OK folks - a longer post than most! 😊
I've been very busy with client projects, a number of repeat customers who just can't get enough of shaking their family tree... projects based in the American Midwest - Kansas, Missouri and further east such as Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, the typical routes of migration (in reverse). I had a fun project that traced a family from Scotland to Philadelphia, southwestern Ontario and adjacent Michigan where the border was just a short hop across the St. Clair river, and then down to Virginia. This family moved a lot!
I've had a number of Native American projects, tracing family history in tribal rolls, etc. And now some that involve Mexico and El Salvador - glad my Spanish comes in handy. But I've also had a lot of projects tracing Canadian ancestry, specifically French Canadian in Quebec and Acadia (roughly what is now the Maritime provinces of Canada), putting my French to good use. So many migrated for work in the second half of the 1800s from French-speaking Canada to New England and New York. I've been doing a lot of projects focused on that specific kind of migration, so tracing back across the border into Canada on behalf of clients.
This has reminded me that I need to get back to my own family research - I have deep roots in French-speaking Canada, and only recently became aware that that includes some Acadian ancestors - for those who don't know, the Acadians - French-speaking settlers of what is now Maritime Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, a bit of Newfoundland) and also far eastern Quebec and also northern Maine see map above! - were expelled (a word that doesn't really do justice to what happened) by the British in the 1740s, 1750s, and 1760s, and even later some were kicked out again. This expulsion resulted in a diaspora of a unique cultural group and also populated much of rural Louisiana (the Cajuns are really Acadians - an English elision of the name)... some people know about this, some don't. The Acadians were sent to New England, other ports along the eastern seaboard/ American colonies, places in the Caribbean, and Louisiana as well as England and France, and even the Falkland Islands in the southern hemisphere. CRAZY. This happened some 270-ish years ago, but some people are just now realizing that they have Acadian roots (me included!). Many Acadians tried to return to their homeland; some did, but often Anglicized their names and spoke English instead of French to try to fit in with the Anglo dominant community in eastern Canada. It was really an attempt at genocide, at least cultural if not actual. I don't use that term lightly but read up and you will see what I mean. John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland is a good place to start, or even quicker - just listen to the beautiful song by The Band "Acadian Driftwood" which encapsulates the heartbreaking story so well. I have LOVED that song for decades!
Anyway, I recently watched an amazing video of a meeting of Acadian genealogists and historians, and learned about the work they are doing. I also realized how I need to work on my own genealogy and start writing about my own family history and my discovery of a hidden history. I recently discovered that my great-grandparents had a child who died just a month old of pneumonia, in the winter of 1905 in Boston. No one alive in my family knew that. I found his birth and death certificates, and his name was Basil. His father, my great-grandfather, was Harry Clifford Fowler, who was born and raised in a small town in Kings County, New Brunswick Canada, but had moved to Boston and married a woman he met there in 1904, my great-grandmother, Marie Louise Pillard. Marie Louise was from Troy NY, but her family actually came from Varennes, Quebec in the mid-1800s.
Harry was an Anglophone (English-speaking) Baptist young man, and Marie Louise was a Francophone (French-speaking) Catholic - her first language was French, despite being born in Hudson NY and growing up mainly in Troy NY. The Catholic parish her family attended was predominantly French-Canadian, and masses were held in French. Her parents wrote down the births of their children in their family Bible en Français. I didn't even know that this great-grandmother, who died about 4 years before I was born, spoke French and was Catholic until I was an adult. (Of course as an adult she spoke mainly English.) But more recently, while researching her family line - Pillards and Poiriers in Quebec - I found an ancestor named Jean-Basile Mignault (most often called Basile Mignault). He was Acadian! Born in what is now Nova Scotia, and moved as a young child to St. Denis on the Richelieu River south of Montreal in Quebec (part of the Acadian expulsion), and he fought in the Revolutionary War on the American side, I presume because of his antipathy toward the British who had exiled his family from their homeland.
When I first saw that my great-grandparents had a baby named Basil, I thought of it as an English name - that Harry had suggested the name - he came from UEL stock - meaning (for those who don't know Canadian history) United Empire Loyalists - meaning those in the American colonies who had remained loyal to the British during the American Revolutionary War, and many of whom were given land grants in Canada after the war to populate Canada with English-speaking monarchist loyalists... so Harry's ancestors would have been on the opposite side from his wife's ancestor Basil in that war. But also, now knowing about her Acadian ancestor, Basil, I believe the baby who, sadly, only lived a month at the dawn of the twentieth century in Boston, was likely named after an Acadian hero. I would love to know whether that is true, and also if it was, what was the conversation that took place between Harry and Marie Louise?
Acadian flag
Yesterday I attended a great workshop given by Sunny Jane Morton at the Midwest Genealogy Center on writing our ancestors' stories. I am now determined to not just flesh out more details of this branch of my family tree, but to write about it so that my family can discover this as well. I hope more family members will be inspired to take an interest in our genealogy, our family history that has many twists and turns... stay tuned!
