Memory Lane Lifestories

Bella was born on September 30, 1918. The stories of her life span ten decades. Inside, she shares some of these stories in her own words. She recounts her childhood experiences as an American growing up during the Depression, as a young woman getting married and raising a family during the war, and as an adult reflecting on the challenges and triumphs of a well-lived life.

Albina Schofield and her daughter Mae

Aunt Margaret with young Arthur and Rosa after Arthur died

Chapter One:

Blue in the Morning

The week I was born, my mother lost a brother and a sister to the influenza that was going around in 1918. It was a bad year. My parents were living with my father’s mother, and when my mother’s brothers came to see her, they didn’t wear a black tie like they used to in those days because they didn’t want her to know what had happened. She had lost her sister and her brother. They didn’t want her to know.

She lost her oldest sister, Albina, who was married to Herbert Scholfield. They had two daughters, Mae and Violet. Albina had been pregnant when she got sick. Her husband was not Catholic, but he used to drive her to church every Sunday. When she got sick, he promised that if she didn’t die he would turn Catholic. But she died, and the baby didn’t live.

Then my Uncle Arthur that died, he had been married to Margaret. Aunt Margaret was a beautiful girl. They had three kids. So Aunt Margaret had lost her husband, who was a Bellemare, and Uncle Herbert had lost a wife that was a Bellemare. A few years later, they got married and raised the children together. It worked out.

My name was supposed to be Marie-Beth Bella Vezina, but the priest got it wrong and put Marie Bertha Bella Vezina on the birth certificate. My mother said, That’s not what I wanted! The priest must have been drunk when he wrote that!

My aunt made my christening gown for me…Aunt Anna. She would see something in a store window and go home and make it. She was so clever. When I was born, my mother and father lived with my grandmother, and Aunt Anna wasn’t married at the time so she lived there too. She made me that dress, and all my kids wore it, and some of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren! She made Aunt Bernadette and Louise’s clothes too.

Aunt Louise was a photographer. She had a camera that took black-and-white pictures. When we lived over the bakery, we had a room with a toilet but no bathtub. It was dark in there…she developed her pictures in the bathroom. She took an awful lot of pictures. She was good at that.

Aunt Bernadette and Aunt Louise the photographer on the right

Grandparents

Joseph and Albertine Bellemare

My mother’s father, Joseph Bellemare, was born in Michigan. His mother, Amelia Hudson, had died when he was born, so he was brought up in another family. He had a brother, but nobody knows anything about him or where he went. His sisters went to Canada to live with some aunts. He could speak English because he was born in Michigan. He was so handsome. He had the bluest eyes. My grandfather and grandmother Bellemare both did.

I remember St. Michael’s church in Smithfield, Rhode Island used to have a fair, and my