Lumber magnates were zealously leveling Michigan’s virgin forests in the 1870s, and many of the loggers they hired came from northern New England or Quebec.

Oliver St. Jean, an illiterate French Canadian barely out of his teens, took his bride there to make his fortune, but she evidently died in childbirth in 1883, leaving him with a newborn son. A few years later, Oliver moved to southern New Hampshire, changed his name to St. John, married a 16-year-old French girl and proceeded to fill a farmhouse with children.

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