My maternal great-grandfather, John Baptist Mutty, was born on March 31, 1861 in South Brewer, Maine. This photograph comes from a lineage booklet compiled by Dana Pierce, my first cousin once removed. Known as John B., my great-grandfather was the eldest of twelve children in a French Canadian family rooted in both Québec and Maine.
John B.’s father, John Thibodeau Mutty, was born in Maine to Québécois parents, and his mother, Mary Selena Boulette, emigrated from Québec around the time of her marriage in 1860. Like many French Canadian families in the mid-19th century, they crossed the border in search of steady work. From 1850 to 1930 one million Québécois migrated to the United States. Thousands of Québécois migrants settled in Maine’s river towns, where the lumber industry was booming.
The Mutty family’s livelihood was closely tied to that world. In the 1850 Census, John B.’s father is listed as a millworker; by 1870, he was working as a saw filer—a skilled position responsible for maintaining the large circular saws that powered the mills. In 1866, he was granted a U.S. patent for an improvement in feed rollers to circular saws (Patent No. 52,188).
The spirit of hard work and invention influenced the next generation. In the 1880 Census, nineteen-year-old John B. is listed as a sawmill worker. In 1883, John B. married Estelle Pooler in Bangor, and together they had six children. My grandfather, Lawrence, was the youngest. The family’s work trajectory did not remain tied to the lumber industry. According to Dana’s detailed lineage, John B. shifted to the burgeoning shoe industry when he had young children.
In 1917, John B.’s brother Victor invited him and their brother Louis to join him in Boston, where he had established a successful manufacturing business producing rubberized canvas for automobiles and fabric for player pianos. Thus, several members of the Mutty family settled in Melrose, Massachusetts.
And yet, Maine remained home in a deeper sense. In his lineage booklet, Dana Pierce recalls attending “Grandpa” Mutty’s wake, and then, on the day of the funeral, walking to the railroad tracks near St. Mary’s Grammar School to watch the Bangor Express pass by:
“to pay my last respects as ‘Grandpa’ sped by—and perhaps to wave to my grieving mother who was aboard the train with other members of the family.”
John B. died in Melrose, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1936, at the age of 75. He is buried in Bangor, Maine.
To my mother’s father’s father–because you endured, I am here. I did not know your voice, your dreams, or your fears, yet I know that you lived.
Tracing North 