Tides of Tadoussac.com Marées de Tadoussac
Janes, Mary Francis Russell
After a very difficult start to life, Tadoussac was very likely a place to heal


Mary Frances Russell Janes 1864 - 1915
Mary Frances Russell Janes’ mother was born in Franklin, New Hampshire in 1836, the daughter of Willis Russell and Rebecca Page (Sanborn).
In 1843, when she was seven, Mary’s family relocated to Quebec City where her father, Willis, entered the hotel business. In 1858, Mary married a Scotsman, William Duthie Baxter Janes and they moved to Montreal. Their first daughter, Mary Frances Russell Janes (1860) died within a week of her birth, and their second daughter, Elizabeth Anne Leavitte Janes (1861) died at the age of one. Erie Russell Janes (1863) was the third daughter. She survived and thrived, as did her younger sister who was given the same name as the first child, and is the subject of this biography, Mary Frances Russell Janes (1864).
In Willis Russell’s biography, it was mentioned that a doctor recommended sea air for Willis’s ailing daughter. His friend William Rhodes encouraged him to join him in Tadoussac, a plan that led to the construction of Spruce Cliff in 1861. It seems clear that Mary was that ailing daughter and sadly, tragedy struck one more time. In the days following this fourth daughter’s birth, Willis’s daughter, Mary, weakened and died in Quebec at the age of twenty-eight. She was buried in the family plot at Mount Hermon Cemetery in Quebec.
The two surviving children, Erie and Mary, went to live with their grandparents, Willis and Rebecca, who had built Spruce Cliff as a place for their daughter to heal. One can only hope that after being left with two babies and enduring three family deaths in five years, the cottage helped to heal the whole family.
Erie eventually married George de Guerry Languedoc and built Amberley Cottage in Languedoc Park. Mary never married and she continued to come to Tadoussac every summer to Spruce Cliff, staying with her grandparents until they died in the late 1880s, and then with her Uncle William and his three children. An old family letter reveals that she lived for a time with her sister, Erie, and her husband, George Languedoc, in Ottawa.
Mary died in 1915 at the age of fifty-one. In the chapel, both the baptismal font and a wall plaque are given in memory of her fifty years of summer residency in Tadoussac.