A Victoria man trying to piece together his family tree stumbled across a long-forgotten second cousin — and now, a permanent marker will ensure that the baby boy who died in 1944 will not be forgotten again.
Baby Dionne was just three days old when he died that November. His body was placed in an unmarked grave at Colwood Burial Park, now known as Hatley Memorial Gardens.
Amateur genealogist Stephane Davis, 57, was not looking for Baby Dionne when he started his search. He was checking into a rumour, relayed to him by cousins living in Abbotsford, that their mother had had a baby before she was married.
The aunt was Christine Dionne, a half-sister of Davis’s mother, Rosalee Dionne.
As part of his search for a possible, and previously unknown, first cousin, Davis and his cousins checked Greater Victoria cemetery registers for a baby boy who died in the 1950s or 60s.
Anne Sampson, family services director at Hatley Memorial Gardens, found a record of a baby with the last name Dionne who died in November 1944.
But instead of being his cousins’ brother, David discovered that Baby Dionne was the son of his great-uncle Walter and his wife Bertha — in other words, a second cousin he never knew he had.
Davis tracked down the baby’s brother, Walter Dionne Jr., who was born in Victoria and now lives in Kelowna.
Davis asked Walter if his parents had ever mentioned losing a child. Yes, Walter said, a three-day-old son had died due to heart failure.
Both men felt driven to ensure that Baby Dionne was not forgotten.
“He said: ‘I’d like you to take me where the baby is buried so I can see it,’ ” Davis recalled.
Last summer, Walter Jr. came to Victoria to see where his brother was buried.
After that, it bothered Davis that the baby’s grave was not marked.
“You wouldn’t even know the baby was there. This baby has been lost and no one knows about it,” Davis said. “I thought, it’s quite sad.”
Davis commissioned a headstone that reads “Baby Dionne” since the boy was never given a name. It is engraved with a set of baby booties.
Davis said he feels a sense of fulfilment in being able to add one more branch to the Dionne family tree.
“I’m just trying to keep the family history going,” he said.
It’s a large family history, since Davis and his cousins apparently have a connection to the famous Dionne quintuplets. Davis was told growing up that he was related to the famous sisters, who were made wards of the Ontario government a few months after their birth in 1934.
The government said the quintuplets were taken from their parents to ensure their survival, but wasted no time in capitalizing on the swell of public interest and marketing them as a tourist attraction.
With Baby Dionne’s marker in place, that chapter in the family history is closed — but the original question, whether Davis’s cousins had an older sibling, is still unanswered.
Sampson, of Hatley Memorial Gardens, thinks it’s wonderful that Davis was able to install a headstone so he can visit the grave of a family member he never knew he had.
“I don’t like the term closure, when you lose someone, the door never shuts,” Sampson said. “But what it does in putting the marker down, it says that you were here. It says that person was here on Earth, for however long.”
