Appendix 3 to The Voyage of Captain Lucas
Augustin Lucas after 1848
Lucas family in America
update of information by R. D. Wood (2014)
New information on Augustin Lucas.
Returning to France from Tahiti in 1848 after only one year back he and his wife and two children (Mathilda and Dolores) emigrated to the United States in 1849. After spending what proved to be two unsuccessful years in the timber trade in Preston County, West Virginia, he moved a little further west to Cincinnati, Ohio. He died there most probably in 1859 (although it needs noting that another account by his granddaughter Evangeline Soyer indicated the year was 1854).
In Cincinnati his daughter Dolorès married a French-born Alfred Soyer in 1858 and it is said the name of "A Lucas" appears as a witness in the church register, but he is absent from the Cincinnati Directory of 1860 although his wife is listed. (this information depends upon Mahon Lucas Henderson, A Breton Family in America: The Lucas Story, McClain Printing Co. (Parsons, West Virginia, USA) 1986, chapter 10 (Augustin Lucas and his family), pp. 66-70.). The considerable difficulty in establishing the exact date of death of Augustin Lucas is that the city records of Cincinnati of the period were destroyed by fire.
Dolores and Alfred Soyer (a Confectioner) while living in Cincinnati quickly had two children, a son (who died as a baby) and their first daughter Adrienne in 1859. They moved from Cincinnati, soon after the civil war began in April 1861, to Toronto, Canada, where two more daughters (Evangeline in 1863 and Marie in 1868) were born.
It was Evangeline who when she reached the age of 78 in 1941 wrote a valuable short memoir on her family - the full text is currently on a public access page at the genealogical website of Katryne Chauvigné-Bourlaud at http://matribu.chauvigne.info/pages/041-evangeline-soyer-courte-autobiographie-fr.php
From Katryne's genealogical research on Lucas families (she herself is in direct line from Victor Lucas, older brother of the Captains Augustin and Francois) it can also be established, from evidence of his original birth and marriage certificates, that Captain Lucas' first name was indeed Angustin, not Auguste as is sometimes found in printed sources.