Hope this is ok to ask, but I recently found out that my great grandfather came to america from Avion, France in 1904 when he was 10 years old. My family is wierd and we don't talk, so this was news to me and I am unlikely to get more information from relatives.
Since I can't get specifics, I would love to get a general idea. What was life like in a small coal mining town in the very early1900s? What was the culture like? What was family life like? What did people wear? What was the predominant religion?
I know you guys can't answer this specificly, but is there a reason why someone would pack up and move all the way accross the world, never to return? Like, Irish immigrants make sense, what with the potato famin. And while I can't imagine living in a coal mining town would be fun, but it doesn't sound like anyone was a great self-starter or anything, so was there a benifit to moving from a poor town in france to a poor town in USA?
Another question I have is why would imigrants completly discard their language and culture of origin? I feel like other families who have been in USA for generations still have conections to their roots. I met a lady whose family still gets together and does german polkas at family holidays. And I have yet to meet an Italian who isn't really into family relationships. And polish decendants have all sorts of recipies, and food passed down from generation to generation. For whatever reason, my specific ancestors seem to have kept nothing from "the old country" My great grandpa's early childhood was spent in France, and he imigrated with his parents, who were adults. And yet, my dad who grew up sitting on this man's lap had no idea that he was from France, or spoke French. So, it seems like it was never mentioned, and any traditions were discarded. Is there a reason why? If other cultures were able to assimulate into the great melting pot and still bring some of their heritage, is there a reason why a french family wouldn't?
The Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, where your ancestor was born, was added in 2012 to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. It comprises 109 sites, including the Terril (spoil tip / slag heap) du Pichonvalles, which is partly in the commune of Avion. The region was a major site of coal production during the Industrial Revolution up to the 1960s (the last pit was closed in 1990).
What was life like in a small coal mining town in the very early 1900s? What was the culture like? What was family life like? What did people wear? What was the predominant religion ?
If you want to get a idea of the life in the area, you may read Emile Zola's classic novel Germinal (1885). It's set about 20 years earlier, and it provides a grim image of the mining life. Possibly, your ancestor's parents were already working in Avion when Zola came to do research in Anzin, about 30 km from there. He discussed with miners and visited pits and miner housings.
The first pit of Avion was opened in 1872 when the village had about 1500 inhabitants, and it had grown to 9000 people in the 1900s, and to 15000 when Polish immigrants arrived in the 1920s. Two companies owned pits in Avion: The Compagnie des mines de Lens (pit N° 5-5 bis) and the Compagnie des mines de Liévin (pits N°4-4 bis and 7-7 bis). Like in other mining towns in Northern France, life revolved around the "pit / spoil tip / miner's housings" trio. A look at the birth certificates of the children born in Avion in 1894 shows that the fathers were either miners or railroad workers.
Let's be clear: life in a mining town was harsh. The largest mining catastrophe in Europe (1099 dead) happened in Courrières in 1906, 11 km from Avion. And children still worked in the mines. At that time, in the Pas-de-Calais, there were still about 6700 boys between between 13 and 16 working underground, and 1200 girls of the same age working above ground (Pierrard, 1987).
But because mining companies needed to attract and retain labour, they looked after the well-being of their employees. Particularly, they provided them with good quality housing. "Good" is relative, but it was better than that used by other factory workers in large cities where unsanitary conditions caused epidemics (like the cholera epidemic that swept across Lille and other northern cities in 1832). The first type of housing, from 1820 onwards, called the corons, consisted in long bands of identical, one-family, one-story brick houses, each with a vegetable garden in the back. After the 1880-1890s, the construction of corons was discontinued and companies built instead small groups of houses side by side, and later separated houses (pavillons). This urban architecture is highly characteristic of French and Belgian mining towns, and it has been often said that it was meant to allow mining companies to better control the miners, socially and politically, though this is debated (Baudelle, 2001).
Company housing was only one aspect of a general "paternalistic" system. Companies also set up dispensaries, schools, grocery shops, canteens, etc. There were bonuses in kind and in money granted to the most deserving families, coal distributions, special allowances for certain holidays such as Saint Barbara's Day, as well as relief and pension funds. One important aspect of mining towns were their rich cultural life. Mining companies encouraged sports clubs (football started to be popular in the early 1900s), pigeon racing associations, philharmonic societies, choirs, gardening, etc.
These were tight communities, whose working class identity was forged in the mines. Union struggles were important. Miners were politically active, and went on strike on a regular basis, for better salaries and living conditions: there were several strikes in Avion in the 1890-1900s. Strikers regularly had to face gendarmes and troops. The population was catholic, but, unlike the farmers around them, they tended to vote for left-wing / socialist parties and their religious practice was lower (Michel, 1974 ; Laury, 1971).
The mining museum of Anzin (about 30 km from Avion) published a small book about the daily life in a miner family in 1900, available online (see Duez, 2018 in Sources). It's in French, but nothing that Google Translate/Deepl.com can't fix.
But is there a reason why someone would pack up and move all the way accross the world, never to return?
It is difficult to answer this question without access to other elements in your family history. The Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin was a land of immigration (Belgians, later Italians, Algerians, and Poles), not emigration. There were plenty of jobs, and as noted above, tight communities and a rich local culture. But mining was hard and dangerous, and miners fought constantly with mining companies. An individual could have numerous reasons to leave town to find better opportunities elsewhere (which is what the hero of Germinal does in the end of the novel). In her article about French immigrants in the US, Foucrier (2019) notes:
In the 1880s, whole families of miners left northern France for Iowa where, in Keokuk County, there were enough of them for a village in Washington Township to be called Frenchtown. Other miners, threatened by the repression exercised by the northern coal bosses, were able to leave for the United States thanks to political and union solidarity networks and find work in the mining regions of Pennsylvania.
An article published in the historical magazine of Louisville, Colorado, talks about its French immigrants, most who came from coal mining towns of the Nord Pas-de-Calais (Bacon, 2016).
These French-speaking families carried on their cultural traditions, but also became integrated into the town. One young man from this neighborhood, a miner, was killed during strike violence and his funeral was attended by 1,500 people. Another was killed in World War II and is still mourned today by people who remember him. Many members of the French families married others of French descent, but some intermarried with members of other immigrant families, such as those from Italy, England, Bulgaria, and Slovenia. Some of the women of French heritage from this neighborhood prepared and served food in the Italian-American restaurants for which the town became famous.
The quote above may shed some light on your last question. French immigration in the US was always relatively small and the scattered French commmunities had no choice than becoming fully assimilated, which may make traditions harder to preserve in the long run. Still, Foucrier notes:
Well assimilated in their public activities, the French preserve their traditions in their private lives. Immersed in an English-speaking world, French migrants have to learn the language in order to improve their chances of finding a job, but they try to keep the French language in their lives, and to pass it on to their children and descendants. Immigrants gradually disappear, but their children often retain a strong interest in the country of their origin. Many speak French, especially if they were educated in France, and memories of the 'old country' are treasured.
You can look up your ancestor's birth certificate in the online archives of the Pas-de-Calais (here https://archivesenligne.pasdecalais.fr/console/ir_seriel.php?id=56&p=formulaire_etat_civil). All you need is his name and approximate date of birth, and that will give you his full birth certificate with a wealth of information about his parents, at least their name, age, profession, and address. It is very possible that the coron house where your ancestor was born is still there and visible on Google Maps! With some digging one could even find if he had siblings and other family members, the military record of his father (which would give information about his whereabouts at different points of his life), or even passenger manifests.
Sources
In addition to u/gerardmenfin 's excellent answer I can add a few additional links.
Politically, probably the biggest event in France in the decade leading up to 1904 was the Dreyfus Affair. Your great great grandparents would probably have been aware of it, but we can only speculate about what they thought. u/rocketsocks talks about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7t5nvk/comment/dtaoh6r
For more on migrants to the United States in this period, see this answer by u/UrAccountabilibuddy/ - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djgvb7/comment/f474phv
As u/gerardmenfin says, there was much less immigration from France so that would have influenced how your ancestors assimilated compared to the German or Irish immigrants discussed in the linked answer.