I love this! I always try to find out what the driving force was behind ancestors moving as well. I want to know why! Because I can't imagine getting on one of those rickety boats voluntarily 😅
Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan are my tenth great grandparents. But I'm apparently descended from them 47 ways. Endogamy indeed 🤣🤣
We HAD to be cousins! Intriguing that you've found 47 ways! I think if I did a visual of the Bourgeois branch, it would look like a tangled thicket from which tendrils emerged.
My favorite one to look at is Jean Gaudet, lol. Also a tenth great grandfather but I'm descended from him more than 100 ways 😂 sometimes I wonder if it won't be possible to one day reconstruct the genome of some of these founding ancestors using their descendants DNA because I once did the math for how much I should share with him (theoretically, roughly) and it was a lot considering how long ago it was! 🤣
Moi aussi, chere cousine! I looked up Jean and then found three children who are ancestors. Went to the next generation and aiyaiyai...like bittersweet vine just taking over everything -- lol.
What a great idea about reconstructing genomes. The image comes of an Acadian recovery a la Jurassic Park.
Are you also a member of Nicole Gallant Nunes' Facebook group? At this point, I've taken to calling her a cousin-sister or sister-cousin for all the overlaps we have.
Fascinating! I loved this account of one deportee, that brought this terrible event to life, and showed us what incredible courage and endurance she and her fellow victims of the Derangement had. In answer to your question as to why a French person would choose to settle in New France in the seventeenth century, I can tell you as a European historian that the timeframe for French migration to Canada was short compared to most national migrations to the new world, with most people arriving in a window of about 60 years. This migration coincided with the terrible hardship of the Little Ice Age- what Annales historian Pierre Goubert called the "tragic seventeenth century." France experienced famines over and over again-- with harvest failures in 1630-1631, 1649-1652, 1661-1662, 1693-1694, and 1709-1710. Of course the people who came to Canada were not starving peasants, but the general political, social and economic crisis conditions would be enough to make anyone want to start fresh somewhere else. And of course, there were some nice incentives from the government to do so!
Wow! Now I can offer a backstory possibility to the brother who thought it was all about adventure, exploration, and a better life. Well, maybe the better life was a motivator. This is fascinating -- we talk about migration crises now in the face of climate change, and here is something in our not-so-distant past that relates. Do you know whether the Little Ice Age was an earth cycle, or whether some other nature phenomenon provoked it -- I don't know, some volcano erupting somewhere or some meteor disrupting the world. Going to Google now.
Thanks Ann, interesting & well written. The free-range analogy had me thinking, well not so free in view of Le Grand Derangement! But before the 1750s it seems an Evangeline-romanticism to characterise Acadian life as limited to the extended-family hamlet; sure, survival required long hours of hard physical work cooperatively, but there were large families - they seem to have reproduced lustily and young people headed off to make their own lives (and new Acadian communities), like most of us have done through the ages. We tend to think of economic forces driving movement (and they do) but I think there's also a very common urge just to leave the parental home and make one's own life as a young adult. Post-1750s, I see Acadians once dispersed & deliberately separated damn-well determined to freely make their own decisions to regroup as families and settle where they chose not where they were dumped. If bloody-mindedness and two fingers up to Authority isnt an Acadian characteristic, I'll have to look elsewhere. Thanks again.
Absolutely, Ian! I'm still looking at whether motives might be different for men and women. Pepe Maurice Vigneault came from Quebec and married Meme Comeau in Port Royal where her family was living in little hamlets along the Dauphin River. Then, in 1720, the whole family ups and leaves for Port Toulouse when the English governor makes fishing licenses conditional on oath-taking (that two fingers up to Authority?) Some of the sons move to Beaubassin where they marry Acadian women from families living in hamlets there. Do you have Acadian stories to share? it was actually the Doucet name that got me started on this Acadian passion: https://acadiann.substack.com/p/doucet-is-an-acadian-name
Re motives (for moving) possibly being different for men and women... They may be different, but I'd allow for a lot of individual variation among any generalisations. Sure there was an awful lot of childbearing; the 1671 census had three Doucet families with 15 children, including that of Marguerite Doucet, 46, married to Habrahan Dugast 55, an “armurier", their seven children Marie 20 and Anne 17 who were both already married, Claude 19, Martin 15, Marguerite 14, Habrahan 10, Magdeleine 5.
But this doesnt mean it was a case of 'men-the-wanderers versus women-the-homekeepers'. As with Marguerite, women are often listed as head of the household even with a partner or husband there, and kept their own surnames (streets ahead of what the UK censuses two centuries later show us about male/female equality there).
I think it all depends on who we choose as being 'typical'. My Irish grandmother Ellen Connell (or O'Connell when putting on ancient airs and graces), who married Louis Doucet (Joseph Louis at birth but he had a brother Joseph) in 1913 had emigrated alone as a young teenager from Ennis in Ireland to Montreal in around 1900 (I have the date but not to hand), followed a year or two later by her sister Mary who was a witness at her wedding (named as Helene then, accented). No sign any of the Connell boys emigrated. The girls were following the tragic Irish tradition from the famine years only two generations earlier of 'get out if you want to survive'. They had first to get from Ennis in the poverty-struck west to Belfast (on foot?), then ship to Liverpool for an ocean-going liner (passengers only, grouped by class & funds) to Quebec, then on to Montreal - and must have somehow squirrelled away the fares for all this as well as found shipping times and routes. Pretty impressive for a 15-year-old girl to do alone even today. Determined and maybe desperate to escape. They worked as domestic servants before marrying. I read one vague reference to there being an Irish community in Montreal at the time (but I have found no other details on this), so by hearsay they may have been following an established route (otherwise, why Montreal?).
Similarly, on my mother's side of my family, among her three aunts and three uncles it was the boys who lived close to their mother in Scotland all their lives (their mother's difficult life suggests why), while two of the girls went awandering and established their own families elsewhere.
One of the few things my père perdu said to me was that he joined the RCAF in 1940 because he had no job or prospects, living in the francophone western (?) part of Montreal which was impoverished. And, he said, his mother (Ellen) disliked them speaking French at home. Despite the folk-memory of protestant English oppression of the catholic Irish she wanted them to speak English - surely this was at least partly to give the children a better chance of getting a job. My father, Joseph Cleophas Jean Doucet became known post-war as Cliff - as war industries closed down, like many he struggled to find work - and was named on his 2012 obituary as Clifford John. In the current urge to reclaim francophone-ness, I think it's worth remembering that anglicisation had an economic driver for many people, survival.
He also told me rather proudly that he'd traced his ancestry back to Acadie, the only mention I had of this, late in life (I've had to do that work again, with much help from Nicole Nunes). Signing Pledges strikes a wrong note for me, but as so much family history was unspoken or hidden as I was growing up I started to put it on a website - https://www.doucet-backstories.net/acadia/ - for grandkids etc to read as & when they're interested (and other family history is there). I wish all parents would tell their children, when little, stories of where they grew up, what life was like then, their relatives and homes and movings; fireside winter evening chats; those fragments will lodge in the child's mind and be remembered years later, threads to pull to discover more, and show that each of us is part of something much larger.
Oh my...this feels like opening a treasure chest. Eager to read those stories on your Website...Nicole is just the best of people, n'est ce pas?
Your story of Irish immigration in the famine years is kin to what a writing pal of mine and I recently talked about in her migration in the 90s (?) from Ireland to the U.S.
Thank you Ann, that has given me material to understand the 'Why Montreal' question in Ellen's case. Over the years I've found that getting the ancestral dates is one thing, but it's bare-bones stuff; getting locations and moves between places puts some flesh on the bones; understanding the social contexts of the various times adds more, but still hardest because most human/individual is the question 'why' - this remains guesswork.... did my grandmother Ellen Connell look at her mother's life and her grandmother's in the 1890s in Ennis (both of them illiterate, signing certificates with an X) and bolshy-teenagerishly think "no way, I want something better" - ? The coming of compulsory primary education (= just literacy and numeracy) in the late 1800s in Britain (which then included Ireland) did much to make changes between generations around this time. Ellen and her siblings went to school, her parents had not; I think her generation started to think of themselves as being different to their parents. In the small very rural Welsh village I live close to, in the late 1800s one of the boys in the next small basic cottage along from mine was one of the first to attend primary school; this new law meant boys and girls no longer spent their childhoods on farms etc but entered the big wide world (of the village!) and often had to lodge there during the week (no time for near-subsistence farming parents to walk or horse&cart them into the village & back each day); the kids had their eyes opened to how others lived, the local cash economy grew because their parents needed money to pay for lodgings and villagers had a new source of income, the kids needed slightly better clothes, and shoes (when many kids of poor families went barefoot) had to be afforded. Childhood experiences and mental horizons probably changed in a few generations. Previous Irish generations were driven out of Ireland to escape starvation; Ellen and Mary made choices about where they might make a better life - that's how I understand it.
There are so many aspects to all this I struggle to keep up, and much yet to write - more to find out about Ellen, but I'm running out of energy; and it's a pastime (interesting word) for the short winter days here when I cannot be outside much.
So many aspects - not only an Acadian diaspora but also overlapping diasporas, Irish, Scottish, and probably German/mid-European (Lunenberg etc). In Scotland as in Ireland, the English are the villains of the un-peaceful piece and there's also a Protestant versus Catholic theme with the 1746 Battle of Culloden crushing Scottish Catholic rebellion - prompting generations of Scottish migration to the 'New World', which Alistair MacLeod (a Cape Breton-er/Nova Scotian) amongst others have based family fiction on. My maternal Ross line puts my foot in that camp too. Sometimes I think the best thing my secretive parents did was give me both Louis and Ross as middle names, but it is all a bit much sometimes too.
What you're doing is really helpful and interesting, and I'll continue to dip in and out. There's also a life-now to be lived, grass to be cut, animals fed.
I love this! I always try to find out what the driving force was behind ancestors moving as well. I want to know why! Because I can't imagine getting on one of those rickety boats voluntarily 😅
Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan are my tenth great grandparents. But I'm apparently descended from them 47 ways. Endogamy indeed 🤣🤣
We HAD to be cousins! Intriguing that you've found 47 ways! I think if I did a visual of the Bourgeois branch, it would look like a tangled thicket from which tendrils emerged.
My favorite one to look at is Jean Gaudet, lol. Also a tenth great grandfather but I'm descended from him more than 100 ways 😂 sometimes I wonder if it won't be possible to one day reconstruct the genome of some of these founding ancestors using their descendants DNA because I once did the math for how much I should share with him (theoretically, roughly) and it was a lot considering how long ago it was! 🤣
Moi aussi, chere cousine! I looked up Jean and then found three children who are ancestors. Went to the next generation and aiyaiyai...like bittersweet vine just taking over everything -- lol.
What a great idea about reconstructing genomes. The image comes of an Acadian recovery a la Jurassic Park.
Are you also a member of Nicole Gallant Nunes' Facebook group? At this point, I've taken to calling her a cousin-sister or sister-cousin for all the overlaps we have.
I will check the group out! I have started to think of all my DNA matches who are related to both my parents a ton of ways as my "super cousins" 😅
Fascinating! I loved this account of one deportee, that brought this terrible event to life, and showed us what incredible courage and endurance she and her fellow victims of the Derangement had. In answer to your question as to why a French person would choose to settle in New France in the seventeenth century, I can tell you as a European historian that the timeframe for French migration to Canada was short compared to most national migrations to the new world, with most people arriving in a window of about 60 years. This migration coincided with the terrible hardship of the Little Ice Age- what Annales historian Pierre Goubert called the "tragic seventeenth century." France experienced famines over and over again-- with harvest failures in 1630-1631, 1649-1652, 1661-1662, 1693-1694, and 1709-1710. Of course the people who came to Canada were not starving peasants, but the general political, social and economic crisis conditions would be enough to make anyone want to start fresh somewhere else. And of course, there were some nice incentives from the government to do so!
Wow! Now I can offer a backstory possibility to the brother who thought it was all about adventure, exploration, and a better life. Well, maybe the better life was a motivator. This is fascinating -- we talk about migration crises now in the face of climate change, and here is something in our not-so-distant past that relates. Do you know whether the Little Ice Age was an earth cycle, or whether some other nature phenomenon provoked it -- I don't know, some volcano erupting somewhere or some meteor disrupting the world. Going to Google now.
Thanks Ann, interesting & well written. The free-range analogy had me thinking, well not so free in view of Le Grand Derangement! But before the 1750s it seems an Evangeline-romanticism to characterise Acadian life as limited to the extended-family hamlet; sure, survival required long hours of hard physical work cooperatively, but there were large families - they seem to have reproduced lustily and young people headed off to make their own lives (and new Acadian communities), like most of us have done through the ages. We tend to think of economic forces driving movement (and they do) but I think there's also a very common urge just to leave the parental home and make one's own life as a young adult. Post-1750s, I see Acadians once dispersed & deliberately separated damn-well determined to freely make their own decisions to regroup as families and settle where they chose not where they were dumped. If bloody-mindedness and two fingers up to Authority isnt an Acadian characteristic, I'll have to look elsewhere. Thanks again.
Absolutely, Ian! I'm still looking at whether motives might be different for men and women. Pepe Maurice Vigneault came from Quebec and married Meme Comeau in Port Royal where her family was living in little hamlets along the Dauphin River. Then, in 1720, the whole family ups and leaves for Port Toulouse when the English governor makes fishing licenses conditional on oath-taking (that two fingers up to Authority?) Some of the sons move to Beaubassin where they marry Acadian women from families living in hamlets there. Do you have Acadian stories to share? it was actually the Doucet name that got me started on this Acadian passion: https://acadiann.substack.com/p/doucet-is-an-acadian-name
Hi Ann,
Re motives (for moving) possibly being different for men and women... They may be different, but I'd allow for a lot of individual variation among any generalisations. Sure there was an awful lot of childbearing; the 1671 census had three Doucet families with 15 children, including that of Marguerite Doucet, 46, married to Habrahan Dugast 55, an “armurier", their seven children Marie 20 and Anne 17 who were both already married, Claude 19, Martin 15, Marguerite 14, Habrahan 10, Magdeleine 5.
But this doesnt mean it was a case of 'men-the-wanderers versus women-the-homekeepers'. As with Marguerite, women are often listed as head of the household even with a partner or husband there, and kept their own surnames (streets ahead of what the UK censuses two centuries later show us about male/female equality there).
I think it all depends on who we choose as being 'typical'. My Irish grandmother Ellen Connell (or O'Connell when putting on ancient airs and graces), who married Louis Doucet (Joseph Louis at birth but he had a brother Joseph) in 1913 had emigrated alone as a young teenager from Ennis in Ireland to Montreal in around 1900 (I have the date but not to hand), followed a year or two later by her sister Mary who was a witness at her wedding (named as Helene then, accented). No sign any of the Connell boys emigrated. The girls were following the tragic Irish tradition from the famine years only two generations earlier of 'get out if you want to survive'. They had first to get from Ennis in the poverty-struck west to Belfast (on foot?), then ship to Liverpool for an ocean-going liner (passengers only, grouped by class & funds) to Quebec, then on to Montreal - and must have somehow squirrelled away the fares for all this as well as found shipping times and routes. Pretty impressive for a 15-year-old girl to do alone even today. Determined and maybe desperate to escape. They worked as domestic servants before marrying. I read one vague reference to there being an Irish community in Montreal at the time (but I have found no other details on this), so by hearsay they may have been following an established route (otherwise, why Montreal?).
Similarly, on my mother's side of my family, among her three aunts and three uncles it was the boys who lived close to their mother in Scotland all their lives (their mother's difficult life suggests why), while two of the girls went awandering and established their own families elsewhere.
One of the few things my père perdu said to me was that he joined the RCAF in 1940 because he had no job or prospects, living in the francophone western (?) part of Montreal which was impoverished. And, he said, his mother (Ellen) disliked them speaking French at home. Despite the folk-memory of protestant English oppression of the catholic Irish she wanted them to speak English - surely this was at least partly to give the children a better chance of getting a job. My father, Joseph Cleophas Jean Doucet became known post-war as Cliff - as war industries closed down, like many he struggled to find work - and was named on his 2012 obituary as Clifford John. In the current urge to reclaim francophone-ness, I think it's worth remembering that anglicisation had an economic driver for many people, survival.
He also told me rather proudly that he'd traced his ancestry back to Acadie, the only mention I had of this, late in life (I've had to do that work again, with much help from Nicole Nunes). Signing Pledges strikes a wrong note for me, but as so much family history was unspoken or hidden as I was growing up I started to put it on a website - https://www.doucet-backstories.net/acadia/ - for grandkids etc to read as & when they're interested (and other family history is there). I wish all parents would tell their children, when little, stories of where they grew up, what life was like then, their relatives and homes and movings; fireside winter evening chats; those fragments will lodge in the child's mind and be remembered years later, threads to pull to discover more, and show that each of us is part of something much larger.
Oh my...this feels like opening a treasure chest. Eager to read those stories on your Website...Nicole is just the best of people, n'est ce pas?
Your story of Irish immigration in the famine years is kin to what a writing pal of mine and I recently talked about in her migration in the 90s (?) from Ireland to the U.S.
Do you subscribe to Ancestory on Substack? She has both Acadian and Irish ancestors, too, and a connection to Montreal. Fascinating read recently about Montreal 1878: Boyne's Red Shore https://substack.com/home/post/p-147669837?r=2xsqqu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you Ann, that has given me material to understand the 'Why Montreal' question in Ellen's case. Over the years I've found that getting the ancestral dates is one thing, but it's bare-bones stuff; getting locations and moves between places puts some flesh on the bones; understanding the social contexts of the various times adds more, but still hardest because most human/individual is the question 'why' - this remains guesswork.... did my grandmother Ellen Connell look at her mother's life and her grandmother's in the 1890s in Ennis (both of them illiterate, signing certificates with an X) and bolshy-teenagerishly think "no way, I want something better" - ? The coming of compulsory primary education (= just literacy and numeracy) in the late 1800s in Britain (which then included Ireland) did much to make changes between generations around this time. Ellen and her siblings went to school, her parents had not; I think her generation started to think of themselves as being different to their parents. In the small very rural Welsh village I live close to, in the late 1800s one of the boys in the next small basic cottage along from mine was one of the first to attend primary school; this new law meant boys and girls no longer spent their childhoods on farms etc but entered the big wide world (of the village!) and often had to lodge there during the week (no time for near-subsistence farming parents to walk or horse&cart them into the village & back each day); the kids had their eyes opened to how others lived, the local cash economy grew because their parents needed money to pay for lodgings and villagers had a new source of income, the kids needed slightly better clothes, and shoes (when many kids of poor families went barefoot) had to be afforded. Childhood experiences and mental horizons probably changed in a few generations. Previous Irish generations were driven out of Ireland to escape starvation; Ellen and Mary made choices about where they might make a better life - that's how I understand it.
There are so many aspects to all this I struggle to keep up, and much yet to write - more to find out about Ellen, but I'm running out of energy; and it's a pastime (interesting word) for the short winter days here when I cannot be outside much.
So many aspects - not only an Acadian diaspora but also overlapping diasporas, Irish, Scottish, and probably German/mid-European (Lunenberg etc). In Scotland as in Ireland, the English are the villains of the un-peaceful piece and there's also a Protestant versus Catholic theme with the 1746 Battle of Culloden crushing Scottish Catholic rebellion - prompting generations of Scottish migration to the 'New World', which Alistair MacLeod (a Cape Breton-er/Nova Scotian) amongst others have based family fiction on. My maternal Ross line puts my foot in that camp too. Sometimes I think the best thing my secretive parents did was give me both Louis and Ross as middle names, but it is all a bit much sometimes too.
What you're doing is really helpful and interesting, and I'll continue to dip in and out. There's also a life-now to be lived, grass to be cut, animals fed.