Regional Storyteller

Laurent d’Entremont

Few things can be more confusing and frustrating to a postmaster than sorting mail for customers who have the same, or similar names.

For example, in the Annapolis Valley, you will find the Newcombes in Port Williams; the Huntleys in Scott’s Bay; the Canning area is home to the Rands (lots of them). Gaspereau has Kenny, Kennie or Kenney to add to the postal confusion. There are also Elliott, Foote, Eaton and exotic names like Zimmerman and Zhang to make it more challenging.

Digby County has names like Amero, Amiro, or Amirault; there are lots of Comeaus, Comeaux, Deveaus, Robichauds and hundreds of similar names, to confuse the postal department. In Shelburne County, they had a Crowell Newell, or was it Newell Crowell?

However, those places are only in the little leagues. In my village of West Pubnico, we have at least six or seven hundred people with the same last name, the name of “d’Entremont”.

Our founder 350 years ago was a d’Entremont with lots of sons.

It was interesting enough to lure writers from two well-known publications to visit Yarmouth County at mid-century and write about the Acadians, their survival and how they lived. Strangely, the two articles -- one American and one Canadian -- both had the same title “Acadian Utopia” for our village, or rather villages.

The Saturday Evening Post in their issue of April 19, 1947, with Norman Rockwell as their cover illustrator, published the first article. The second article, by the Canadian magazine Standard, was more or less a spin-off of the first which appeared in the July 15,1950 issue.

According to these articles, Pubnico was a Utopia with no crimes, poverty or illiteracy, no jail, divorce or taxes to pay. However, there was one dispirited resident -- the postmaster -- who had to put up with delivering mail in a village where 800 people had the same last name, including himself.

The Saturday Evening Post writer, John Durant, with Ivan Dmitri as photographer, was so prolific with words in his 1947 article that the first few paragraphs are worth repeating here. He wrote: “Gerald d’Entremont lives in Utopia come to life and has one of the most confusing jobs in existence. He is postmaster at Lower West Pubnico, Nova Scotia, and twice a day he hands out mail to members of the 75 families who come to call for it at his combined general store and post office. That’s where the confusion comes in. Of the 75 families in his district all but five are named d’Entremont—more than 800 people with the same name. Every day is d’Entremont day for Gerald, an amiable 30-year-old man who sometimes isn’t so amiable when he tries to figure out which d’Entremont gets which letter.

He has to cope with nine Joseph d’Entremonts, for instance, nine Marys and half a dozen Roberts and Pauls, many of whom have the same middle initials. “I know them all, of course”, he says. “I’m related to every one of them, but that doesn’t help when I’m sorting out the mail. It’s nerve racking at times. I want to peek inside the envelope, but I can’t, so I try to remember who is writing to whom. Like I know that one of the Roberts is writing to a friend in Quebec and another Robert is getting some mail from some people in the States. It’s easy to identify letters like that from the postmarks, but when new letters come in for one of the nine Joes, I want to toss it up in the air and hope it lands on the head of the right Joe. Sometimes all nine of them are here.”

He explained how the different Josephs were distinguished from one another around the village. “We tack on their father’s name to their own,” he said pointing to a man who was standing at the tobacco counter, “ That Joseph over there is the son of Urie d’Entremont, so he’s called Joe-a-Urie. Then we have Joe-a-Tom, Joe-a-Germain, and so on. That takes care of the Joes, but the Marys are harder. Two of the Marys are married to two Joseph d’Entremont. One is called Mary-a-Joe; the other is called Mary-a-Joe Levy, which includes her husband’s name and her old man’s as well. That’s about as far as you can go”.

To make it more confusing, there were seven Pubnico villages around Pubnico harbour and each one had a post office of its own fifty years ago.

However, contrary to the exaggerations of the two writers of half a century ago, we are no longer a Utopia. Sadly, we have caught up with the rest of the world when it comes to crime, divorces, poverty, illiteracy, etc, and yes, we do pay taxes like everybody else.

laudent@hotmail.com