photo by Aroostock County Tourism
I was thinking about crosses because Maine Governor Janet Mills recently signed a proclamation that sets June 28 as Maine Acadia Day forever more. The date was picked because the oral history in the Madawaska region of the state says that Acadian refugees landed on the shores of the St. John River that day in 1785, and that they erected a cross. Now at The Acadian Landing is a 14-foot marble cross representing the one erected in 1785.
Which led me to wonder about other Acadian cross monuments.
The French Cross in Morden, NS
The Deportation Cross in Grand Pré
Benediction of the Deportation Cross at Hortonville, 1924. Parks Canada
And my own Vigneault cross.
As cousin George Comeaux says, I’m going to take you through the long short-cut to how this cross came to me.
The story begins with a fitful late fall night when I couldn’t sleep because the chronic pain of an autoimmune-disorder-that-doesn’t-exist flared. Youtube is part of the pain management plan.
Being as how it was near Halloween, I wondered whether Acadians had ghost stories. One thing led to another and I found Alan Melanson’s video in which, at about the 23-minute mark, he talked about graveyard tours in Annapolis Royal.
Ah, Annapolis Royal/Port Royal. The setting for The Promise, my historical faction (mix of fact and fiction) short story about my Vigneault ancestors. (It made it to the finalist round of a historical fiction contest two months earlier.)
I followed Alan around Youtube and landed on an interview he did with Jennifer and Charlie Thibodeau as they embarked on their project to restore the Belleisle Hall Acadian Cultural Center. Almost in passing, he mentioned (marker 8:50) that they make wooden crosses from fallen branches they find on the properties once owned by our ancestors. He called the crosses an example of the touchstones that matter deeply to Acadians.
Might they have one for the Vigneault family? A few clicks, and I found them at The Acadian Peasant, and, yes, they still make them.
But they didn’t have the Vigneaults.
Using Mapannapolis storymaps we located the Port Royal homesite of the Vigneault family in 1715. The Thibodeaus visited the former Vigneault homesite, now the site of The Mad Hatter Wine Bar. (Which is its own kind of appropriate for at least my line of their descendants.)
Charlie and Jennifer found a branch at the high-tide mark behind the bar, looking they said, as if it was about to set sail itself. Sent chills down my spine — in my short story, ancestor Maurice brought a driftwood cross to wife Marguerite Comeau in the months before they set sail from Port Royal to Port Toulouse in 1720.
Art imitating life imitating art.
I’ve draped the cord and cross above my writing space as a daily reminder to continue to write the longer story of this branch of the family, faction though it may be.
You can read about one imagined reason for the family leaving Port Royal here:
Resources
Hooray for the governor for celebrating this important history. And hooray for you, for keeping it alive for all of us.