Alfred Benware Sr.
Born:
Died: 1935
Married: Leila Anderson Benware
Children: Alfred Benware Jr., Willard Benware, Ray Benware, Anderson Benware
The following is a letter from Barbara Benware Burt, received by HSL 7/14/2020
Family Gumshoe
As a child of five or six, I remember my grandmother, who lived next door to us in Bloomingdale, NY, being absolutely slavish to Mrs. Morency, who lived up the road. Even at that tender age, it seemed odd to me as Mrs. Morency's late husband, Joe, had shot and killed my grandfather, Alfred Benware Sr., in a hunting accident in 1935, ten years before my birth. Living in such a small town in the Adirondack Mountains, I could have understood Grandma being civil, even pleasant or vaguely friendly, but she took it way beyond that-virtually bowing and scraping to Mrs. Morency. But, at the time, that anomaly paled in light of my cousins' and my running for cover whenever Mrs. Morency's vicious Chow dog got loose and chased us.
As I grew older I gathered that my grandfather had been hunting that fateful day with not only Joe Morency, but also with his own eldest son Anderson Benware. At one point, my mother said that Anderson, a diabetic, had died of “suicide by Hershey bar” shortly after his father's tragic death. As a parenthetical, when Anderson had been diagnosed with diabetes, even though insulin had already been discovered, the local doctor didn't recommend its use saying, “It would only prolong his life!” Growing up I remember my father and his siblings rarely mentioning Anderson, but I never questioned that in the same way I never asked much about other family my father spoke of, but whom I had never met, as they all lived fifty miles away.
In 1968 I lost my own dear father, Willard Benware, to a lumbering accident, at 54, the same age as his father had been. The night of my father's funeral, back at home, I found a wonderful old photograph featuring my dad's father, his uncle and his grandfather, who was merely, and politely, identified as “Father Benware.” For the next twenty-five years an enlargement of that photo hung on my wall, and I yearned to know who my great grandfather was. My uncles did not know his name, so where was I to turn?
After a particularly ugly 1992 environmental battle in which it fell to me to call experts and witnesses all over the eastern seaboard, I realized if I could overcome my innate shyness and phone strangers about, quite literally, garbage, I could do the same about something that had tugged at my heartstrings for so long. So I picked up the phone.
Each "stranger cousin” I spoke with had another piece of the puzzle and I asked each one for the names of other cousins, or elders, with knowledge of the family. Incredibly, within two weeks I had a name, and Canadian baptismal record, for “Father Benware” (Archie Benware/real name Joseph-Antoine Benoit-Vaillancourt) and eventually found our common lineage back to 1644 in Normandy.
But I did not stop there. I was bitten, smitten, besotted with my quest. Having a natural bent for research, our son, by then too old for camp and too young to work, spent the summer of 1993, while I was at work, happily doing his own, and my, research. On one of his forays to the New York State Library, he turned up two 1935 Malone Telegram accounts of my grandfather Alfred's untimely death. Finally something tangible.
“Alfred Benware, 50, of Bloomingdale, is First Hunting Fatality of Season-Killed Almost Instantly in Onchiota Woods While Hunting with Son and Neighbor-Fatal Shot Meant to Frighten Deer. The shot struck Mr. Benware near the heart and, although he was still alive but unconscious when his son, Anderson, 16, the third member of the hunting party, reached him, he died three minutes later. The fatal shot was reported to have been fired by Joseph Morency, a Bloomingdale neighbor of the victim." While the ages were not accurate, both stories mentioned Joseph Morency as the shooter. However, something bothered me about this account, but there was no one who knew more about the incident, or so I thought.
Something about the words "was reported to have been fired" gave pause for thought. In spite of newspaper verbiage being slightly more formal or eloquent in those days, a niggling suspicion hung on that wording. Could Anderson have killed his own father? Then, in his shame, grief, anguish, could he have essentially committed suicide by devouring too many sweets?
Years later, once again embroiled in an environmental issue, speaking with an elderly retired engineer, I discovered he had been born and bred in Kushaqua, the next village over from Onchiota, where my grandfather had been killed. The engineer, Sherwood, remembered, as a youngster, hearing about my grandfather's death. I bluntly asked if anyone had ever questioned if the shooter had been the son and not Joe Morency. He confirmed there had been “some talk” about that at the time. Again, only suspicions.
Shortly after my Uncle Alfred Jr. passed away in 1995, his wife, our Aunt Bea, came down with encephalitis and almost died of the swelling of the brain. Thankfully she was spared, but seemed to have lost her ability to remember names, though not her memory which was still, as always, sharp and vivid. Conversations with her would begin with “Bonnie, Charlene, Barbara” until she hit the name of the right niece. And knowing my husband had been transferred to New York City for a year, she solicitously inquired if he was “back from that place” yet. She just-couldn't put names to things any more.
In one of our last conversations before she too passed away in 2009, Aunt Bea was telling me about the sad life some boy had had. When I asked who she was talking about, she replied, “You know, that boy who shot his father!" When I asked if she meant “Anderson,” she said, “Yes, that's the one!" Finally, my suspicions were confirmed. Nearly sixty years later, my childhood confusion about “what's wrong with this picture?”' was cleared up. Persistence had paid off.
To save our family the shame of patricide, Joe Morency had obviously taken the rap for Anderson's mistaken shot. That explained my grandmother's slavish behavior to Mrs. Morency—she owed a lifelong debt to the Morency family. And my grandfather could have had no truer friend than Joe Morency.