Talk:Richard Bergeron

Determining a person's status

Spent a few hours in early 2021 trying to determine if Richard was dead or alive. He'd be 86 this year, which means it's certainly possible that he is.

A few hours of searching on ancestry.com and on the Internet in general didn't solve this question. The possibilities for Bergeron seem to be

    Bergeron died a long time ago
    He changed his name
    ancestry.com has really crappy records from Puerto Rico
    He hasn't had any art or any writing published in nearly 30 years (which frankly
           seem particularly weird)
  

Bergeron is a more common name than I expected, particularly in Massachusetts. I wonder if there's any chance he relocated to another state?

[ -- User:LaurieMann 11 April 2021‎ ]

Searching for what became of Richard Bergeron

A couple of years ago I had the same idea as the person whose (unsigned) remarks are above -- searching genealogical records, not just Ancestry.com, to see whether Bergeron is still alive and/or what became of him.

I didn't succeed. The most recent record I was able to find of him being alive was from 2 March 1995, on which date he's listed as the informant on the death certificate of his father Leo Midas Bergeron. His Old San Juan post office box is given as his address.

I did find the 26 Aug 1954 edition of the Newport (Orleans County, Vermont) Daily Express, which reports, on page 3, the winners of various awards at that year's Orleans County Fair: Richard Bergeron, 3rd place in oil painting; 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in water colors; 1st and 2nd place in pen and ink drawing; 1st and 2nd place in pencilling; 1st place in pastels; 1st and 2nd place in crayons. This is only one of several reports in small-town Vermont newspapers, in the early 1950s, of the artwork of the young Richard Bergeron winning honors.

Richard's parents were Leo Midas Bergeron (born 2 Nov 1911 in Saint-Prime, Quebec; died 2 Mar 1995 in Newport, Orleans County, Vermont) and Rachel Margaret Pudvah (born 4 Jan 1913 in Lowell, Orleans County, Vermont; died 25 Sep 1991, presumably in Newport); both of them are buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Newport. His father came to the United States at the age of four, arriving from Canada at Newport on 18 November 1915 with his father Alfred Bergeron. Both of Richard's parents have French Canadian ancestries going back to the founding of New France -- ancestries that are trivially easy to discover, because French Canada is one of the genealogically best-documented populations on the planet.

-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden [7 April 2024‎]