the family of a man who was known by nine different first names and two different surnames during his fifty-seven years.

On vital records, church records, census enumerations, his World War I draft registration card, and in several city directories his given name appears in these variations: Armedis, Armedas, H. Artemus, Arnedis, Almedias, Homore, Hormidas, Hormids, and Medus. (In order to avoid confusion I will refer to him as Hormidas throughout this article.) In many of these records his last name appears as Hill, but his surname on the official record of his suicide, which I found following a long and often frustrating search, was a far cry from Hill.

The research of this man was necessary in order to meet the legal requirements governing the distribution of the fairly substantial estate of his daughter, Edna [Hill] Johnson, who died intestate in 1999. In layman’s terms, she died without leaving a will.

Normally the search for legatees (heirs) to an intestate estate is conducted by the staff of the attorney handling that estate. When the lawyer’s team is unsuccessful in locating the rightful heirs, as in this case, the attorney usually employs a professional genealogist to conduct the search. Consequently, I was hired to hunt for the relatives of Edna Anderson’s father.

For an experienced researcher this type of assignment is usually routine. But there can be very disappointing exceptions to that “usually routine” rule as I discovered during the seemingly endless hours I spent combing archives and other sources for the relatives of the man who, during his relatively brief lifetime, left that trail of nine given names and two surnames. In fact, on several occasions I seriously considered conceding defeat in the search I had been employed to undertake.

Locating the relatives of a person who died intestate is necessary because of the marked difference between the laws governing the settlement of an estate of a person who died without leaving a will, and the procedures for settling an estate of an individual who left a valid will (or who died testate).

In the latter instance, the individual who made the will had the sole authority for designating his or her heirs whether or not they were relatives. Often the sole family members included in such a will are the surviving spouse and children of the decedent. On the other hand, state statutes dictate that the estate of an individual who dies intestate, as Edna did, must be divided among certain surviving relatives, including parents and grandparents, if living; siblings; half brothers and sisters; uncles and aunts; first cousins; and nieces and nephews.

According to Edna’s death certificate, the birth names of her parents were Hormidas Hill and Louise Otilla Fichtinger. Eventually, it was the maiden name of Edna’s mother that provided the key to the successful conclusion of this difficult search.

Hormidas and Louise were divorced when Edna was seven years old, so Edna went to live with Louise’s parents. After the divorce, Edna remained close to her mother’s relatives, but had no contact with her father or anybody else on his side of the family. Thus, my task was to identify any surviving relatives of Hormidas Hill, including his siblings and their children who were legally entitled to share in Edna’s estate. The law requires that every reasonable effort be made to locate potential legatees before the estate is presented to the probate court for settlement. Otherwise, after the estate has been settled legal heirs who have been omitted from that settlement may initiate prolonged and bitter litigation.

At the New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records there was no death, birth, or marriage record for a Hill under any of the variety of first names by which Edna’s father had been known. By a rare and disappointing coincidence there was no trace of a marriage of Edna’s mother, née Louise O. Fichtinger, in the Brides’ Index at the same bureau.

I did find an H. Artemis Hill in the 1910 Manchester, New Hampshire, census. He was listed as the head of a family that included his wife Louise and their five-year-old daughter, Edna. The daughter, of course, was the future widow, Edna Johnson, who died childless in 1999 at the age of ninety-four. The 1910 enumeration was the only census in which Edna’s father appeared as head of household under any name, Hill or otherwise, including the one I discovered on his death record late in the search.

Next, I turned to Manchester’s collection of city directories. In those volumes Hill entries with variations on Edna’s father’s first name are listed from 1902 to 1917. After 1917 he n ever appeared in another Manchester directory under the surname Hill. When at last the preponderance of evidence identified his birth surname, I found him listed under that last name in the 1924 through 1936 directories.

Not having any inkling during the initial stages of the search that he lived his entire life in Manchester, part of it under a surname other than Hill, I hunted in vain for the death record of Hermidas Hill in the archives of the other five New England states. Not only did I fail to find him in any of those states, but ironically I later discovered that his death occurred in a hospital situated about a mile from my own home.

For several weeks I had conducted a methodical investigation following the conventional procedures governing genealogical research. The result of adhering to established guidelines that were usually productive had yielded deplorably few positive results.

Then one night when sleep was sporadic, intuition rescued me from ignominious failure. Three facts coalesced in my semiconscious state that led me to suspect I should search among the records of Manchester’s very populous community of French Canadian descendants for the information I was seeking. The facts follow:

1. A few days earlier when I typed “Hermidas” into my favorite Internet search engine, I learned that Hermidas was the name of male members of families in the province of Quebec.

2. In 1902, when the name Ardenas (aka Hermidas) H. Hill appeared in a Manchester directory, he was listed as a boarder in the home of the widow, Celina Lajoie, obviously a woman with a French surname.

3. Printed just below the Hill entries in several Manchester city directories included the note, “See Descoteau.”

My French-to-English dictionary translates descoteau as little hill. There were several Descoteau listings in Manchester’s directories, but none of them included a first name even remotely similar to the nine by which Edna’s father was known at various times during his life.

The hunch that Hermidas had a Quebecois heritage prompted a visit to Manchester’s American-Canadian Genealogical Society, one of the richest resources for researching French Canadian families in the United States. The ACGS collection includes records of baptisms, marriages, and funerals from hundreds of Roman Catholic churches in New York State and the New England states, including those of a dozen parishes in the Manchester area.

Since Edna’s death record listed Louise O. Fichtinger as her mother’s name, I began searching the loose-leaf pages among the alphabetically arranged brides’ names inscribed in the repertoires of the Manchester Catholic churches hoping to find Louise Fichtinger’s marriage record. To my delight, I discovered the following entry in the Church of St. Augustin’s “Repertoire Des Marriages, l871—1972.” It listed the date of the wedding, the names of the bride and groom, and the names of their parents:

Following this breakthrough, I returned to the New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records to hunt for the death record of Hormidas Lajoie alias Hormidas Hill. Success again. He died 15 November 1937. That date led me to the New Hampshire State Library’s extensive collection of microfilmed newspapers. A brief obituary in the Manchester Union Leader began with the sentence, “Hormidas, Lajoie, also well-known as Hormidas Hill, a lifelong resident of this city, died at a local hospital yesterday morning aged fifty-seven years.”

The newspaper did not divulge certain details that were recorded in the files of the New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records. His death occurred in the psychiatric ward of the Hillsborough County Hospital where he had been confined for two months. The cause of death was “self-inflicted laceration to the throat with a razor.”

I never did find an actual birth or baptism record for Hermidas, but the official record of his death plus the facts in the 1900 Manchester census about the resi dents of the widowed Celina Lajoie’s home firmly identified him as her eldest living child. Six other Lajoie children were members of Celina’s household. In that 1900 enumeration, Hormidas [Hill] Lajoie’s given name is listed as Medus. Probably that version of his first name resulted from the mistaken way in which census takers frequently erred in translating unfamiliar names.

Based on the marriage record of Louise Fichtinger and Hermidas Lajoie plus the 1900 census, the job of completing my assignment was relatively easy. All but one of Hermidas’ siblings listed in the 1900 census married and became parents and grandparents of many children and grandchildren.

My search for Edna’s relatives on her father’s side revealed that if she had kept in touch with the Lajoie family she would have known, or at least known about, four uncles, two aunts, and twenty-two first cousins. Most of them, like Edna, lived in Manchester. None of Hormidas’ siblings changed their given names or their surname, Lajoie, except the women in the family who married. All of the aunts and uncles died before 1999, but fifteen of Edna’s first cousins were living at the time of her death, and thus were legal heirs to her estate.

My final discovery in the search was an explanation of the probable reason Hermidas chose Hill as his last name during much of his life. That choice illustrates the old axiom, “Like father, like son.”

St. Augustin’s “Repertoire Des Marriages 1871—1972” contains the following marriage entry:

On this marriage record, and in the Manchester directories from 1880 to 1885, Hormidas’ father is listed as as Guillame Descoteau. He is not listed in the directories of 1886 and 1887, but in the directories of 1888 and 1889, the year he died, he appears as William Lajoie living at 176 Lake Avenue. That was also the address of Hormidas’ mother, the widow Celina Lajoie, in the 1900 census. That census and the 1910 census both state that Hermidas was born in May 1880. So during h is early years Edna’s father knew his own father as Guillame Descoteau (Little Hill) rather than William Lajoie.

If there was a logical explanation for the nine different first names by which Hermidas appeared in various records, I failed to find it. However, that explanation was not necessary for the settlement of Edna Johnson’s estate.

Edward F. Holden, a retired educator, is a professional genealogist and the Staff Genealogist at the New Hampshire State Library. This position gives him the opportunity to combine his enthusiasm for teaching with his interest in the many facets of family history research.