Hector De Claire

Hector De Claire (1836–1906) was a French-American tailor. Born into a Catholic family in Lille, he became a socialist and a freethinker at an early age. He emigrated to the United States, where he became a US citizen after fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War. He plied his trade as an itinerant worker in Michigan, where he married Harriet Elizabeth Billings and had three children: Marion, Adelaide and Voltairine. After Marion's death at a young age, the family moved to St. Johns, where they lived in extreme poverty. To find better work, he left his family and moved to Port Huron, where he was later joined by his daughter Voltairine. He paid for her education at a Catholic school in Canada, after which he resumed itinerant labor and later retired to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he died.