All my life, everyone said our family trail was lost. Obscured, geneologically speaking, in the bilingual weeds somewhere in deepest, darkest Clinton County, New York. Nobody could remember the details of the paternal line, much before great-grandpa Joseph, that is. Seems the family thought better of its Franco sounding (and looking) surname, and changed it to something more, well, Anglo. (The guy who changed it also appeared to have converted for a time to ..shudder...protestantism! That didn't last long, they buried him in the Catholic cemetary along with the rest of the tribe.)
Trouble is, name changes can spell disaster when it come to unraveling a family blood line. And for now, going on three generations, nobody has really known where we came from. Or when. Until now.
Thanks to the wonderful online registry/search engine/original source repository called Ancestry.com (based, not surprisingly in Utah...) and the tireless work being done by often unknown kin all over the world, I was able to piece together -- reasonably effortlessly -- a family geneology that goes back to the mid-seventeenth century. Early by anyone's count for North Americans, especially those who emigrated to what was then called New France.
Thrilling facts emerged. We came from Normandy, (Rouen, to be specific) across the Atlantic to a place just outside Quebec city, settling on Ile d'Orleans. Our first North American ancestor, Pierre, took a wife in 1656 from among the ranks of the Filles du Roi, (Daughters of the King,) a band of some 700 mail-order brides dispatched by Louis XIV to shore up the flagging French colony on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
Some five successive generations of Joseph's made their way south and west, along the path of the river 'till they crossed into the US in the mid 1800's presumably to mine coal in Mooers, NY. My grandparents, both from Mooers, moved farther south still, settling in Vermont in the early years of the twentieth century. And as satisfying as a complete family tree can be, it can't compare to how thrilling it is to see your grandfather's World War One draft card describing a man you never knew as a person "of medium height, slender, with blue eyes and auburn hair." Or to read a census record describing your three-year-old grandmother's people as Canadian immigrants, one French and one English, but both English speakers, able to read and write.
So, having thought all my life I would never be able to connect the dots among my Canadian ancestors the way my proud wasp maternal line had done way back to Castle Donnington, England (don't get excited, we lived outside the walls and it's now a speedway...) I am proud to report I will soon be inducted into the Societe de les filles du Roi, an honor as great, or greater to me than all the Mayflower Society members put together. Vive la (Nouvelle) France! and God Bless the internet.
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