JULIANNE MANGIN, Secrets of the Asylum: Norwich State Hospital and My Family, Pennsauken, NJ: BookBaby, 2023. ISBN:  979-8-35090-997-5

Reviewed by Megan St. Marie

While meticulous genealogy research is part of what makes Secrets of the Asylum: Norwich State Hospital and My Family stand out, the greatest triumph of this Franco American family history is how author Julianne Mangin conveys the healing, transformative power of such research. With humility, curiosity, integrity, and grit, she recounts how her professional background and training as a research librarian at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a website developer and database programmer at the Library of Congress poised her to delve into her maternal family’s troubled past, to fill in gaps from her mother’s stories, and to arrive at a deeper understanding of the people and places that brought her into being. “It was a long time before it occurred to me that Mom’s family history was my family history, too,” she writes, “but eventually I came to the conclusion that I had a right to my own interpretation of what the family story meant. It wasn’t a point of view that Mom would have encouraged” (19).

With these lines from the second chapter of her book, Mangin establishes a paradoxical tension at the heart of her endeavor: in seeking to better understand her mother and claim her maternal family history, she risks betrayal and alienation. Born Pauline Tillotson, Mangin’s mother was also a librarian interested in genealogy, but her interest had limitations. Mangin writes, “With all the energy Mom spent in retirement in researching her family tree, I would have thought that her stories would have become more detailed and connected than before. But Mom continued to tell the same old tales, which were unaltered by anything that she might have uncovered” (23). Mangin depicts her mother as frustratingly circumspect about the past in her repeated, condensed narratives of the tragic circumstances of her impoverished upbringing and of her own mother, Beatrice Metthe Tillotson’s, mental illness. 

Reflecting on these stories from her mother, Mangin writes, “It puzzled me that her emotions didn’t match up with the scale of her family’s misfortunes” (4). This puzzlement, along with questions it provoked —“Why did Grandma lose the delicatessen? What happened to Grandma in the mental hospital? Why were you taken from Grandpa by a social worker and put into the county home? Why hadn’t he tried to get you out?”— propelled her into the role of “reluctant genealogist” (20).

At first Mangin seems to overcome this reluctance by treating genealogy as an intellectual pursuit akin to detective work. She puts her prodigious research skills to use, building on information gleaned from her mother’s papers to access additional records, carefully comb through documents, and patiently follow one lead to another. The documentation of this work will be both inspirational and instructive to readers engaged in their own genealogy pursuits, offering a model for how to find and interpret sources, and revealing how methods of the past have given way to those in current use. For those who haven’t branched far beyond accessing vital records, censuses, and newspapers, Mangin’s work with the patient records of relatives and ancestors who were committed to Connecticut’s Norwich State Hospital will be particularly inspiring. Writing about the hospital social worker’s report on her grandmother’s family history, Mangin states, “It was a genealogist’s dream. A thrill rushed through me when I realized how much more I was going to learn about the family than what Mom had been willing or able to tell me” (41).

That learning extended beyond revelations about personal and family history to engage with broader Franco American history. Mangin shares that her mother’s “ancestors were part of a large emigration of Quebecois in the nineteenth century” (43). She continues, “Learning what drew these French-speaking Catholics to New England helped me understand what had happened to Grandma’s family once they got here, and how it affected the choices they made” (43). She explains that some of these choices were tied to “the concept of la survivance, the preservation of their faith and culture. […] Throughout New England, French Canadians (now Franco-Americans) were viewed with suspicion because they kept to themselves, continued to speak French, and worshiped at Catholic churches” (143).

Where she could not fill in gaps in her knowledge, especially in the early stages of her research, Mangin allowed herself to enter an imaginative space, even using archival photographs of Franco Americans factory workers at the turn of the twentieth century to create mental images of ancestors she had never seen in photographs. Writing in the conditional she muses, “If they were typical employees, they would have worked twelve- or thirteen-hour days, six days a week” (57). And based on her growing knowledge of Franco Americans of this era she concludes:

It sounded to me like my great-grandparents’ lives were full of drudgery—working all day at the mill, going home to their modest apartment, eating a meager supper of bread and pea soup by light of an oil lamp, and going to bed exhausted and perhaps still hungry. I could only hope—since I couldn’t know for sure—that they’d had some bright spots in their lives. Maybe Phillippe and Graziella found some relief in the French Canadian tradition of Saturday night parties with family and friends where they would eat, drink, sing and dance to fiddle and harmonica, and play card games. (58) 

Ultimately, Mangin unearths the profound impacts of generational trauma wrought by cycles of poverty, domestic violence, and mental illness. “Knowing what really happened to my mother and my grandparents was going to help me make sense of why Mom had been the kind of mother she was” (147), she writes, having earlier described her mother as “unable to give me the emotional nurturing I craved so much while growing up” (18). By investigating how her mother’s own childhood was marked by loss and trauma, which in turn was born of loss and trauma in prior generations, Mangin cultivates compassionate understanding of her mother’s and grandmother’s limited capacities for nurturance. 

In a particularly moving passage, Mangin describes visiting the “shed behind a relative’s house” (7) where her grandmother lived as a child as her own mother descended into mental illness. “I was standing on the same planks upon which my grandmother, only six years old, had stood,” (69) she marvels, continuing, “My visit […] confirmed for me the importance of going to the places where my family’s history took place. It allowed me to acknowledge and honor my grandmother’s childhood suffering. By doing so, I planted a seed of empathy in my heart for her—one that continued to grow as I reconstructed her life” (71).

If there is one thing lacking in this book, it is a genogram to aid readers in keeping track of names, relationships, and the patterns of mental illness, losses, and challenges faced across generations. The absence of such a data visualization tool undermines the accessibility of an otherwise moving and compelling read as Mangin reveals that, in addition to Beatrice Metthe and her mother, Graziella Bonneau Metthe, three other women in Mangin’s family were committed to the Norwich State Hospital: Graziella’s sister, Rose Bonneau; and Graziella’s daughters (Beatrice’s sisters), Dinorah Metthe and Pauline Metthe. 

Mangin contextualizes her writing about ancestors’ and relatives’ experiences at the Norwich State Hospital within the history of psychiatry, including disturbing details about abusive, exploitative “treatment” of mentally ill patients. She learns, for example, that her mother’s comment, “Some doctor thought it was a good idea to pull out all of her [Graziella’s] teeth,” (7) was rooted in “theories circulating within the psychiatric community that insanity was caused by infected teeth” (105). This practice, taken “to its illogical extreme” (106), led a Dr. Henry Cotton, medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital from 1907–1930, to “move on to other organs: removing tonsils, adenoids, spleen, and even the colon” (106). Mangin reflects, “While he didn’t work at the state hospital where my ancestors were patients, his work was widely known in state hospital circles. […] I was appalled to realize how often patients were subjected to so-called cures before unbiased testing was performed to determine whether they were effective” (106).

Mangin also provides details of other misguided, harmful “treatments” her ancestors and relatives endured, and of impoverished family members’ frustrated attempts to help their loved ones suffering with mental illness. In reflecting on their experiences, she confronts prior judgments she heard or held about men who had supposedly “abandoned” their wives and children, discovers a heartrending story of sexual exploitation that calls into question her mother’s paternity, and even meets new family members she’d never known. Throughout, the generosity and love with which she writes combine to create a tone that is candid without bitterness, and open rather than excessive, demonstrating the empowering and healing impact of family history knowledge.

In a 2014 article for the New Yorker, writer Michael Specter profiles neurologist Daniela Schiller, whose feelings and memories of her father were transformed when she finally heard him speak about his experiences of the Holocaust after many years of silence. Specter writes that Schiller “realized memory is ‘what you are now, not what you think you were in the past. When you change the story you created, you change your life.’”1 Readers of Secrets of the Asylum will see that, in using genealogical research and writing to change the story her mother had created about their family history, Mangin enabled herself to change memories of her own past, and thus to change her life. This emerges not as a betrayal of her mother, but a testament to how Mangin took what her mother was able to provide her and built something new. Instead of remaining wounded and confused by maternal criticisms and evasions, she gained new understanding of her mother and her family, allowing herself to grieve, to enact rituals honoring them, and to create a book that bears loving witness to their full humanity. 

Notes

(1) Michael Specter, “Partial Recall,” in The New Yorker Magazine, May 12, 2014.