LEWISTON – Surrounded by family, Linda Dube called the moment “a dream come true.”

She hadn’t seen one cousin, Diana Bohn, since 1969. Another, Warren Correveau, she hadn’t met prior to Wednesday.

Then there were the four folks sitting on the sofa facing her. Dube’s mother, Cecile Cote, her aunt, Eva Madore, and her uncles, Edwin and O’Neal Correveau.

It was the first time all of the siblings had been together since 1935.

Dube’s excitement over the reunion eclipsed the others’, though.

“They have the blood,” said Dube, “but not the family togetherness.”

Still, in a precious few hours, Dube was determined to make the most of it.

“They’ll never be together again,” she said.

For one thing, their ages are creeping up. At 78, Eva is the baby.

For another, Edwin, 80, will be on his way to Kansas come Thursday. Diana is taking her father home with her to Wichita, where he’ll spend the rest of his life, a life limited by incurable cancer.

Joined by Cecile and O’Neal, the four exchanged small pleasantries then seemed at a loss for words. They were brother and sister, sister and brother, yet they were strangers as well, separated by 69 years.

Each in their turn would respond to a question or two, and remember a snippet of family togetherness.

‘The lost brother’

O’Neal, for example, – “the lost brother,” Dube called him – said it was probably 1955 or ’56 when he last saw Cecile. He had visited her at her St. John Valley farm then, helping her and her husband and their children dig potatoes.

He and Edwin hadn’t cast eyes on each other since about 1940, however. That’s when O’Neal joined the Civilian Conservation Corps at Bar Harbor. Edwin said goodbye to his sisters a couple of years later, drafted into the Navy during World War II.

Edwin eventually found himself living in Lewiston. He and his sisters lost track of O’Neal, who lives in Swansea, N.H.

Eva married and went her own way, landing in Plainville, Conn.

Only Cecile stayed close to her roots in Aroostook County. She now lives in Madawaska.

The family became separated early on when their mother died; Eva was only one. Their father, a lumberjack, found that he had to give up his parental rights. He couldn’t care for the four children and still make a living doing the only thing he knew to make money.

Eva, Edwin and O’Neil moved in with an uncle in St. Agatha, joining his 18 children in a one-room house with a view of the sky through the roof.

“None of us ever slept outdoors,” said Edwin with a smile, but still, calling conditions there cramped would be kind.

Cecile, meanwhile, was wrongly diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to live in a sanitarium in Presque Isle. Several years later the diagnosis was corrected, but rather than joining her siblings, she was taken in by nuns in St. Agatha. Then the state found the living conditions at their uncle’s house too severe for the family, and her brothers and sisters joined her in a foster home.

Those days, they said, were the closest they ever really had to being a family in the traditional sense.

As they grew they also grew apart and moved on to live their separate lives.

That’s until Dube used her hobby of genealogy to track her aunt and uncles down and arrange for Wednesday’s reunion.

It was wonderful, she said. “Now I have a picture of them all together, my family, to hang on my wall.”

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