(9 July 1860-3 April 1943), harnessmaker. Born at Berthierville, Que. Parents: Edouard Genereux, chief of police and bailiff of Berthierville, and his wife Phoebe St-Germain. Henry Genereux was educated at Berthierville College. He learned harnessmaking at Sorel, Que., and Montreal, then worked for Peter Kinsella, in Lancaster, GC, as a harnessmaker for about five years. Genereux moved to Cornwall in Dec. 1885 when Kinsella moved there to open a shop. He remained Kinsella’s employee in Cornwall till Kinsella retired three years later. Thereafter Henry Genereux was a harnessmaker at various addresses in Cornwall, sometimes as an employee and sometimes in business on his own. He was burned out in the Cornwall fire of 1933 but he resumed business. Genereux, who continued to work till failing health stopped him, was a Cornwall resident for 57 years. In his obituary he is described as “one of the best known men in Cornwall.” He died at the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Cornwall. Roman Catholic. Married (1) Georgianna Contont, died 1892, and (2) Mrs Elzear Contant, died 1931. (inconsistent sp. found thus) Only one of his six children survived him.

     Genereux worked in a trade important to agriculture during an age which, in the GC-area, so long reliant on the horse, did not end till the 1950s. Skilled workman such as Genereux were needed and valued, but, at the other end of the range of expertise, the workhorse-owning farmer had his own, more limited harness skills. With knowledge that by the time of Genereux’s death was no longer being handed down to the next generation, the farmer occupied himself with his own day-to-day mixing-and-matching “make-do” repairs of his farm’s sizeable collection of greasy, sweaty harness and harness bits, some of it older than the aging farmer himself. Genereux’s long and valuable obituary in the Standard-Freeholder is itself a contribution to the history of the harnessmaker trade.

     Other harnessmakers of the GC-area included Ulric Lalonde, of Alexandria, who was 80 in July 1962, and had been in the harness-making business for 60 years, and his nephew Maxime Lalonde (1918-15 April 2006), also of Alexandria. Ulric was the father-in-law of Magistrate Léopold Lalonde. Maxime Lalonde imported linen thread from Ireland and bought harness buckles from England (where he visited to inspect the source) and from the Mennonites of Waterloo County. As the years passed, he changed from being an old-style Eastern Ontario harnessmaker practising a dying art to something new, and more in keeping with the times, namely a quality artisan who preserved and continued the old skills and values but was now quite deliberately practising them for a generation which had awakened to the value of the traditions they represented.

Standard Freeholder 5 April 1943 * Ulric Lalonde: Glengarry News 17 Feb. & (marries Marie Louise Sauvé) 20 Oct. 1905, 7 May 1920, 3 Oct. 1947, 30 Aug. 1962 * Maxime Lalonde: feature articles (illustr.), Le Point 6 janv. 1981, GN 19 Sept. 1984 & 21 Aug. 1991; obituary GN 19 April 2006 (portrait); gravestone, Sacred Heart Cemetery, Alexandria