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6-25-2012 • riversidereader.com • 3
THE LAST SURVIVOR
continued from page 1
"She played cards and I cleaned the house. I was late for school a lot because I couldn't go until I had finished cleaning/' she recalls.
When asked if she assumed the other children at school grew up with lives similar to her own, Alice says she always knew her life was different and harder.
"I loved my daddy very much but my mother never showed any love to me; so that's why I don't have any good memories of her," she recalls.
When pressed to recall the happier times of childhood, like Christmas, Alice becomes silent.
Without prodding, she doesn't offer any fond childhood memories.
With a little more coaxing, she finally recalls her favorite Christmas gift— a robe she once received from Santa Claus.
"When I would come home from school there would be a note on the table: 'wet-mop the rooms,'" she reveals.
When Alice was 14, the Geoffroys officially adopted her. She attended school in Delcambre through her junior year then transferred to Mount Carmel in New Iberia where she graduated. In 1942, at the age of 26, she married Reuben Bernard of Erath and together they raised seven children in their rural home located between Delcambre and Erath on 160 acres of farmland and some rental property inherited from her adoptive parents, following their deaths in 1939 and 1949.
After her youngest child began school, --Alice-got -tr-job as an admittance clerk at the Abbeville General Hospital where she worked until that child completed high school.
Her husband raised cotton and later sugarcane on the land her father left her.
Connie Babin, the second eldest of Alice's children, says she never knew her mother's adoptive parents. Her grandfather died about a dozen years before she was born' and her grandmother died when she was about three. Her father's parents had died before she was born too, she says.
"Mother was very secretive about being adopted.
I was married and already had children of my own before I knew," she recalls.
"After I was born, mother wrote to the Foundling Hospital in New York and she was pretty much shut down. The nuns told her to be happy she had a good life.
"The adoption records and birth records were
Above, the oldest living orphan train survivor in the state of Texas, Mary Maresh of Burleson County, Texas, meets Alice G. Bernard, the oldest living orphan train survivor in the state of Louisiana for the first time. In addition to both being orphan train survivors, they were also both bom in New York City to unwed mothers and were sent south to rural communities in neighboring states when they were just toddlers. They met and shared stories on Christmas night 2010 at Bernard's granddaughter's home in Texas.
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Ned Doucet, retired as chief judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and his legal background helped them in their search for answers.
"My sisters got a court order to get our mother's records and they did extensive research. We think we know who our biological grandfather was and we think we've found his gravesite. Through research, my sisters were able to piece together a lot. They were able to place our grandparents' homes within a three or four block radius of each other," Connie says.
Connie also confirms that her mother is still troubled’ by the way ‘children at school treated her when she was young, noting that her mother brought up the subject just days before this interview last week.
But while Alice looks back at her childhood with at least some degree of bitterness, Connie says others have recalled that her mother "was dressed like a princess in town."
Nonetheless, Alice never had the fortune of knowing other Orphan Train children like herself until just a year and a half ago.
It was then that Alice met Mary Maresh of Burleson County, Texas, a woman who is still going strong at age 103 and whom Alice refers to now as her role model.
"My daughter lives in Texas and she read a newspaper article about a 102-year-old woman who came to Texas on an orphan train. We were going to visit my daughter for Christmas and she made arrangement
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was sent to Texas before her second birthday. Also like Alice, Mary was raised without any knowledge of her biological family.
Maty didn't learn she was adopted until she overheard classmates talking about her at school. She never told her parents she knew and, just like with Alice, decades would pass before she even revealed her past to her own children.
"She had been looking all of her life for her birth parents or relatives but she never found them. She said she would have given anything to at least have had a picture of her mom," Connie recalls Mary saying.
"Then she reached over
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hand and said, 'That's okay, we're sisters.'
"It was a very precious moment."
In the last four years, Alice's past, over which she had no control, has moved from childhood shame to golden years fame.
On June 6, 2009, the Acadian Museum in Erath. Louisiana honored Alice by inducting her into the Order of "Living Legends. " Earlier that same year, she was also interviewed by Louisiana Public Broadcasting's The State We're In and was declared to be the last Louisiana survivor.
On Oct. 10, 2009, a museum was opened by the Louisiana Orphan Train Society in St. Landry Parish to^ preserve the history of the more than 2000 orphan train riders who settled in Louisiana. Operating with an all-volunteer staff, the museum is located at 223 South Academy Street in Opelousas in an
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