At the start of 2026, keenly aware of modern sensitivities about appropriating a culture one is not a part of, I wondered why Acadian culture isn’t appropriated by those outside an Acadian identity.

Where are the sports teams named Fighting Acadians or the offensive logos marketing products? With the notable exception of Evangeline tourism, which Acadians have reclaimed as their own, few outsiders seem interested in appropriating the heritage now.

In the “be careful what you wish for” category, along came AI, and those using it to manufacture and confabulate history.

I’m not talking about differences of interpretation among historians. Or the delicious ride of well-rooted historical fiction. Or the ancestor tale morphed to mythological realms through generations of retelling. Or the unusual world of the modern Acadieman.

free image download from creator Dano Leblanc https://archive.org/details/acadieman

I’m talking about YouTube videos that sound factual, interesting, even exciting, but are unsourced and unreliable. The ones that either outright make stuff up, including sources that don’t exist, or that synthesize just enough documentation to sound plausible but then veer off into unsupportable conclusions.

Earlier this week, I came across a YouTube video about Acadian DNA. What exciting new findings! Except that the three scientific studies listed as references don't exist.

The narrator sounds AI-generated, and the graphics look it, but that doesn’t bother me all that much. I work with ChatGPT in a zone of détente and accommodation. I’ve set standards for it, and, wryly to me, it applies those standards to what I write if I begin to drift into speculation when my aim is evidence-based conclusion.

“Acadian DNA,” Mothers of Acadia project, administered by Denis Savard; a documented mtDNA/Y-DNA genealogy project

What has me ballistic about this particular DNA video is the outright fabrication of reference articles. The Association des Acadiens-Métis Souriquois blog in July by Marie Rundquist called them “ghost citations.” She used Gemini to help sort fact from distortion. Of the purported research by Claude Bhérer, Gemini speculated about how the false citation may have been generated: The AI scraped her real-world expertise and backdated a fake paper to make its script sound authoritative.

I asked ChatGPT to find the citations from the video. Its conclusions mirror those of Gemini.

ChatGPT: This looks like a very good example of AI confabulation built around a scaffolding of genuine history…That’s why this is much more dangerous than a completely nonsensical video. A knowledgeable viewer can recognize enough true Acadian history to lower their guard…So yes: I would classify this video as unreliable. Not “somewhat speculative.” Not “popularized science.” It appears to contain fabricated scholarship intermixed with genuine Acadian history…Interesting claims deserve investigation; citations deserve verification; conclusions have to survive both.

After this, another Acadian genetics video popped up in my social media feed, this one from 2025. This, too, started with recognizable Acadian history. Good, but something was off that I couldn’t quite identify. I analyzed it with ChatGPT as co-pilot: rhetorical confidence exceeds its evidentiary foundation.

Which I thought was hilarious, and reminded me of something I sometimes say to people: You can’t believe everything you think.

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To which ChatGPT responded: “Rhetorical confidence exceeds its evidentiary foundation” is what happens when you give that problem a narrator, dramatic music, stock footage, and a YouTube channel.

It amuses me to see a LLM learning wit and sarcasm. It’s one reason we’ve reached détente and accommodation.

It’s also why I use it to check my own biases. I thought I knew the Mark Twain quote that began this post, but, darn, it’s my own moment of You can’t believe everything you think. Evidence that Mark Twain originated this hasn’t been found. Garson O’Toole, a master of sourcing quotes, concludes its creator is anonymous. In conclusion, the target saying evolved incrementally over time. Instances have been attributed to a variety of humorists such as Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, Kin Hubbard, and Will Rogers. However, there is no substantive evidence that the saying was crafted by one of these funny men. The ascription remains anonymous.

Is there anything I can do to advocate for accuracy and transparency when it comes to the subject of Acadians? AI isn’t going away. Confabulators and exaggerators and BS artists are part of our shared humanity. What can I contribute to solving this problem?

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An Acadian Bookshelf. (This is rudimentary. Really rudimentary.)

On June 2, 2026, Vanessa Riley published Move That Dang Rock on her Write of Passage Substack. I commented that I have a dream to have a niche for Acadian writers a la Lauren's dream for Black romance writers. She replied: Do it. And let me know your progress.

So it begins. A slow go. A bit larger than I meant when I dreamed of a niche for writers. I was thinking of fiction. But AI-fabrication of cultural history has me rethinking that idea.

On the Bookshelf belongs documentation, story, podcast, and video. Where I’ll start is with a limited selection made on the basis of whatever I’m working on or reading. Feel free to add your findings in the comments — or create your lists for us to share. AI-assisted material is okay; AI-manufactured evidence is unwelcome.

Enjoy but verify. You have to know enough of your Acadian heritage story to raise an eyebrow at a fact fabulously presented but bereft of support.

This is war!

About Acadiann

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Genetics

Bergeron, Josée. Contribution différentielle des ancêtres d'origine acadienne au bassin génétique des populations régionales du Québec. Master's thesis, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2005.

Bherer C, Labuda D, Roy-Gagnon MH, Houde L, Tremblay M, Vézina H. Admixed ancestry and stratification of Quebec regional populations. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2011 Mar;144(3):432-41. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.21424. Epub 2010 Nov 10. PMID: 21302269.

Ebermann I, Lopez I, Bitner-Glindzicz M, Brown C, Koenekoop RK, Bolz HJ. Deafblindness in French Canadians from Quebec: a predominant founder mutation in the USH1C gene provides the first genetic link with the Acadian population. Genome Biol. 2007;8(4):R47. doi: 10.1186/gb-2007-8-4-r47. PMID: 17407589; PMCID: PMC1895989.

Gagnon L, Moreau C, Laprise C, Vézina H, Girard SL. Deciphering the genetic structure of the Quebec founder population using genealogies. Eur J Hum Genet. 2024 Jan;32(1):91-97. doi: 10.1038/s41431-023-01356-2. Epub 2023 Apr 4. PMID: 37016017; PMCID: PMC10772069.

McClelland, P., Femerling, G., Laflamme, R. et al. A multi-ancestry genetic reference for the Quebec population. Nat Commun 17, 1319 (2026).

Moreau C, Vézina H, Yotova V, Hamon R, de Knijff P, Sinnett D, Labuda D. Genetic heterogeneity in regional populations of Quebec--parental lineages in the Gaspe Peninsula. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2009 Aug;139(4):512-22. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.21012. PMID: 19226649.

Robichaud PP, Allain EP, Belbraouet S, Bhérer C, Mamelona J, Harquail J, Crapoulet S, Crapoulet N, Bélanger M, Ben Amor M. Pathogenic variants carrier screening in New Brunswick: Acadians reveal high carrier frequency for multiple genetic disorders. BMC Med Genomics. 2022 Apr 29;15(1):98. doi: 10.1186/s12920-022-01249-1. PMID: 35488281; PMCID: PMC9055701.

Roy-Gagnon MH, Moreau C, Bherer C, St-Onge P, Sinnett D, Laprise C, Vézina H, Labuda D. Genomic and genealogical investigation of the French Canadian founder population structure. Hum Genet. 2011 May;129(5):521-31. doi: 10.1007/s00439-010-0945-x. Epub 2011 Jan 15. PMID: 21234765.

Sirugo G, Keats B, Fujita R, Duclos F, Purohit K, Koenig M, Mandel JL. Friedreich ataxia in Louisiana Acadians: demonstration of a founder effect by analysis of microsatellite-generated extended haplotypes. Am J Hum Genet. 1992 Mar;50(3):559-66. PMID: 1347194; PMCID: PMC1684290.

AI commentary

Dr. Patrick Lacroix, historian and Director of the Acadian Archives, talked about the pros and cons of the use of AI in historical research in 2024 in his Query the Past post The Franco-Americans of ChatGPT .

Mark Twain

O’Toole, Garson. November 18, 2018. Quote Origin: It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So , accessed August 22, 2026. Quote Investigator, powered by WordPress

Photo by Lu Costa, used with permission

Since the 1881 first national Acadian convention in Memramcook, New Brunswick, Acadian people have celebrated August 15 as National Acadian Day. In 2003, the government of Canada passed the National Acadian Day Act to recognize the contributions of Acadians to Canadian life.

If you live in the Canadian Maritimes, parts of Québec, or northern Maine, you’d be hard-pressed to rise that morning and not find a celebration of community and culture nearby.

Interactive map

Not so, here in Massachusetts, though pride in Acadian heritage is just as fierce.

As my family historian, I want us to take an interest in our cultures and heritages. Last year, I decided to do something to popularize Acadian heritage within my inner family circle. I took a page from the book of my Uncle Arthur Forcier and decided to pair the holiday with a gift.

In honor of the day, I had T-shirts made for my sister’s four biological grandchildren and one step-grandchild. They each selected their favorite animal. For two of them, I was able to find designs from Acadian artist Patsy Cormier.

photo by Susan Paradis, used with permission

The point was to introduce them to the idea that Acadian lineage is part of their heritage. Even the step-grandchild, whose actual lineage I don’t know. I kept thinking of the speaker who once opened a World Acadian Congress with a welcome to all Acadians — by birth, heritage, lineage, adoption, affinity, or acceptance. It’s a big tent.

This year, I’ve upped the ante.

I collaborated with a local paper artist, who makes handmade journals (the photo at the top of the page), to make some of the cutest personal journals I’ve seen. Okay, I’m biased. But they really are cute.

The cover had to be the Acadian Flag, Acadian day date, and the child’s name. The inside cover page, the back inside cover, and the back cover each have unique images tailored to the child. I’m hoping that’ll be enough for the kids to keep them with their mementos from childhood. Cash and Acadian flag pins should reinforce the memory.

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That’s similar to what kept Uncle Arthur’s memory alive in my mind and those of my three younger siblings.

This summer, I started one of those do-it-someday projects, which is why Acadiann went dormant.

I’m turning a stack of scrapbooks bequeathed to me about 25 years ago into a series of articles about Arthur’s vaudeville, circus, nightclub/cabaret, and either Army Special Services or USO days (still sorting that out). I’d known nothing about that time of his life. When I asked the sibs for their memories, they, too, had a vague recollection that he was a Fonzal, but they remembered more clearly the Christmas money gift, along with playing penny poker with his siblings at our house.

Then a “duh” moment struck. The Acadian Vigneaus, whose lives are the basis for the historical fiction I’m working on, are paternal line ancestors. Arthur is my paternal uncle. The only one. He’s one generation closer to the diaspora than I am.

The lineage from the diaspora to the grand hemorrhagie involves a good lot of the ancestors picking up and moving homes. Arthur’s performing life was lived out of a trunk (which is sitting somewhere in my attic). That begs for reflection about habits and patterns passed from one generation to the next.

From Arthur (and my father Wilfred) the Acadian line goes through their mom Angeline Chenevert to grandfather Ulderic to Marie Louise Chevrefils to Marguerite Benoit to 3rd great-grandmother Victoire Bourgeois, who died in one of Québec’s Little Acadies in 1824 and who was born in Miquelon in 1775.

Acadian lineage of Victoire Bourgeois, Arthur’s 3rd great-grandmother, created on WikiTree

Now and then, new and old traditions, celebrating survival and remembering those who passed — all this is fodder for participating in National Acadian Day no matter where you are. Share the stories. Pass them to the next generations. Bribe them if you have to.

Acadian Memorial List

I’d love to hear your then-and-now stories about your connections to National Acadian Day.

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You can also reach Lu Costa at facebook.com/lucosta

from The Devil is Loose (Crache à pic) by Antonine Maillet

from the cover of Maillet’s French novel

The more I follow the Vigneau clan around during the years 1700 to 1755, the more I see more residents of pre-Deportation Acadia involved in international trade. I’ve had to acknowledge that the Vigneaus didn’t spend the bulk of their time raising corn and cattle. They were sailors, shipbuilders, and traders. Maybe smugglers.

from Canadian Privateer Ship List

Though this felt like a discovery to me, cousin Bernard Vigneau recently confirmed that this is a truth in plain sight about Acadians: they were either farmers or sailors.

Bernard, founder of Centre d’Information Historique et Généalogique de Miquelon, is a descendant of Jacques Vigneau, the inspiration for the Uncle Jacques in the story I’m writing. I’m a descendant of Jacques’s niece Marie. Bernard’s branch of the family has lived on Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland since Jacques brought the clan, including Marie, there from Massachusetts at the end of the Seven Years War (1763)

But before Miquelon, before imprisonment in Massachusetts, before deportation to Georgia, Jacques and his brothers transported goods and people as part of Acadia’s maritime commerce.

Were they an anomaly? Weren’t Acadians the people of the forest primeval (Longfellow), happily farming, dyking, and visiting relatives before Le Grand Dérangement?

According to historian Regis Brun (Acadians before 1755):

…some 200 ships owned by Acadians before 1758, as recorded in North American archives, is a potent testimonial to the strength of the Acadian community in the sphere of maritime commerce. (p.90) and

Acadians based in Nova Scotia, the Allain, Bujold-LeBlanc, Gauthier and Vigneau families owned over half the ships, including the ones with the highest capacity (Brun, p. 90).

At that time (1750), the largest seafaring traders among the Acadians were established in this community (Baie Verte), in particular the Vigneau family. The largest ships from New France and from Île Royale tied in at this port, bringing supplies to the two French outposts as well as military goods for the Acadian and Micmac population. Goods were also transported to Île Saint-Jean from Baie Verte (Brun, p. 91)

In 1754, just before the Grand Dérangement, Jacques Vigneau’s business must have been flourishing. He began building the largest ship in Acadia — a 100-ton schooner (Brun, p. 86).

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Brun pulled those facts from records. But what he couldn’t know, he wrote, was what those 200 recorded ships don’t include — boats involved in clandestine operations (Brun, p. 47).

Coastal captains from Port-Toulouse were also trafficking in merchandise intended for Louisbourg but illegally off-boarded from vessels sailing into their harbour from New England (Brun, p.84).

If trade is either clandestine or illegal, someone’s smuggling at the least, capturing booty under government approval as corsairs (French privateers), or outright thieving as pirates.

Because the Vigneau men grew up and became coasters in Port Toulouse (St. Peters) after Papa Maurice sailed out of Port Royal with the family in 1720, they were likely part of those operations. Port Toulouse was just 12 nautical miles from Fortress Louisbourg.

from opentextbc.ca

Which leads me to wonder how widespread was maritime engagement and conflict around Acadie? What with imperial France and Great Britain frequently at war, how much local smuggling and open-sea plunder of the other nation’s ships happened seaside in Nova Scotia? And how did the resident Mi’kmaq react to these disputes?

As it turns out, the grandfather of a minor character in my Vigneau story was a corsair — Pierre Maisonnat. He was the grandfather of Marie Winniett, wife of the Edward How who was murdered under a flag of truce (previous post).

According to historian Roger Marsters (Bold Privateers: Terror Plunder and Profit on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, p. 25), Pierre “Baptiste” Maisonnat started out as a boatman with long experience ferrying wines along the Dordogne and Gironde rivers in southwest France. He did a stint as a prisoner in Boston after William Phips sacked Port Royal in 1690, then ended up as a corsair by January 1692 when he showed up in records towing his booty — a rich New England ship (p. 29). From 1692 onwards Baptiste sailed in company with other French privateers, provisioning and refitting at Acadian coastal settlements — Port Royal, Minas, Beaubassin.

from opentextbc.ca

Provisioning and refitting? At Port Royal, Minas, and Beaubassin? What news of the world were corsairs bringing to the farmers and merchants of those villages? What goods were exchanged? Since the Mi’kmaq were no slouches at sailing, how were these folks involved in the maritime trade?

I wonder how many young Acadian or Mi’kmaw men, maybe women, saw Maisonnat’s ship or one like it and decided to forego the farm for the sea. Corsairs had to recruit crews someplace. And, if they were refitting ships in Acadie, they had to hire local shipwrights, or at least find supplies for their own shipwrights. Someone was not haying and fixing dykes.

Another corsair, Pierre Morpain, came to the rescue of Port Royal in 1707. Morpain, sailed out of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in the West Indies with supplies for Acadians who’d been plundered by the British in June of that year. Among the supplies were 750 barrels of flour, 25 casks of butter, and large quantities of ham and lard (Marsters, p. 45).

free image at Pixabay by Roy Snyder

Jacques Vigneau was 5 years old and living in Port Royal when this happened. I wonder, given his age, whether the presence of corsairs in the Dauphin River or Boston merchant ships in Baie Française became part of Jacques’s ordinary. Were large ships carrying supplies from as far as 1200 nautical miles away as much a part of daily life as neighbors who cut sod and poles to build dykes?

Morpain sailed back to the Caribbean after this rescue but returned in 1709 to marry Acadian Marie Josèphte D'Amours. By 1716, he was port captain at Fortress Louisbourg. He returned to privateering in 1744 when King George’s War broke out.

Morpain’s fellow corsair, Joannis-Galand D’Olabaratiz (De Laubara, Dolobarats), became port captain after him. In May 1744, these two corsairs sailed ships that protected 350 French soldiers, Swiss mercenaries, and local fishers (Marsters, p. 54) who raided British Canso.

Which is also the raid in which the previously mentioned Edward How’s business was wiped out.

Acadia looks less and less like a Brigadoon, and more and more like a node on an international seaway of fuzzily bounded relationships.

Will I ever know for sure whether the Vigneaus were simply merchants or expanded into smuggling or piracy? Probably not, given that (1) they likely kept a low profile and (2) no records have surfaced about them smuggling. (Why would anyone keep smuggling records?) Perhaps it’s that low profile that speaks to a family trying to live in-between the warring French and British imperials.

Which led to another thought.

I’ve often wondered how long the effects of trauma — such as an ethnic cleansing — last among Acadian descendants. Now I wonder what habits and behaviors tied to skills also persist and show up slant in descendants.

Acadian Memorial List

See…there’s my paternal Great Uncle D. He was the great-great-great-grandson of my Marie. The family story is that he smuggled alcohol during Prohibition — about 200 years after the Vigneau men may have off-loaded Caribbean via Boston rum into Acadie.

As my father told the story, his uncle had a Rolls Royce with two gas tanks, one for gas and one for alcohol. Uncle D made frequent trips to Canada, and he managed to stay out of the crosshairs of local police through bribes. So said my father.

According to Jim Vorel in a 2024 Paste article Canadian distillers, blenders and bootlegging operators were able to ship nigh-inconceivable amounts of booze to thirsty U.S. cities by pretty much every vector imaginable.

Guess a second gas tank is one sort of vector.

Of course, it really wasn’t much more difficult to bring booze in straight over the border between the U.S. and Canada, thanks to the ability of bootlegging dollars to grease all the right palms along the way.

Fits Uncle D’s MO.

The way the stories parallel through the generations —

• negotiating the different laws of French and English authorities,

• working in, with, and around Canadian and New England trade exchanges,

• trafficking legal goods from one place to another where they’re illegal,

• a tale in nearer generations that mimics the habits and choices of more distant generations,

• staying beneath radar —

all lead me to lean into a “yes” that we inherit more than consequences of trauma’s wounds. We inherit habits and behaviors hidden in plain sight that link us to our forebears.

How much more in plain sight is yet to be revealed?

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Resources

Brun, Régis. The Acadians Before 1755, (publ. 2012), image reprint CD, (Milton: © GlobalGenealogy.com Inc., 2012). Originally published by Régis Brun, Moncton, 2005; this edition published by Global Heritage Press, Milton, 2012. Translated by Monique Arsenault. Edited by Paul Delaney.

Gilhuis, Nicole. 2024. Colonial Ghosts in Indigenous-British Conflict: A Revisiting of Two 1726 Piracy Trials

Marsters, Roger. 2004. Bold Privateers: Terror Plunder and Profit on Canada’s Atlantic Coast. Halifax: Formac Publishing Company Limited.

Montgomery, L. Alexandra. 2015. Pirates, 1726: The Regionalism of Danger in the Early Northeast

The Trials of Five Persons for Piracy, Felony, and Robbery. 1726.

Canadian Privateer Ship List

Pierre Maisonnat (en Français)

The French Privateers of St. Malo

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Francois Guion

Pierre Maisonnat

Historical Fiction

Maillet, Antonine. In English The Devil is Loose (1987) translated by Philip Stratford. In French Crache à pic (1984) Crache à pic is the Acadian she-master of the schooner Sea-Cow “daughter of a long line of giants, sorcerers, and intrepid sailors” who plies the bootlegging trade along the coast of 1930s Acadia and St. Pierre-et-Miquelon with a motley crew of relatives and neighbors. Inspired by Acadian culture.

Riley, Vanessa. 2026. Fire Sword & Sea. William Morrow. Tells a tale of women pirates from the Caribbean 1675 to 1698. Inspired by real people.

From how spaces of power affected Deportation-era children, to Baie Verte refugees who rallied from imprisonment in Massachusetts to settle a new Beaubassin on Miquelon, to a family of hybrid New England colonial-Acadians who now clamors for its due, I wake compelled to listen to what they have to say.

Thank you to historian Nicole Gilhuis for provoking this loop.

from Nicole Gilhuis

Professor Guilhus focuses on “on history of the Atlantic from the 16th- to the 18th-century with a special focus on African, Native American, and European commoner histories.”

In a mid-February Acadian Archives talk, she explored how her ancestors, French Huguenot David Basset and Acadian Marie Melanson, give us a window into trade between the British mainland colonies (U.S.) and the functionally 14th British colony of Nova Scotia.

Sometimes one is a merchant, sometimes a privateer, sometimes a pirate or corsair. It all depends on where you are, who has governmental power, and who are your relatives.

In her talk, she shared an observation that both piqued my interest and expanded my thinking. In the time period she discussed (1680 - 1730), Acadian and New England merchant networks could be maintained through kinship groups and marriage.

Sometimes, one member of a family would marry outside the social circle, opening access to trade through extended family ties.

I think about all the Acadian cousins just one person from a Cyr, Melanson, or Bourgeois family would bring to that table.

Members of merchant groups, she said, might have fluid religious identifications — converting to Protestant or Catholic to maintain affiliations that opened conduits for trade.

Well, I thought, they wouldn’t have been the first. Huguenot Henry of Navarre (Henry IV of France) reportedly said Paris vaut bien une messe (Paris is well worth a Mass) when, in 1593, he converted to Catholicsm for the second time.

The idea of having a flexible identity simmered on my mind’s backburner when I returned to writing the story of Marie Vigneau’s imagined life experience. There she is in 1750 Baie Verte, 10-years old and settling in with relatives. She’s recovering from watching her Beaubassin home burned by French soldiers, Acadian militia, and Mi’kmaw warriors.

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Their goal in burning her home was to keep supplies and shelter away from Charles Lawrence and his British soldiers and New England rangers, among whom are Massachusetts Wampanoags.

The Brits’ goal was to take control of Chignecto, an isthmus splitting two bays, which provides a land-route to Québec.

Marie’s goal is to grow up.

On the site of the burned village of Beaubassin, Charles Lawrence and his team are building Fort Lawrence. Among the group is Edward How (born 1702). I know that in this part of the story, he will be shot while under a flag of truce, and that this will increase distress among the warring factions. But I want to know enough to make the scene authentic, one that prevents an actual historian from wanting to burn the page.

Fort Lawrence - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

Why How and why then?

The problem is that there are at least nine different accounts of what happened. More than 275 years after How was murdered, his case remains cold. (See one version under Webster in Resources below).

According to the Canadian History of Biography:

How began his career at Canso as a merchant and was prominent enough by 1725 to be recommended by Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong* for a seat on the Nova Scotia council; he was not, however, appointed on this occasion. That same year he received a grant of 12.6 acres on an island in Canso harbour – now called How’s Island – as part of a plan for a permanent settlement.”

This means an English, Protestant settlement. On Mi’kmaw land.

He often went to parley with the Indians in the Canso area and likely learned the Micmac tongue. This might explain his commission in 1725 as captain in the local militia, though he always considered himself a civilian.

In 1744, How’s business was wiped out by the French raid on Canso.

In June, How married his second wife, 25 year-old Marie-Madeleine Winniett, the daughter of an Acadian mother and a father born to Huguenot parents.

Her dad died three years before her marriage. He was a merchant whose route ran from Boston to Annapolis Royal to French settlements at the head of the Bay of Fundy, Minas Basin, and Cape Breton. Surely there was opportunity for How and Papa Winniett to have crossed merchant paths. Perhaps even paths with members of the Vigneau clan who were coasters out of Port Toulouse, and shipping merchants in Beaubassin.

Marie-Madeleine’s mom was Acadian, a woman who seemed to wield some influence among the British on behalf of her Acadian relatives.

Marie-Madeleine’s maternal grandfather was a Huguenot, who married her grandmother in Acadia though he had a wife back in France. He was also a privateer or a pirate, depending on who was calling him out.

This was a family stew made of accommodating identities and lives with fuzzy boundaries.

This is also a story I’m reading against the grain.

Chart courtesy of historian Lisa Maguire; Acadian bits and pieces

Before he was killed in 1750, How, fighting for the British side, was severely wounded in the Battle of Grand Pré in 1747. The wound rendered his left arm useless. He was taken prisoner, then ransomed for six French prisoners. Must have been a valuable person to the British.

Then, on October 4, 1750, he left Fort Lawrence under a white flag to meet with someone, also under a white flag, from the French side of the river. Whatever it was that went awry, Edward How was dead at the end.

But what of Marie-Madeleine? What might she have experienced? She was six years married, her husband was imprisoned then ransomed a few years into that marriage, and now, with his murder, she became a single mom with two sons — a five-year-old, and one not yet a year.

Was she still tied to her Acadian family after marrying an Englishman? Think Bridgerton when second son Benedict and maid Sophie decide to marry. The family rallies round knowing that members of the ton, the hierarchy of British royal society, may shun them. Family mattered most.

Marie-Madeleine Winniett did have an Acadian mom who lived in English Annapolis Royal but who advocated for Acadians.

Or was Marie-Madeleine a pariah to her Acadian kin? Think Fiddler on a Roof and the hardline Tevye draws when youngest daughter Chava marries Russian soldier Fyedka. Faith mattered most.

Maybe during the intensifying animosities on the Chignecto, people who wanted to live life in the middle felt pressured to pick a side.

Or had Marie-Madeleine withdrawn from her Acadian roots and adopted an English life-style — language, Protestant faith, admiration for British royalty? Some of her siblings seem to have lived in a French Acadian world while others lived in an English society.

These spaces of power and events would have also affected my young Marie Vigneau because, as it turns out, the Bourgs, Vigneaus, and Winnietts were kin. This is not a surprise given Acadian endogamy, but it’s still interesting to map out the connections.

Marie Vigneau was third cousin to Marie-Madeline Winniett.

She was second cousin, once removed from Marguerite Bourg, her Uncle Jacques’s second wife. Marguerite was a first cousin, once removed of Marie-Madeleine Winniett.

Even if members of the family were on the outs with each other, the news of Edward How’s death had to be more personal than not. Tensions on the isthmus were rising among military opponents, but were they rising within families and extended kin?

This rich family stew of accommodating identities lived within spaces of power — military might, trade, and religion — wasn’t what I meant when I began the search for details to make a scene authentic. But it sure is a lot more interesting and leaves me eager to be a fly on the wall as the Vigneau clan responds to the murder of Edward How.

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Resources

• Bruce, Clint and George M. W. Kennedy (eds). 1995 Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde: Études comparées, études transnationales (Volume 14) (Rethinking Canada in the World) (French Edition), Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press

• Gilhuis, Nicole. 2020. Colonial Ghosts: Mi’kmaq Adoption, Daily Practice & the Alternate Atlantic, 1600-1763, doctoral dissertation, UCLA.

• C. Alexander Pincombe, “HOW, EDWARD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 8, 2026, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/how_edward_3E.html.

• Plank, Geoffrey. The Two Majors Cope

• Webster, John Clarence. 1930. The Forts of Chignecto: A Study of the Eighteenth Century Conflict Between France and Great Britain in Acadia

One version of How’s murder (p. 55). Enjoy the old-timey word “dastardly.”

In October, while engaged in building Fort Lawrence, a dastardly outrage was perpetrated which caused great anger among the British as well as among some of the French officers . Associated with Lawrence was Edward How, who was well known both to the Acadians and Indians . It was his desire to establish peace with the Indians , and to obtain from them their English prisoners.

He had frequent interviews with French officers under a Flag of Truce. One day he went to an interview with a party from Beauséjour carrying a white flag, he also bearing a flag, when he was fired on by a party of Indians hiding behind a dyke and mortally wounded

Chignecto Isthmus corridor

What does it mean to be Acadian?

Bernard Vigneau

from Bernard Vigneau: As a Miquelon diaspora member you don’t need any authorization to use this blazon See (1) below for what the elements in the blazon signify.

Sometimes a story unfolds out-of-sequence.

My intent for this post was to wind back the clock to 1753, to peer into Casteel’s journal and watch what Jacques Vigneau and Marguerite Bourg were doing in Baie Verte during Casteel’s ransom. To see whether I could capture a glimmer of the kin culture surrounding Marie Vigneau, both their niece and my 5th great-grandmother.

from Québécois(e) d’origine Acadienne Facebook landing page

Instead, thanks to Québécois(e) d'origine Acadienne and my recently found cousin Bernard Vigneau, my dreams are filled with Vigneaus, and how they may have lived after the Seven Years War (1763) until the American Revolution (1775 to 1783).

The Facebook site focuses on Québécois who have Acadian ancestors. I joined because I have Québécois ancestors who have Acadian ancestors.

Bernard is the fondateur (founder) du Centre d’Information Historique et Généalogique de Miquelon. Miquelon is part of France: a self-governing Territorial Collectivity in an archipelago of eight islands off the southeast coast of Newfoundland.

Bernard pointed out that the Vigneau name is missing from the list on the right column of the Qd’OA Facebook landing page. He also offered to share Vigneau history with anyone interested.

After doing the cousin dance, I settled down enough to write to him to ask if we could communicate in English. No problem. French, English, maybe even Spanish, he said. I agree with cousin Nicole, we have some of the best cousins.

Nicole's Acadian Memorial List

What I didn’t know about this part of the family story could fill a book — and probably will someday when Marie’s fictionalized life is fully written.

I knew that Marie was a part of a large, close kinship group, one that stayed together in 1755 during exile from Baie Verte (now in New Brunswick) to Georgia. In questionable water craft, about 100 of them left Georgia to sail up the British colonial east coast trying to return to Acadie, but they were arrested in Sandwich, Massachusetts in summer 1756.

Marie and her kin lived in smaller family groups in Massachusetts until the Seven Years War ended. This separation from cousins was likely a deeper burden than we in 21st century North America realize. Somewhere in my files is a reference to a letter directing the British during the Grand Dérangement to try to keep nuclear families together but to separate adult cousins.

Marie was a member of the families who left Massachusetts in October 1763 for St.-Pierre-et-Miquelon. I knew only vaguely that “there was a lot going on” in those islands, which later resulted in her exile to France several times in her adult life.

Bernard filled in the details.

In October 1763, following the Treaty of Paris, Jacques Vigneau, who must have had some money to hire or buy the Saint-Jacques, rounded up the Massachusetts relatives and sailed to Miquelon, which had recently returned to France. I’m curious to know how it was that they communicated with each other, and how much of that network involved gossip, laundry days, and taverns.

Jacques was 60 and Marguerite was 73.

Which humbles me into refraining from complaining about obstacles to retirement.

from Bernard Vigneau, the site of the original Vigneau settlement is in the upper right

The Saint-Jacques carried 21 families composed of 112 or 113 people. The last two family groups don’t seem to be Vigneaus or Bourg/Cyrs. The man Marie would eventually marry was listed in that out-group.

Les Refugies Du Saint Jacques

186KB ∙ PDF file

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When I used WikiTree connector, her future husband, this 5X great-grandfather Claude Bourgeois showed up as a first cousin thrice, a first cousin once removed, and a nephew twice of people in those other 19 families. His step-mother was Marguerite Bourg’s sister Marie. He was kin.

He was also Marie Vigneau’s maternal third cousin, and, since her mother (Agnes-Anne) was a twin (Madeleine), was also the third cousin of the Pierre Cyr’s and Madeleine Poirier’s children. Madeleine was Marguerite Bourg’s daughter-in-law. Is your head spinning now? Because such entanglements also lead me to wonder how on earth the British soldiers could parse out how to separate adult cousins.

Bernard wrote a 53-page article En Passant par Miquelon. It is full of history, story, and genealogy — a wonderful introduction to our Acadian ancestors who settled in Miquelon.

En Passant par Miquelon

3.43MB ∙ PDF file

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He tells us how important it was for the newly landed refugees to receive the Catholic sacraments of baptism and marriage that they’d missed during their exile in the British colonies.

Confirmation Des Ondoiements

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Which also tells me that life goes on for Acadians, whether or not sacramentally blessed, but if you get a chance, see the priest.

He also tells us of their first winter:

Elle les oblige à dresser leur campement au lieu dit aujourd’hui la Roche à Biche. L’hiver approchant, ils y construisent à la hâte des cabanes en piquets de sapins recouvertes en plaques de gazon.

Translation: They were forced to set up camp at the place now known as Roche à Biche. With winter approaching, they hastily built huts there out of fir stakes covered with sod.

from Mapcarta 2.27.26

They made it through the winter, then Jacques set about collecting more of the family.

Bernard reports:

Le 19 août 1764 débarquent 115 réfugiés, venus de Chédabouctou, de la Pointe de Beauséjour, de Beaubassin et quelques-uns de l’île Saint-Jean, pour la plupart prisonniers du fort Beauséjour, emmenés par Joseph VIGNEAU, frère de Jacques VIGNEAU.

Le 2 octobre 1765, 111 autres arrivent de l’île Saint-Jean et d’Halifax.

Le 28 octobre 1765, 72 autres personnes viennent de Beauséjour.

Juin 1766, arrive un autre groupe venu d’Halifax, fort d’environ 60 à 70 personnes.

Translation:

August 19, 1764, 115 refugees from Chédabouctou, Pointe de Beauséjour, Beaubassin, and a few from Ile Saint-Jean, mostly prisoners from Fort Beauséjour, brought over by Joseph VIGNEAU, brother of Jacques VIGNEAU.

October 2, 1765, 111 from Ile Saint-Jean and Halifax

October 28, 1765, 72 from Beauséjour

June1766, about 60 to 70 people from Halifax

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During these years, Marie and Claude married (1764) and had two babies. Claude worked as a carpenter and fisherman.

Then the French government decided the island was overpopulated. The government had recruited settlers, some from the former garrison at Fortress Louisbourg. Adding their numbers to those of the Acadian refugees brought the population number higher than the government deemed sustainable.

So in 1767, 586 Acadian refugees were sent across the Atlantic to mainland France. I don’t know whether what I read is true, but one writer suggested that the English of Newfoundland hated the Acadians more than the French, so the French government alleviated the population problem by removing some Acadians. Something to do with a diplomatic maneuver to protect French fishing rights.

Marie and Claude, and two-year old Jean-Baptiste, sailed on La Petite Fortune to Larochelle, France. Baby Marie was born there in Jan. 1768. Many of her relatives were on the same journey

After island merchants lobbied the French government, the Acadians were allowed to return. Marie, Claude and the children sailed back, as did many of their relatives. The next decade saw them living a life of relative stability. Marie and Claude had five living children, a house, a stable, a horse, two cattle, a boat, and a fish-drying yard. (2)

But then the American War for Independence erupted. France joined the side of the rebelling colonists. Which didn’t bode well for the residents of French-controlled St. Pierre-et-Miquelon.

By 1778, the Anglo-French War (yes, another one!) was underway in addition to the one involving the American colonies.

In fall 1778, the British took control of the islands. They repeated the actions of 1755; they burned homes and boats, slaughtered animals, and deported the population to France.

Marie and Claude were again uprooted.

I wonder what this repetition of French and English battles, the cycling between having something and having nothing, did to our ancestors expectations and beliefs about life.

This part of the tale barely scratches the surface of the information that Bernard shared. There is so much more to understand.

If you’re interested in Bernard’s work, you can download the files he’s sent. He wants them freely available to anyone searching for Miquelonnais.

You can also reach him at bernardvigneau@gmail.com.

Miquelonnais toujours!

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Notes:

(1) Blazon meaning:

-on the top the Acadian flag

-in the middle a bird THE HARELDE OF MIQUELON = long tail duck

-in his beak, three flags: Basque, French Brittany and Normandy

-at the bottom of the blazon, two cods. Miquelon for centuries was a cod fishing village. It was the main industry.

(2) Miquelon 1776, Recensement de la population, (Original source: Archives Nationales S.O.M. G1 467)

Resources

History of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon

Michel Poirier’s thesis available on Internet Archives Les Acadiens aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon 1758-1828 : 3 déportations, 30 années d'exil

The capture of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon in September 1778

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The topic on Feb 12 was “The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula” with guest historian Thomas Peace.

University of Chicago Press image

His publisher’s blurb states Drawing on the concept of spaces of power, historian Thomas Peace demonstrates that despite imperial changes of power and settler colonial incursions on their Lands, local Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, Wolastoqiyik, and Wendat nations continued to experience the contested Peninsula as a cohesive whole, rather than one defined by subsequent colonial borders.

Peace called Thursday’s session an experimental talk, one he hoped would have a lively Q&A. Because the Acadian story is also one shaped by spaces of power, though one that could use more scholarship.

Personally plagued throughout the talk by wondering what an historian means when s/he says spaces of power, I defaulted to just listen. Which continued to plague my sleeping brain until the wee hours of the morning when I surrendered and sought out my new assistant, AI DeepSeek.

Acadiann: Please explain “spaces of power” in simple, not academic, English.

DeepSeek: “Spaces of power” is a fancy term for the idea that where people are can change how powerful they feel or act.

Think of it like this: A place isn’t just a location; it can give you more or less power depending on who you are.

Acadiann: Is this also what an historian means by "spaces of power"?

DeepSeek: A “space of power” is a place that shapes, shows, or controls who has the upper hand. An historian just adds the “who, how, and why” over time.

(Aside: some in the U.S. are adamantly against using DeepSeek because it’s a Chinese company that may spy on us. Just tickles my fancy to consider the possibility of informing spies about Acadian history.)

Well, then, I’m no historian, but those are precisely the questions that plague me about a child living in the 1750s Beaubassin conflict zone. Her space-of-power, like most children through time and place, was powerlessness. (Exceptions for maybe Louis XIV and other royals who ascended thrones as children.)

I thought that was enough to put the plague of thinking to bed.

But the dreaming mind wandering around a sleeping brain is a mysterious thing.

Another night followed of images of Marie coming of age while adult men defended their indigenous land, allying with either French or British soldiers and rangers, her Acadian adult caregivers maybe trying to thread the neutral needle, or picking a side. Her mother and aunties and cousins trying to keep up with the housework and raise the babies.

What would my other assistant, AI ChatGPT, have to say about that? Because ChatGPT, unlike DeepSeek, remembers that I’m interested in Marie in mid-18th century Nova Scotia.

ChatGPT-generated image from Acadiann prompts 2.14.26

ChatGPT concluded that Peace’s book is particularly relevant to understanding Marie’s life. That the politics, geography, colonizing through infrastructure, everyday life, violence, and negotiation were spaces-of-power.

ChatGPT-generated image from Acadiann prompts 2.14.26

ChatGPT: It (Peace’s book) supports your idea of reading events as part of a conflict-zone childhood environment rather than isolated incidents.

Fist-pumps. Thank you, Professor Peace! My emerging novel is rooted in evolving historian-think.

Nicole's Acadian Memorial List

Another image, memory surfaced from my childhood, one that seems relevant to the perception of spaces-of-power to a child.

Sometime between age 8 and 10, I realized that, in my Little Canada, I lived within two different geographies. I can feel the fall air and hear the rustling leaves along the broad, tar driveway that passed between the convent and the rectory as I walked home from school.

One set of bounds was defined by the Catholic Church. It outlined parish and diocesan boundaries. The parish radiated out from the hub of the local church, until it met the bounds of the next local church. The diocesan bound was more amorphous.

The other was defined by Massachusetts’s meets and bounds. The town’s geography radiated out from the hub of Town Hall.

At least to my child-mind.

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Neither me nor Marie at that age understood the concept of spaces-of-power, but we could feel them, could react to them, could absorb them.

If I could notice different boundaries layered over the same physical space, why couldn’t Marie think about the sway and say of the various military and non-military adults in her marshland world? Why wouldn’t she feel unanchored as much by the burning of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption church as by her home? Both are spaces of power.

Her meets and bounds shifted abruptly and violently in 1750. Somehow that shaped the person she would grow into.

Resources

Sample chapter from Peace's book

The Forts of Chignecto, 1930, John Clarence Webster,

Beaubassin marker

Addition 2.16.2026

Island of Pheasants where no pheasant ever lived

This is a fun take on a quirky place across the pond that changes its “space of power” every six months — between France and Spain. By Jasmine Grace St-Pierre.

She is just 10, maybe 11, in 1750 when a priest-led band of French allies burns her home. Any history, document, letter or report now becomes a piece to read against the grain for clues about the influences of nurture, which includes community events, on a child living in a conflict zone.

Chart courtesy of historian Lisa Maguire; Acadian bits and pieces

I came across the Journal of Anthony Casteel. It’s his testimony about his harrowing survival during an encounter with Mi’kmaq in 1753 and includes an episode with Jacques Vigneau, Marie’s uncle, in Baie Verte. (The Casteel journal and Uncle Jacques will be the the subject of another Substack. )

Reading such a contemporaneous witness account is riveting, whether or not the testimony is credible. Acadia pre-Expulsion is looking more and more war-torn, and less and less pastoral to me.

According to historian Geoffrey Plank’s essay (1), this was a then when people were developing national identities, especially Europeans. From the sounds of things, the British, especially, did not want to be confused with the French.

During this time period, Marie was coming of age, leaving the self of childhood for the one of adulthood. Whether she pondered it or not.

“In the 1750s, the peoples of Nova Scotia had not decided on a coherent scheme to govern the classification of peoples, but their uncertainties did not prevent them from placing labels on each other, and then punishing each other on the basis of the label. In part because of the uncertainty surrounding the issue of nationality, Nova Scotia became a very dangerous place.” (Plank (1), p.56)

That sounds eerily now.

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Gathering thoughts, trying to see the patterns in the then and now, I set loose my internal wanderer, allowing images and memories to surface. Because, though technology and customs may differ, people are people who sort out their lives in not dissimilar ways. That’s why stories like Lysistrata, the Sermon on the Mount, and Macbeth remain relevant in the 21st century.

My wandering mind operates like a kindergartener’s version of Marilu Henner’s famous memory meets cousin George Comeaux’s long short-cut home. It flashes an image from a more recent then of the Acadian icon Antonine Maillet.

https://media-cdn.socastsrm.com/wordpress/wp-content/blogs.dir/3041/files/2025/02/antoine-maillet.jpg

How did I forget(!) her when I’d suggested some books to the Acadians Project? Stories were and are my “gateway drugs” to Acadians and Acadian history. How could I forget the pathos and humor of Pélagie la Charette/Pélagie: The Return to Acadie?

photo by Acadiann

The mind wanderer visits La Sagouine, another Maillet character, on the Île aux Puces (Flea Island) in Bouctouche, New Brunswick.

Epiphany flushes through me — people in that then were more than kind to the visitors from Massachusetts, me and my Tall-Guy brother Glenn. He’s 5’6’’. The clerk in the gift shop actually referred to him as the Tall Man, which tells you something about male Acadian height norms in Bouctouche.

We were there because Viola Léger performed, for the first time, La Sagouine in English. She was born in Fitchburg MA, a few towns east of where I live. That, by itself, intrigued. How did the girl from Fitchburg, Massachusetts become a Canadian star? That intrigue, and an instinctual voice that says “just do it,” sent us to her New Brunswick dinner-theatre.

image from WikiTree

There we were, sitting in the middle seats of the center table in front of the stage where Ms. Léger performed. It’s hindsight now that shows me what a gift they gave us — the actual best seats in the house — to experience her performance.

Talk about “Welcome the Stranger” (Leviticus 19:34).

I wonder now if maybe Ms. Léger was a little tickled to have people from near her birthplace travel almost 600 miles to New Brunswick primarily to see her English performance. I also wonder why La Sagouine seemed so much like our mother.

I wish I could reach back in time to say thank you to her for imprinting La Sagouine in my mind, and to the people of La Sagouine village who’d welcomed us as if we were long-lost family. Speaking in English or French didn’t matter. The point was to be able to talk with each other, to enjoy the stories, to laugh.

photo by Acadiann

And then the wanderer mind drops further back in the then, thinking of little Marie, of the comings and goings that involved Massachusetts, and French, and English, and Mi’kmaq, and Wampanoag, and family, and growing up during escalations in hostility that would lead to uprooting her from Nova Scotia and send her to Georgia and Massachusetts, never to return to her birthplace.

Wondering whether the extended family members who were expulsed with her cushioned her against the terror of the unknown. Whether they could laugh together through the years. Because laughing and humor seem to be pretty strong traits among Acadians I know. Even among the cranky.

Nicole's Acadian Memorial List

Wondering whether Marie ever felt welcomed by the strangers in the British colonies.

This is going to take close reading against the grain and exploring the silences.

Ricochet to the now. Wondering whether the little “Maries” and their brothers caught up in the pivotal conflicts of these times feel safe among strangers. Do these children still laugh?

Wondering what the collision of budding cultural identities did/do to growing minds.

Pivotal moments can tear you away or tear you up, both personally and politically. Pivotal moments can also embrace and welcome you. Then and now.

People are people who sort out their lives in not dissimilar ways.

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Further reading

(1) Plank, Geoffrey. The Changing Country of Anthony Casteel

(2) Giniger, Henry. A Novel's Heroine Buoys the Spirits of Canada's Acadians

More personal notes

We had to bring gifts to Canada, Glenn said. For the people at La Sagouine and the people at Parks Canada. I brought goods from Massachusetts, though I don’t remember what, and he brought merch from the company he worked for, useful products (it was a cleaning company) covered with its logo.

We first visited the Parks Canada dig at Beaubassin, followed by a visit to the Fort. While I accumulated an armload of books and souvenirs from the gift shop, he chatted up the docents and staff. They traded logo-laden merch.

Even then I chuckled to think that this was probably not all that different from 1700s traders right in this same spot. Minus the logos. My Parks Canada pin sits on a colorful loosely woven waist-belt I converted to a memory-pin holder. Yes, it is a loose approximation of a voyageur sash.

At Bouctouche we stayed in a converted priest’s house. Near a cemetery. The echoes of generations of Catholicism in Acadie and our family reverberated through the building and the land.

Deborah A. Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

In 2024, when I started posting Acadiann, I had one question: “What’s an Acadian?”

Since then, I’ve been digging into names, bits and pieces of scattered histories, novels, family tales, and stories posted on WikiTree by volunteers who sit in my personal Pantheon of goddesses and gods.

Now comes the 2026 question: what happened after the Expulsion?

Some, in made-for-novel-adventures, returned home to reunite with family.

Le retour by Claude Picard, accessed 1.1.26 at https://www.geocities.ws/pitre_family/Gen4.html

Some were deported again. My own 5x great-grandmother Marie Vigneau was uprooted 9 times before she settled in the Acadian refugee haven of Nicolet, Québec.

Les Acadiens, Sculpture by Philippe Hébert, 1906. Collection from the Seminary of Nicolet accessed 1.1.26 at https://www.geocities.ws/pitre_family/Nicolet.html

For those who didn’t return, where did they go? Did they remember their history or, as happened in my family, did they not talk about it until the descendants didn’t know about Acadia?

As “missing persons” emerge from the mists of history, I seek details about the migrations and daily lives of the so many ordinary people that were the ancestors. In the words of Paul Harvey, I seek “the rest of the story.”

When a synchronicity of ancestral names, words, and images collide in the now, I’m inclined to follow the connections. Sometimes there is a marvelous revelation — as happened recently.

Observing a mistaken lineage, I begrudgingly detached a second great-grandmother’s parents from their ancestors in a database I’d built in the analogue world decades ago from Drouins, Tanguays and parish registers. Hours of on-site research and data entry evaporated.

But seeking the correct lines in the digital world (WikiTree, Génealogie Québec) led to an Acadian line I didn’t know was mine: the Savoie-Pellerins. The print I bought a year ago is now more than cultural heritage; this homestead is personal history.

Temps heureux chez les Savoie et leurs voisins acadiens Belleisle vers 1690 by Claude Picard English: Happy times with the Savoies and their Acadian neighbors in Belleisle circa 1690

Which all is backstory to how I’ve wandered about to learn of Noël Carrière from New Orleans. Who is not a cousin as I know it now, though I have learned “never say never” about anyone who shows up in a post-Expulsion Acadian hotspot.

As often happens when one sets about either a genealogy search or research into the lives and times of a particular ancestor, pretty-shiny things appear in historical documents and even daily events.

This tale was triggered by a daily event.

Noël Carrière showed up in a Facebook group. He was the leader of the New Orleans black militia and an American Revolutionary War hero.

I don’t have Black ancestors that I know of, but I couldn’t help myself asking if he was a cousin. Carrière is a version of Carrier, who are in my ancestral lines. And, when it comes to South Louisiana and its French and Acadian lineages, as cousin Savanna King says, you mostly wonder who you aren’t related to.

My Carrier-Samson lines show up in Québec, Port Toulouse, Louisbourg, Caraquet, and Rimouski. Canadian Francois Carrier and Acadian Anne Samson probably married in 1777 in Louisbourg, which is curious all on its own since at that point the fortress was a war ruin.

Another cousin, Nicole Gallant Nunes, once suggested that stories about Acadian life on Cape Breton (where Louisbourg sits) could benefit from some attention. She named the Poujet(Lapierre), Moyse, and Vincent clans, who are the ancestors of my Samsons and Carriers, as names to research.

Acadian Memorial List

Also sparkling in the pretty-shiny pile was the memory of Savanna’s recent Substack post “What makes someone an Acadian?” In it, she urged us to cast a wider net when we look for ancestors, to consider that a hole or absence in finding records is because we’re not thinking broadly enough about how people traveled back in the day, or how families dispersed and reconnected. Several centuries ago, for example, people traveled river roads and seas, which made for different access routes than the land roads we default to today.

I couldn’t find African Noël on WikiTree. The upshot of that foray into ancestry is that the US Black Heritage Project created a stub for him. Savanna went into her rabbit warren and found wills, birth, marriage, and death certificates, and I selected significant parts of The Strange History of the American Quadroon by Emily Clark (January 1, 2013, University of North Carolina Press) to add to research notes.

That would have been the end of it except that there was another Noël Carrière on WikiTree listed as born about 14 years before Noël the war hero. Could they be the same person? Half-siblings? Cousins?

French Noël is listed as my 2nd cousin, 9 times removed, which still counts as a cousin in the world of French cousinage. This Noël’s parents were married in Louisiana, probably New Orleans.

Brain hijacked and the game afoot. Though it would likely lead to an uncomfortable truth about ancestral roles in enslavement.

As it turns out, French Noël (b. 1732) is listed as the white son of Joseph Carrière and Marguerite Trépagnier. Marguerite owned (cringe) African Noël (b. 1746), who was the son of Joseph Leveillé, a laborer for the Ursuline nuns, and Marie-Thérèse Carrière, a bondservant in the Carrière-Trépagnier household (Clark’s Chapter 5).

Well, if they weren’t related by blood, they were by circumstance.

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African Noël was a cooper and tanner, and, from 1764-1771 lived as a libre en fait (free person) even if he wasn’t officially manumitted. According to Professor Clark’s book he even managed as an enslaved teenager to own two slaves, which, she wrote, was both illegal and unheard of.

French Noël’s dad Joseph Carriere (b. 1682, Montreal) had good penmanship. You can see it in his signature when he witnessed baptisms in Montreal. Maybe not the most interesting fact, but it probably means he was literate.

Baptismal record of a Boyer child in 1706 Montreal, Notre-Dame-de-Montreal

Joseph’s first cousin Pierre (b. 1662) was a marine whose wife Madeleine (b. 1673) was captured by the Iroquois during the Lachine massacre (Aug. 5, 1689), and released in 1700. I can imagine Joseph might have had a number of reasons for wanting to leave Montreal for New Orleans.

French Louisiana https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FvvjS7Ly9ebENGO0IX8wSoXUawRwm2Wd8yniQ8Q8Rtvw.png%3Fwidth%3D960%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D10e2da865e65ee2822363ef353dfa8c8487f91db

French Noël’s mother Marguerite was born (1708) in Mobile, Louisiana, the granddaughter of a fille-du-roi.

Lisa Elvin-Staltari’s YouTube episode tells Marguerite’s grandmother’s story, and the tale of how Marguerite’s mother came to Mobile. I can imagine that their leaving Montreal in 1700 had something to do with the Lachine massacre, too.

I still don’t know whether there is a connection between African Noël or French Noël and my Acadian Carrier-Samson ancestors.

There is, however, a slant, though uncomfortable, connection to Canadian cousins in the Carrière-Trépagnier line of early New Orleans’s European founders.

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Resources

Louisianan ancestors who survived the Lachine Massacre

Classroom activity and graphic novel of LeSeur family traveling from Canada to Old Mobile

Old Mobile: Archaeological treasures in Louisiana’s first capital by Gregory A. Waselkov

Excerpt: The Mobilians and the rest of the petites nations, numerous small towns of diverse Native peoples living near the coast, hoped the French presence would finally put an end to raids by Muskogee (Creek) warriors from the north who had been selling captives from other Indigenous groups in the slave markets of English Charleston, South Carolina.

Between 1702 and 1711, a visitor strolling the streets of Mobile would have seen about as many Native Americans, free and enslaved, as colonists in the French colonial capital.

Free persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana

French Colonial Archaeology at Old Mobile: An Introduction

Another family leaves Montreal for Lousiana -- Joseph Chauvin and Louis Chauvin, who may be relatives of French Noël.

Writing New Orleans into the American Revolution by Emily Clark

Future research to do:

(1) Dig deeper into French Noël’s lineage through original documents. Baptismal records at St. Louis in New Orleans show siblings Antoine (1744), Francois (1733), Francoise (1748), Henry (1730) and Marguerite (1729). But no Noël, born in 1732 (WikiTree).

(2) Dig deeper into the Sacramental records of St. Louis in New Orleans.

In a marriage record, a brother named André is listed.

In a baptismal record, Joseph and Marguerite are listed as the grandparents of Genevieve Therese, daughter of Marie-Therese and her husband Louis Antoine Decallogne.

So…now there is an African and a French Marie-Thérèse as well?

What was going on in this family?

Generated image with ChatGPT from Acadiann text 12.6.25

The story of the Acadian Expulsion, though not as widely known as it should be, given that Acadians lived in what was the pre-Revolutionary 14th British colony of what became the U.S., is at least a subject for academic historians and a smattering of historical novelists.

There is, though, so much more between the dichotomy of emotionless fact and riveting fiction. One arena in which personal and professional understanding intersects is within WikiTree, a volunteer-driven, source-reliable, free family tree.

From August through October, I’d learned to use WikiTree, and questioned, added, and revised some information in my family lines. The work changed my tag from “Newt” to “Owl.” I don’t feel particularly wise, but I do ask “who? who?” as I build my contributions to this tree.

photo by Nikhil Joseph, https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-owl-peeking-from-the-tree-hole-12232364/ free-to-use, downloaded 11.30.25

In early November, WikiTree volunteer Owls and Golden Owls hosted a free, online, 17th anniversary celebration. They created a soul-satisfying smorgasbord of talks, chats, games, and challenges, including one talk about The Big Tree.

The Big Tree, as Eowyn Langholf and AJ Jacobs described in their November talk, aims to connect 8 billion humans as cousins. Can you imagine that? What an ambitious hope lives in the mission to create something we can see, use, and contribute to, a something that shows us how we all are relatives. At its core — in the heartwood of such a tree — lies the belief that “other” is an illusion. Humans are only “us.”

Boom! Mind-blowing. Cosmic.

Which is one reason why looking at Projects, and sub-projects, brings you back to earth.

The projects and volunteers are the branches, twigs, underground root system, and mycelium network that comprise the Big Tree.

Our Acadians Project, led by Cindy Bourque Cooper and Gisèle Cormier, is one of the sturdy branches of that Tree. It’s the above-ground view of hours of volunteer contributions, research, and tending in the underground root and mycelium network that nourish it.

AI-generated image in ChatGPT using DeepSeek prompts from Acadiann metaphor, 11.30.25

Take a look at two sub-projects and one research study that feed the Acadians Project:

• a census digitization sub-project

• a memorial sub-project

• rabbit hole research that may well become a sub-project — or maybe its own project

Census project

Retiree Ralph Geer and Rod Savoie, a Researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, digitize census records, making them searchable on WikiTree.

Both Ralph and Rod say that the Acadians Project managers suggested this sub-project to them. They transcribe original census lists into online, searchable documents, and connect profiles to those records. Ralph works on the pre-1715 collections; Rod on the those from 1715 forward.

Take, for example, the original 1686 Port Royal (Nova Scotia) census from the Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada:

You’d have to read French, then look page-by-page to learn whether an ancestor was recorded in Port Royal that year.

Because of Ralph, you can go to the Acadians Project census page, locate the Port Royal 1686 census, execute a search command, and locate a family. Ralph’s hours of work means your search takes seconds.

The Acadians Project recently awarded Ralph the Project Star to recognize his contributions; he’s won every other WikiTree award available.

Rod’s work with the later censuses allows the cousins and other researchers to both find lesser known records, and save time searching individual names. He’s received a Super Star award for his use of technology tools in his work with Acadian profiles and censuses.

Ralph: My project, within the Acadians Project, is ensuring that all profiles have correct census information. It is a daunting task that requires a lot of fact-checking and research. I want the reader of the profiles to be able to read comfortably the census paragraphs without having to stumble around all the distracting sics and rectes and explanations of why Jacques is really Jean, and Marie is really Marie Anne, and Anne is 40 instead of 50, and the children have different last names because of a remarriage.

For each census year, I make my own transcriptions with corrections. Examples can be seen on my Free-Space pages for 1686 and for 1701. I then use ChatGPT to turn each entry into a paragraph for each family member’s profile. Rod is my mentor for using ChatGPT.

My other Free-Space page displays the ChatGPT prompts specific to each location. These paragraphs are then entered into the appropriate profiles. I’ve also made a short video of how to create those paragraphs.

Rod: Within the Acadians Project, my main project-within-a-project focus is on the Île Royale censuses. These records seem to have received less attention historically than the better-known mainland Acadian enumerations, so I’ve been working on transcribing them and making them easier to use.

I was drawn in by my own Acadian roots and by how tangled the families are because of endogamy. WikiTree’s Acadians Project gave me a way to make sense of that tangle in a shared, sourced tree instead of in my own little silo.

Censuses in particular hooked me because they’re structured snapshots of real families in real places, and they’re perfect glue between archival records and modern profiles. I love how censuses tend to partially capture Acadian moments in time.

DNA and the Relationship Finder (WikiTree tools) showed just how interrelated my wife and I are to each other and to my parents, and I wanted to better understand that. At the same time, better digital tools (e.g. Excel, APIs, AI, Neo4j) make working with large-scale censuses a lot less daunting.

A big part of the effort is linking each census entry to the appropriate WikiTree profile whenever possible, which both improves existing profiles and highlights gaps that suggest missing ones.

I do jump from census to census, so updates can come for any of them. You can find my most recent updates on my Free-Space Watchlist.

Memorial project

Professional genealogist Nicole Gallant Nunes is the creator of the Acadian Memorial List to recognize and honor the thousands of Acadian men, women and children who died during the Acadian Expulsion, between the years 1755-1763 and beyond.

Acadian Memorial List

May they all be known, remembered and have their spirits carried through time by their grateful and honored descendants.

Nicole: My main focus is adding expulsion information to Acadians Project profiles. It’s a huge piece of important information that folks want to know about their ancestors.

Where were they when the Expulsion began? Where did they end up?

To build my Acadian Expulsion Memorial List Project, I’ve had to research each and every Acadian living at the time of the Expulsion.

So many simply disappear, either after 1755 when they are forcibly removed from Acadia or after 1763 when they are finally free to relocate. We don’t seem to find them in the typical new locations where others ended up. They just seem to poof into thin air. I’m trying to add little notes to those profiles to let folks know that research is ongoing for those Acadians.

We know the losses didn’t stop abruptly in 1763 when the Seven Years War ended and the Treaty of Paris was signed. Many more losses occurred during the years of resettlement that followed.

While most existing profiles did have some information about locations before and after the Expulsion, I’ve added more details and noted reliable sources for that information. I’ve also created countless profiles for Acadians who didn’t have one.

My focus over the last few months is on Acadians sent to the British colonies of Georgia and South Carolina. That’s where a subproject-within-a-subproject comes into play.

I’m particularly interested in the men who were deported without their families in 1755 and managed to quickly head back north to Acadia to find their wives and children. The groups that charged back north from South Carolina and Georgia were led by Broussard, Bourg and Bastarache men. Many of the other men in those groups were relatives of the leaders. They stuck together which gives me some comfort in knowing that whatever their fate was, at least they had each other.

I’m also tracking Acadians in Massachusetts through documents preserved by the Massachusetts State Archives about the Acadians sent here. I’m planning to add transcriptions of those documents to the corresponding profiles on WikiTree. I’m also still on the lookout for more names to add to my Memorial List as I work various lines.

And I’ve started a new project: to create and add categories for all the Expulsion ships to each profile managed by the Acadians Project.

We’re creating new categories for ships and locations and creating a free space page for everything so it will be all in one place. Exciting!

Image generated by ChatGPT 12.3.25 from Acadiann information

Acadiann: That’s almost overwhelming. Do you have an example of how this information can come together in a family story?

Nicole: Yes — take the story of Joseph Blanchard and Anne Dupuis.

Joseph and five of his sons were deported to South Carolina aboard the Two Brothers, but managed to make their way back north to find their families seeking refuge on Isle St. Jean (Prince Edward Island). They were all then faced with deportations again a short time later when Acadians on Isle St. Jean were expelled to France.

Joseph, his wife Anne, six of their children and twenty grandchildren were lost as a direct result of the deportations. One daughter managed to leave PEI and flee to Quebec, just to die of smallpox just after arrival.

The story of this family is different from what we usually hear, as they were deported not just once, but twice. What a cruel stroke of bad luck.

ChatGPT image generated 12.7.25 from DeepSeek prompts created from Acadiann text

Highlighting these kinds of stories is important because it puts actual names to this tragedy, and there is a lot of power behind a name. Our ancestors and cousins deserve to be remembered while we also teach about the events of the Expulsion. Not just to Acadian descendants who have a particular interest in this history, but to others who have no idea what has happened to the Acadian people and how we’ve somehow managed to persevere.

You can also find updates and notes about my work on my blog, or in my Facebook groups Acadian Genealogy, Descendants of Michel Hache dit Gallant and other Acadians, Quebec Genealogy , and Filles du Roi Descendants.

The Rabbit Hole

Software engineer Savanna King writes Savanna's Genealogy Rabbit Hole, which focuses on South Louisiana, one of the places expulsed Acadians eventually settled. She’s a member of The Louisiana Project, a project whose profiles often overlap with the pre-1755 profiles of the Acadians Project.

Through her research, she is exploring an observation that family networks among our ancestors were broader and more global than we might imagine. Her question What makes someone an Acadian? challenges us to think about experiences besides the Expulsion that connected extended families.

Part of the broader question roots in her own brick-wall family lines — Pierre Gaultier with ties to 1700 Louisbourg and 1774 Saint-Domingue (Haiti), a Thibodaux who may not be the Acadian he is popularly believed to be, and Jean-Baptiste Gautherot— a quintessentially Acadian name — who came to New Orleans before the Expulsion.

from Bunny & Tree by Balint Zsako with permission of Enchanted Lion Books

Savanna: I started out working on my own tree, trying to figure out a few tough brick walls. Eventually I realized that studying the entire “system” was a lot more interesting than just studying my own lines, and probably necessary to answer the initial questions anyway, so I started to focus on certain groups of people more broadly to understand their whole network. I go wherever my interest goes, and this is where I ended up by just following wherever the evidence led.

Many of the people I end up focusing on are ones that haven’t been researched (or at least, publicly documented) well on the major sites. I look for information about someone and when I can’t find it I easily, I research and compile that information so that the problem goes away. Now anybody who Googles someone I’ve researched or seeks a profile on WikiTree will find much better information than I did when I initially tried.

I hypothesize that if we approach many Acadian questions with an open mind about what it meant to be Acadian, we’d begin figuring out the answers to a lot of our open questions about various Acadians.

For example, most people would see a Gautherot in New Orleans in the 1740s and assume he was unrelated to Nova Scotia Acadians because he wasn’t deported with them. And they’d be right that he wasn’t Acadian.

But I think they’d likely be wrong about him not being a relative, perhaps even a close relative, of the Gautrots who did go to Acadia.

from Bunny & Tree by Balint Zsako with permission of Enchanted Lion Books

Look at the records from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), for example. French people colonized the island in the late 1600s, and some Acadians went there after the Expulsion.

These registers often include the church parish when referring to a person’s origins, but that’s a lot less commonly included in Louisiana records. The parish is absolutely essential for finding records in France about a person, as there are so many registers and so many people.

If you do not know where to look pretty specifically, you’re gonna have a bad time. But if you have the parish name, you have a key, and you can usually use it to find the person you’re looking for and probably lots of connections between their life in France and their life in whatever colony you started in. Repeated family names can be found, as well as siblings, parents, witnesses, and godparents.

There may be specific church parishes named in records in Saint-Domingue for people we can connect to Acadians for whom we’ve never located a birth record, and I’d wager a guess that oftentimes their relations would have gone to the same church in France as they did. We should look in those places.

Migration between France and Louisiana and the Caribbean and Canada was continuous, and it went both directions, not just one.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Increasing access, expanding and simplifying data, challenging received knowledge and breaking new ground, these are examples of the sub-projects our cousins are doing to ensure that some not-so-visible knowledge is accessible.

Tips for getting involved in a project or project-within-a-project

Ralph: Wikitree has so much to offer. Try different projects and classes and games until you find what you enjoy the most.

Rod: Join a project. Pick something like the Acadians Project (or a locality you care about) and start there instead of working alone.

• Adopt standards, don’t invent your own. Use the project’s formats for biographies, sources, and categories so your work plugs in cleanly.

• Start small but structured. A single census, parish, or village is enough to begin. Build one good free-space page and link it well.

• Focus on sources and links. Every time you touch a record, think: “Can I link this to a profile? Can I improve the citation?”

• Ask for help early. Project leaders and long-time members (like Cindy, Gisèle, and Ralph) are very generous with feedback. It really is a collaborative sport, not a solo one.

Nicole: WikiTree is made for collaboration so don’t be afraid to jump in.

The more people researching and documenting profiles, the better. Adding records and reliable sources to profiles are encouraged and appreciated.

If you’d like to work on profiles managed by a project, I’d recommend checking in with a project leader to see what work needs to be done on those specific profiles. WikiTree has a wonderful community so you can reach out to others for help if needed.

Savanna: Just start doing it!

Work on whoever you feel like working on. Sometimes I just add entire families from church records in the areas I’m interested in and connect them to their relatives. Usually when I do that, it’s because I couldn’t decide what to do next but wanted to do something. But 9/10 times, as I am adding people, something catches my attention and I end up following the trail to some interesting story or new insight relevant to other work I’ve done.

If you don’t like that there are hardly any profiles with a surname that interests you on Wikitree, or that there’s hardly any information about people from a place that interests you, that’s where you start. Be the change you want to see in the Tree.

If you add the missing people now, the next person to look for them won’t be annoyed that Wikitree hardly has any information about them. Maybe they’ll stay awhile and add some of their own information, too.

Another fun way to contribute is to think of some group of interest (e.g. a particular military unit, a specific cemetery, people who participated in some historic event) and add detailed profiles for everyone in the group that you can find information about. Connect them to the Big Tree, and use categories to tag each profile in the group. This makes it possible to look at the category’s page and see a list of everyone who was in the group in one place.

I often wish I could just find a list of names to start from when I’m looking for information about some group like this, and when I use Wikitree to categorize the people I identify this way, I create the list I probably lamented not finding on Google when I first attempted to figure out who was involved in that thing.

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It’s two months since I climbed the first few limbs of the Acadian WikiTree (part 1). What Gisèle, Cindy, and Ralph said about it is true —

• there’s always someone available to help you learn, add, and correct

• adding yourself and your lineage opens a world to more cousins than you imagine

• you’ll need to resist the urge to add or check “just one more thing” if you want to get to work on time or have a good night’s sleep

At Gisèle’s suggestion, I engaged with G2G, which is code for “Genealogist-to-Genealogist,” and The Tree House, which is a group hangout that includes a weekend chat with other genealogists and family historians. At the moment, we’re rooting for Teenie the NYC parakeet to heal fully from West Nile virus.

I wondered what other suggestions and insights Cindy, Gisèle, and Ralph might have for climbing a few more branches.

Cindy: You’re welcome to use any information about Acadians on WikiTree for your own research purposes, to write blogs or articles, etc. The information is freely available to anyone who wants to look, connect, or use it. Just give us credit 😊

Be collaborative. If you want to materially change information, please post comments or send messages to the profile manager. They oversee, but don’t dictate, the profiles. Keep an open mind, look for sources to support your point of view. We respect sources.

Be curious. Ask yourself, how do we know this? Why did they do this? How did they get from here to there? What happened to those children? Even ask “why does WikiTree do things this way?”

Gisèle: Yes, be curious and ask questions. You can comment on a profile page or in G2G, or contact the Acadians Project leadership team directly.

Use WikiTree’s My Connections to discover which of your relatives were affected by a particular historical event, or were part of a distinctive group. (You’ll find this in a pull-down menu beneath My WikiTree in the right top corner of your profile page)

Your connections are regrouped in categories. Here are a few examples:

Acadian First Families
Interesting People in Acadie
Acadian Village Heritage Site / Village Historique Acadien
Company of Frenchmen
Great Upheaval: Acadians affected by “Le Grand Dérangement”
Passengers on the Pembroke 1755
Acadians on Winslow’s List

You can also join Acadians Project Google Group, a place for information and updates about the project and everything Acadian.

Acadian Expulsion Memorial List

Ralph: The project is forgiving. If you make mistakes, someone will quietly clean up your mistakes without a fuss.

Acadiann: Yes, Ralph, and thank you for that.

In one foray into adding death date and location, I entered a place that, while technically right, wasn’t actually correct. Ralph fixed it and pointed me to the pull-down menus that automatically populate this field.

I could see what he’d done in a history folder:

This folder tracks changes, who made them, and when they were made. If you want, you can revert to an older version of information in that history list. Like Ralph said, the process is forgiving.

Take the Cultural Pledge

There was another question that niggled at me, one that might sound or be rude to those who’ve spent so much volunteer time, energy, and dedication to the project.

Why does the Acadian WikiTree matter?

Gisèle: Because Acadian history is unique. Our shared past is the foundation of our identity — across borders, languages, and traditions.

A lot of records were scattered or lost, so rebuilding these family lines helps bring clarity, recognition, and pride in our heritage. It also helps cousins from around the world find each other. I’ve “met” several cousins who I didn’t even know existed, and it’s a joy to share family stories and photos with them.

Also, WikiTree is a good place to correct errors repeated in other family trees, and to make changes to lineages based on recent DNA research. It’s a community effort that connects us not only to the past but also to each other.

Cindy: This is the one place where most Acadians can be found and a rich family history told. We know where they lived. We know how their families grew. We know their livelihoods. We know how the British drew the noose tighter and tighter and chased them into the woods or took them prisoner. Most other family-tree places only have the bare facts and sometimes not much in the way of sources.

WikiTree expects accuracy and requires sources. The Acadians Project tries to avoid conjecture. We have a place to put theories, suppositions, possibilities, or questions — you can put these in a section called Research Notes.

You can learn much about your own Acadian family and others’ families. We have many apps that allow you to have different views of your ancestry. You can learn how you’re related to the First Families and Pioneers of Acadie, where everyone came from, how large the families were, how long people lived and so much more.

Acadiann: After two months, I’m far more relaxed about adding to, searching around, and feeling inspired by the Acadian WikiTree. I’m also a bit humbled because, in my earliest enthusiasm for learning, I told Gisèle my goal was to master it by December. Probably just as well I didn’t specify a year.

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Having fun on WikiTree

Beside playing games, surfing collections, and reading stories in the Acadian WikiTree, you’ll likely find personal ways to use it. I’m using it to find out how historical characters might be relatives.

This week I’m reading two French heritage books — one about Acadian Jeanne Dugas by Cassie Deveaux Cohoon

and another, an ARC from Denis Ledoux, about Barthélémy Verreault and Marthe Quittel, and Louis Ledoux and Marie Valiquet

I’d previously tied into some of my Dugas links, so it was easy for WikiTree to tell me how Jeanne and I are related. I just needed to make sure I had the right Jeanne Dugas as several popped up in a search.

For the French-Canadian ancestors, I needed to enter information to connect my great-grandmother Parmelie Ledoux to Mr. Ledoux’s Ledoux-Valiquet ancestors.

But I now had a puzzle to solve: How can my 9th great-grandfather be the husband of my 8th great-grandmother?

Asking that question on G2G led Siegfried Keim to find the solution.

Because I’d loaded WikiTree extensions to my browser, the profile page prints my relationships to that person. If the relationship seems incorrect, the solution is to refresh the number-degree circle next to the name.

Voilà, the relationship aligns:

Resources for learning more about WikiTree, including Zooms

Training with Ralph Geer -- YouTube videos

Member Q & A via Zoom -- Oct. 19 at 11 am EDT

Information about how to navigate the WikiTree as you grow your branches

WikiTree Week Nov 2 - 8, 2025

Looks like a combination of online block party, story-swap, and training

WikiTree Day -- Nov. 5

WikiTree Symposium -- Nov. 7

WikiTree Workshop with Bill Moore -- Nov. 17 at 6:30 pm EST, via Zoom

Substacker Bill Moore will host a hybrid workshop at the Henrietta Public Library in Rochester, NY.

Leave a comment

Emily Dickinson, 1868

Telling the truth slant dovetails well with what I think of as slant research — learning about someone’s life by looking at the bits and pieces that are documented about those with whom a person lived or was related to during the lifetime.

I’m digging slant to my 5th great-grandmother Marie Vigneau by looking a bit more into her Uncle Jacques’s life. I’ve selected two suggestions from historian Lisa Maguire’s microhistory writing model: reading against the grain and looking for the scattered traces.

Chart courtesy of historian Lisa Maguire

The history I’m reading slant is Beamish Murdoch’s 1865 A history of Nova Scotia, or, Acadie. In his description of the events of summer 1755 in Beaubassin, he writes what seems to me an off-hand comment about Jacques’s family ties:

Jacob Maurice, who is said to be a kinsman of M. Vergor, came in also with some habitants of baie Verte, to make terms. (p. 273)

Jacob Maurice is Jacques Vigneau’s name in English. The terms were for the surrender from the French to the British of Fort Gasperaux, which fell after Fort Beauséjour.

The came in also follows the remark that Joseph Brossart called Beausoleil, came in under a safe conduct to propose a peace with the Indians, praying pardon for himself. No mention was made of Brossart’s kinships. Something about Jacques’s ties to Vergor mattered, even as Murdoch wrote about the surrender.

Who was Vergor and how were he and the Vigneaus kin?

Vergor was the French commandant of Beauséjour when he surrenderd the fort to British Lieutenant-General Robert Monckton on June 4. Vergor’s full name was Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor.

According to some historians writing in English, Vergor was a human being of questionable morals and incompetent leadership.

Well, not every family member is going to shine.

Take the cultural pledge

Murdoch noted that Vergor had a lot of relatives in Acadie (pp. 234-5). Given the many ways in which families were intertwined in 1755 Beaubassin, that conclusion didn’t require much deduction.

Still, how in particular were Jacques Vigneau (b. 1702, Port Royal, NS) and Vergor (b.1713, Sérignac, Saintonge, France) kinsmen? What was their cousinage?

Murdoch says Vergor’s parents were Acadian Jeanne Muis d’Entremont du Poubumcou (say that three times fast) and Frenchman Louis du Pont du Chambon (m. 1709 Port Royal).

Jacques’s parents were Canadian Maurice Vigneau and Acadian Marguerite Comeau (m. about 1701 in Port Royal).

After several forays into their genealogies, I can find a slant kinship between Jacques and Joseph Brossart through Jacques’s first wife Marguerite Arsenau. Marguerite and Brossart were second cousins; their maternal grandmothers were sisters (Anne and Madeleine Blanchard). But Murdoch didn’t comment that Jacques and Joseph were kinsmen.

Did Vergor and Jacques have closer family ties?

I can’t find a cousinage between the Vigneaus/Comeaus and the Mius/ d’Entremont families. The closest tie seems through godparents.

Jacques’s godmother was Demoiselle Marie de Pouboumcou.* His godfather was Sieur Jacques Pontif, surgeon major of Fort Royal.

They sound like local elite, this demoiselle and this sieur.

Jacques Vigneau baptism from Parish registers of St-Jean-Baptiste de Port-Royal, Acadie. Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia, Canada.

It’s possible the Marie de Poubomcou who was Jacques’s godmother was Vergor’s maternal aunt, his mother’s older sister Marie (b 1684, m. January 1705 in Port Royal). Though I’m no handwriting expert, the signature on Marie Mius D’Entremont’s marriage certificate looks similar to the signature on Jacques’s baptismal certificate, especially the “d” and the “r”:

from François Dupont du Vivier and Marie Mius de Pobomkou marriage 12 January 1705

Jacques’s godfather Sieur Pontif is actually Jacques David, who was born in Château-Richer, Canada, Nouvelle France. Pontif was “the garrison surgeon, responsible for shaving the soldiers and looking after their medical needs. Pontif built three houses on his large property. One house, equipped with a billiard table, seems to have operated as a public billiard hall and tavern. Another served as a garrison hospital until one was constructed on the glacis of the new fort” (Dunn, p. 58).

Not that I wouldn’t want a godfather who ran a tavern and billiard hall, with a nearby hospital, or a godmother whose family was a political and social force, but why didn’t Jacques’s parents pull in at least one of the Comeau relatives for him?

In 1702, Marguerite Comeau had two brothers and three sisters who were at least 16. When Jacques’s brother (Marie Vigneau’s father) Jean Baptiste was born 14 years later, they’d picked Jean Comeau and Marguerite Pitre, wife of Abraham Comeau as parrain (godfather) and marrain (godmother).

Did godparents mean something different for first-born Jacques? Did becoming a godparent in 1702 Port Royal, Nova Scotia, make unrelated families kin?

Out of my wheelhouse and unable to resist the pull of the genealogical rabbit hole, I decided to “Ask a historian.”

My go-to is Patrick Lacroix, Director of the Acadian Archives. Dr. Lacroix sent three references. “The articles insist on the importance of ‘godparenthood’ in establishing social ties where a blood relation was non-existent. But... the one from Acadiensis highlights the intensity of blood relations in a ‘large’ community like Port-Royal.”

Early 1700s, Port Royal was not the hub of endogamy it would become by the deportation years. About half the spouses, mostly the husbands, were born outside of Acadie:

“The parish register of St. Jean Baptiste shows that in almost every second marriage in Port Royal between 1702 and 1714 one of the partners, usually the husband, had been born outside the settlement. Although some of these came from neighbouring Acadian villages, and some from Canada or Cape Breton, the majority immigrated from France.” (Hynes, p. 4)

Still, in 1702, there were blood relatives available to Jacques’s parents, so something more than family ties went into Maurice’s and Marguerite’s selection.

Maurice, a sailor-carpenter, was a recent emigré from Île d'Orléans, having arrived in Port Royal from Canada just two years before Jacques’s birth. He was a master carpenter helping to restore the fort at Port Royal. Pontif was surgeon major for the garrison. Marie de Pouboumcoup’s** father was a co-seigneur of Port Royal. They likely knew each other from those roles as carpenter, doctor-barber, and landlord’s daughter.

Given what Dunn said about some of the not-Acadian husbands coming from Canada, maybe Maurice Vigneau and Jacques David had a closer cultural affinity with each other than with the French from France or Acadia.

In Canada, Maurice was born in Sainte-Famille, Île d'Orléans, which was across the river from Château-Richer where Pontif was born four years before him.

https://marinboucher.blogspot.com/2006/05/chteau-richer-1650.html

Maybe their shared Canadian mainland roots, and their not-from-Acadia status brought them together as well as their time at the fort and in town.

Maybe Jacques’s parents were establishing social ties with the Mius d’Entremont family.

Maybe the French Catholic mindset about the seriousness with which one took godparenthood was alive and well:

“…godparents became relations of both their godchildren and their godchildren's parents, by means of spiritual kinship.” (p. 486, Alfani et al).

If this is so, then the kinsmen relationship between Jacques Vigneau and Vergor was forged through a spiritual link that expanded the definition of family. His baptism may have allied Vigneau and Comeau with Mius d’Entremont and Pontif.

Reminds me of the bonds that form with sister-friends, adopted children and their parents, and step-parents and step-children.

Between Jacques’s baptism in 1702 Port Royal and the Grand Dérangement of 1755 when he was deported from Baie Verte, a lot of life happened. But life events and the upheavals of war didn’t erase family ties. Bonds were significant enough for Murdoch to note in 1865 that Jacques was said to be a kinsman of Vergor.

Modified from a chart sent by my brother John (thank you!)

Something fun — Walking tour of Annapolis Royal 1710

The Annapolis Heritage Society created a map of homes in 1710 Port Royal. The Vigneaus are at #29 and the Pontifs at #23. Jacques’s maternal aunt Madeleine Comeau is at #25. His mother’s cousin Anne Comeau is at #35.

I imagine an 8-year-old Jacques on his own walking tour of family homes.

Source: Acadian Walking Tour Map produced by Annapolis Heritage Society https://annapolisheritagesociety.com/

Acadian Memorial List

Note

* Poubomcoup is the place Mi’kmaq considered a place where in winter you can go fishing for eels in the port by digging holes in the ice. Today it’s Pubnico.

** Marie (de Pobomcoup) Mius D'Entremont may have a tale worth telling. The Acadian WikiTree entry for her says The marriage created somewhat of a scandal within the French Colonial military as it was performed in secrecy by Felix Pain, the garrison chaplain, against the wishes of the acting Governor. About three months after her wedding, she gave birth to her first-born.

Thank yous -

because looking for the scattered traces to reconstruct the invisible history takes a village

Sally Buffington who, after she read my first Acadian Bits and Pieces, shared the Emily Dickson poem about telling the truth slant.

Ralph Geer for finding out that Sieur Jacques Pontif is Jacques David on WikiTree

Lois C. Jenkins, Researcher, Annapolis Heritage Society for finding Pontif in Brenda Dunn’s book on the history of Port Royal

Dr. Patrick Lacroix, historian, Director of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine Fort Kent for answering any and all questions Acadian — and even some that are not

Lisa Maguire, historian and Substacker, for ways in which to use microhistory tools in family storytelling

The volunteers who make the Acadian WikiTree such an invaluable resource.

Resources

• Alfani, Guido, Agnese Vitali and Vincent Gourdon. 2012. Social Customs and Demographic Change: The Case of Godparenthood in Catholic Europe. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, SEPTEMBER, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 482-504; https://www.jstor.org/stable/41681807

• Berteau, Camille, Vincent Gourdon and Isabelle Robin-Romero. 2012. Godparenthood: driving local solidarity in Northern France in the Early Modern Era. The example of Aubervilliers families in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, The History of the Family, 17:4, 452-467, DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2012.752758

• Dunn, Brenda. 2004 A history of Port Royal/Annapolis Royal, 1605-1800. Halifax, N.S. : Nimbus Publishing.

• Hynes, G. I. (1973). Some Aspects of the Demography of Port Royal, 1650-1755. Acadiensis, 3(1), 3–17.

• Murdoch, Beamish. 1865. A history of Nova-Scotia, or, Acadie. Halifax NS: J Barnes. https://archive.org/details/ahistorynovasco01murdgoog p. 273

• Walking tour of Annapolis Royal

The look on her face suggested she’d never considered her mother as anyone other than her mother.

“I don’t know,” she said, “she was just always there.” She did remember she once caught her mother crying in her rocking chair because she missed her people.

So much story that could have been told. What was the story of a person who was always there?

It’s kin to the situation I was in until recently with the Acadian WikiTree.

wikitree.com

This repository of Acadian family lineages was always there. If I needed to dip in and rummage around, I could, without cost or thought. Sort of like rummaging around the refrigerator in a parent’s or grandparent’s kitchen. Always something there for you, though you hadn’t thought much about why, when, or how that happened.

And then, one day, I found a document I thought would be worth adding to an Acadian WikiTree profile. While scanning FamilySearch files for the name “Morris,” I came across a 1758 bill from a Dartmouth, Massachusetts selectman to the Massachusetts legislature requesting payment for taking care of a family of French Neutrals (Acadian bits and pieces: Finding a personal history across the documents Part 1).

Though a bill for supplies, it spoke poignantly about the destitution experienced by Jean-Baptiste Vigneau (known by the surname Morris in colonial Massachusetts), Agnes-Anne Poirier, and their eight children. Here they were, three years after their removal from Baie Verte (now in New Brunswick), in desperate need of food and clothing. Perhaps some of the other descendants might be interested in seeing the document.

Acadian Memorial List

But I felt daunted at adding that to Jean-Baptiste’s Acadian WikiTree profile. Which button or tab do I click? How do I get the document in there? What if I mess up something someone else has already added?

The abundant instructions are clear enough. It’s just that my mind begins to wander if it needs to read a list larger than 10 simple steps. All I wanted to do was add a document and then go back to a world in which “The Acadian WikiTree is always there.”

istockphoto.com

So I sent an SOS to Gisèle Cormier. She and Cindy Bourque Cooper manage the Acadian Project on WikiTree. Could Gisèle please walk me through it, or, even better, do it for me?

That’s when Ralph Geer showed up. “If you let me, I can help you,” he wrote in his first email.

I was a bit nervous about that. What if he was the genealogical equivalent of the scamming Nigerian prince? “Sure,” I answered.

Happy to say, it’s one of the best risks I’ve ever taken. Ralph is an absolute gem of a teacher — patient, thorough, knowledgeable. He even produces YouTube videos to walk me through the steps needed to do a task. Who does that for a stranger?

Apparently, a good lot of the teachers, mentors, and genealogists of the Acadian WikiTree. These folks deserve an award. They’re all volunteers. They love our shared history. But all the work of monitoring, documenting, teaching, fixing? Why would they do that?

So I asked them.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Acadiann: Why are you doing this?

Gisèle: I found WikiTree by chance while searching for a free site to share my uncle’s research and old family photographs. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the Acadian profiles. As a history lover, I’m constantly learning something new, and I find it incredibly rewarding to help others explore and connect with their family’s past.

Cindy: I started out like many, wanting a place for my family tree. My father developed it on paper. I chose WT because it was free. But then when I connected to Acadians and Quebecois who were already on the tree, I realized the value of collaboration, so no one person has to do all the work. Nice.

Then I got involved in some real problem-solving collaboration with others. It was amazing how several people could contribute (and not necessarily agree at first) but develop the story with facts and sources. I'm still friends today with the key person I worked with on that first one years ago - lots of respect there.

Now I want to see all Acadian families documented, and their stories told. Most of those in the deportation times are heartbreaking, and the documentation of the cruelty of the British is shocking. Take a look at the Bergeron family story in Rivière Saint Jean.

Ralph: I never knew my ancestry beyond my great-grandmother until I was 14 when my father stopped at a dairy farm with Geer on the mailbox. We were on a Sunday drive through the country roads in Lebanon, Connecticut, on our way from home in Manchester to the beach at Rocky Neck.

They introduced us to The Geer Genealogy Book which was an eye opener and showed my roots back to George Geer in Connecticut in the 1600s. Outside of visiting Heavitree, England, where George Geer lived before coming to America, I did little for 60 years until computers allowed me to search more easily for more of my tree.

I tried several genealogy sites as I searched for ancestors. I had a chance to compare answers from all the site searches and discovered that the answer on WikiTree was always the right answer. At this point, I joined WikiTree and with the help of a couple of volunteers connected my tree on both the English and Acadian sides to the Big Tree.

I made a lot of mistakes when I started because I wasn't afraid to jump in. Volunteers suggested I take the Profile Improvement Course and the Data Doctor course which I did.

My father died before finding his mother's birth certificate even after driving from Connecticut to New Brunswick in his 80's. His mother, before she died, told him she was born in St. John's when she was really born in Restigouche. This was my brick wall in the beginning because his grandfather, Fabian, went by the name Joseph and his grandmother, Elisabeth, went by the name Lizzie.

I realize that not everyone in my family is interested in their roots, but I am doing this for those, maybe not even born yet, who might appreciate the work I am doing now.

photo by Acadiann

Acadiann: What three things would you tell someone who wants to start adding to WikiTree?

Gisèle:

• Join the Profile Improvement Project (PIP) Voyage. You’ll be assisted by a friendly and knowledgeable guide. You’ll learn how to create interesting, informative, well-sourced profiles that adhere to WikiTree standards, styles, and guidelines.

• Use reliable sources and family trees. Here is a list of Acadian resources

• Read, read, read, especially the New Member How-To Page.

Cindy:

• We want only one profile per person. This is totally different from other sites where everyone builds their own tree. You need to look to see if someone already has a profile and connect to that. This is especially important for way-back ancestors where many people are descendants and share those ancestors. Start with yourself and build up to a known person with a profile.

• It takes a while to learn WikiTree. But there are many people, tutorials, guided learning, and other ways to learn. Please ask questions! Be patient. Don't worry - every mistake can be corrected.

• It’s fun and addicting! Everyone can participate regardless of skill level. You get to know people around the world, and there are plenty of places for humor. You’ll want to spend lots of time to add information, improve accuracy, expand families, solve problems, read and contribute to the discussion forums, play games and more.

Ralph:

• This is absolutely the best genealogy website out there. I know; I've tried the others.

• If you like accuracy, this is one site that demands it by requiring everyone to use sources.

• It’s free.

Okay, this sounds fun. Where do I start?

Ralph suggested I start by putting in my own family tree.

What?! “I don’t have enough time left of my life to do that.” Which could be an exaggeration, but maybe not, even with all the endogamy of Acadian and Quebecois heritage. One never knows. I was ready to unpack the box of SOS flares to Gisèle.

“No, no. You just need a name and a birthdate,” Ralph said.

What a weight off my shoulders.

But first he taught me to how to put the tag next to my name.

I made myself a profile, then added in names and dates from me to my father to my grandmother (Angeline Chenevert) to my great-grandmother (Marie-Louise Belisle-Chevrefils) to my great-great grandmother (Marguerite Benoit) who is the daughter of Marie Victoire (Bourgeois) who is in the Acadian WikiTree. She’s the daughter of Marie Vigneau, the focus of my obsession and the eldest of the children listed in the Dartmouth selectmen’s 1758 bill.

And just like that, I became a profile manager.

Then WikiTree revealed that Ralph and I are 7th cousins once removed. We share many times great-grandparents Marie Poirier and Francois Doucet.

And Gisèle and I are 7th cousins once removed, sharing Michel Haché m. Madeleine Leblanc, and Marguerite Bourgeois m. Michel Poirier.

And Cindy and I are 6th cousins, twice removed — on our Québécois sides. And further back somehow cousins in the Acadian lines of Bastarache, Gaudet, and Richard. Richard sits darn close to an Arcand branch in Cindy’s tree. My maternal grandmother — the one who rocked and cried because she missed her people — was born an Arcand.

The Acadian WikiTree is, simply, a collaboration of cousins.

“Don’t worry about feeling clumsy,” Gisèle said. “We’ve all been there. You're not alone, and we’ll always be here to help you out whenever you need it.”

Next time we visit these WikiTree-ers, they’ll tell us why they think the Acadian WikiTree matters and suggest a few more things that will help if you use the site.

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Microhistory…I first heard this term in Substack writer (and Substack-found cousin) Lisa Maguire’s* interview on the Keepsake Chronicles: Lisa's Spoons.

I hadn’t known this was a “thing,” this little corner of history. According to Charles Joyner, microhistory aspires to "[ask] large questions in small places." Isn’t that what some family historians do?

While I’m interested in all things Acadian, I am obsessed with the Vigneau family and its microhistory from about 1700 to 1800.

Specifically, I want to know the everyday stories of my 5X great-grandmother Marie Vigneau (b. 1740 in Beaubassin).

original artwork by Acadian artist Patsy Cormier with permission

Because she

• was born during an interesting time in Acadian history, (b. 1740 to d.1819)

• is a woman, and

• seemed to move around a lot for someone with generational roots in Beaubassin.

Because she is so ordinary, I can only come at her story slant. I have to find tantalizing bits scattered in various sources like seeds scattered by a windstorm. I have to pick up clues where family dynamics intersect with public events from records most frequently written by men who have their own partialities and biases.

I want to know the personal stuff, how individuals and families lived, breathed, loved, and died during these times. If I can find out, I want to know what they valued.

Beginning with the premise that no one is born in a vacuum, I assume that Marie inherited the mores, values, and attitudes of the relatives around her — parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, godparents. As the eldest child, she likely passed along her ways to her younger siblings — whether they liked it or not.

Being Acadian in 1740 Beaubassin means she was born into a collective, a community whose interconnections of relatives looks like a ball of yarn after the cat is done playing with it.

from ja.hinative.com (I imagine the look on the cat’s face is kin to the genealogist’s trying to sort out Acadian family lines)

So I collect observations about her and her relatives that are documented. Her individual trace is available on the Acadian Wikitree.

Next comes a look at the relatives. For starters, I picked her paternal Vigneau line, mainly because they seem a whole lot less relationally convoluted than the Poiriers, Comeaus, Bourgs, Bourgeois, Boudreaus and Dugases.

Until the most recent half-decade, that search meant reading books cover-to-cover and making a note, or marking with a Post-It, every time the historian mentioned Vigneau, or Vigneault, or Vignau, or Maurice or Morris. The yellow stickies in my copy of Geoffrey Plank’s book make it look plumed.

Reading volumes isn’t a problem for an avid reader, but, after several books that include the beginning-to-end of Nova Scotian Acadie, and what led to the Acadian expulsion in 1755, understanding what a horror it was for our ancestors seeps into your bone marrow. At some point, you start skipping over the Charles Lawrence, William Shirley, and Grand Pré bits.

Photo by Rey Seven on Unsplash

Another clue that general history knowledge has settled in your bones is that you find yourself arguing with the historians.

Because you don’t have an academic history degree, the argument happens mostly in your head. Until it doesn’t. My Substack-found cousin Savanna in her post “What even is genealogy?” said it well —

“I often find that the commonly-accepted wisdom about some aspect of the history of a place is not really backed up by the evidence. I am now someone who has opinions about historical interpretations; I find myself disagreeing with historians sometimes.”

My slant search for Marie-information began with an observation on the recorded variations of the surname. When a record says “Maurice,” someone involved is recognizing heritage. The male progenitor is Maurice Vigneault, so the boys would be recorded as Y à (or dit) Maurice. Patrilineal heritage mattered in mid-1700s Acadia.

Or maybe it was a convenient shorthand for figuring out which Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, or Francois you were. Which leads me to wonder how they sorted out which Anne, Marie, or Marguerite you were.

When “Morris” appears, the recorder is probably English. I learn, then, that the family interacted with British officials or colonials.

Before Plank, there was Pierre Belliveau. In his 1972 book about the French Neutrals in Massachusetts, one of the books I thoroughly read, he identified three variations of the family name: Jacques Maurice (p. 23), James Morris (p. 109), and Jacques Maurice Vienneau (p. 110).

Shout out to Adobe Acrobat in this most recent half-decade for its ability to convert even an image to a searchable document. Because now that I want to find the “bits and pieces” specifically left by the Vigneaus, I can scan older, no-longer-copyrighted books in minutes.

Take, for example, a 655-page, 1866, second volume of the history of Acadie written by Beamish Murdoch.

I scanned for “Vigneau” and its variations but came up with nothing. Then I tried “Maurice” and “Morris.”

Bingo. The search found two instances.

In 1753, under “Morris”

“Casteel was carried by the Indians by the river Shubenacadiee to Cobequid, thence to Tatamagouche and Remsek ; thence they were carried to bay Verte, at a French fort there called Gasparo. He was examined as to the state of the English settlements at Halifax and Lunenburg. Casteel was after this ransomed for 300 livres, from the Indians, by Jacques Morris, a French inhabitant, and sent to Louisbourg, where he arrived 16 June (p. 222).”

and, in 1755, under “Maurice”

“Monckton sent a detachment of 300 men to offer to captain Villeray, who commanded the party posted at the fort at Gaspereaux, baie Verte, the same terms that he had given the garrison of Beausejour, which he accepted, and on the 18th colonel Winslow took possession ; and on the 24th, the troops who had been in garrison at both forts sailed for Louisbourg, and arrived there on the 6 July. Meanwhile, Joseph Brossart, called Beausoleil, came in under a safe conduct to propose a peace with the Indians, praying pardon for himself. The pardon was granted him, subject to the approval of governor Lawrence. Jacob Maurice, who is said to be a kinsman of M. Vergor, came in also with some habitants of baie Verte, to make terms (p. 273).”

So…Marie’s Uncle Jacques, the eldest brother of her father Jean-Baptiste, was an influencer of sorts — negotiating a prisoner ransom in 1753, and, in 1755, helping to set conditions for Acadians at Fort Gaspereaux’s surrender to the British.

Sounds like Marie might have come from a multilingual family that threaded the needle of the complex relations among the disputants for Acadie/Nova Scotia. Hidden information smack-dab in the middle of recorded history.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Recently, I tried this name-search on a set of Massachusetts Archives available through FamilySearch: Massachusetts Migration Records 1758-1769

The result darn near broke my heart.

Here is Marie, 18 years old, post-Expulsion, living in Dartmouth, Massachusetts in the most destitute of circumstances — in need of food and clothes.

“Province of ye Massachusetts bay to Humphrey Smith For keeping one French Neutral family by order of the Government who came from Georgia and was sent here to be taken care of The family is one John Batis Morris his wife and Eight Children one an Sucking Infant about 10 (transcript says 18) months old one Daughter about 18 years old one Boy 15 and another 13 The rest all small down to 4 years of age and came to me Very Bare on it for clothing The old man very often lame in his back which renders him incapable of labouring They all seem to be willing to do the best they Can to maintain themselves, but provision & Clothing Is so Dear that under their circumstances they cannot possibly maintain themselves without a considerable help I improve them every way I can to Advantage : and been obliged to finde them from the 28th of March 1758 to the 28th of Sept which makes Six months

To House Rent at ye Rate of Two pound Eight Shillings a year.

- To 4 cord of Wood at 6 (?) per Cord

- 288 pounds of Salt beef

- 15 pound pork

- 111 pound of mutton

- 3 Quarts of Milk per day for six months & 47 Quarts & one pint at one penny 1/3 per quart

- 23 ½ Bushels of Indian Corn at 2/8

Dated Dartmouth Sept 18th, 1758

Humphrey Smith & Giveh (?) Swift, Selectmen of Dartmouth

Record for Oct 1757 to March 1758

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From this early search, the blurry picture of Marie begins to come into focus. Her childhood was not that of an isolated French Catholic farm girl. At least some in her family were multi-lingual, and interacted with players on both sides of the battle for Acadia. While as a child, she may have been protected from the brunt of the nascent war, by the time she was 18, she suffered its consequent hardships: want of necessities and imprisonment in a foreign land.

Yet, she and her family were willing to do the best they Can to maintain themselves. How often have I heard a variation of that phrase: you do with what you’ve got?

As Pierre Belliveau argued, not everyone in English Protestant Massachusetts was a hater. Mr. Humphrey Smith, at least from his perspective, seems to have had a beneficent attitude and to plead on behalf of these Vigneaus for their sustenance. Never hurts to have an ally when you’re a stranger in a strange land.

Notes

* Lisa Maguire recently wrote a series about Beaubassin and her Morin ancestors. You can find it on Ancestory.

Lisa discussed microhistory with Barbara Tien of ProjectKin on August 7. You can watch the interview at

Projectkin

Special » Family History Asks Large Questions in Small Places — Lisa Maguire

Many thanks to Lisa Maguire for her fascinating program today and for all of you in attendance, including Ann G. Forcier, Anne Young, Daniel Nilan, Diane the FH Bowerbird, Jane Chapman, Jill Swenson, Linda Teather, Mark Hochstetler, Wendi Funchess, Lisa E Oakley…

Listen now

a year ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Lisa Maguire and Barbara at Projectkin

Acadian Memorial List

Created by Nicole Gallant-Nunes, the Memorial list identifies Acadians who died during the Expulsion years. The list includes almost 5000 people.

Thank you

To Anne Wendel, for helping to decipher the bill from the Massachusetts Archives.

Family Vigneau

Jacques Vigneau

Jean-Baptiste Vigneau

Marie Vigneau

Maurice Vigneau

Books

Belliveau, Pierre. 1972. French neutrals in Massachusetts; the story of Acadians rounded up by soldiers from Massachusetts and their captivity in the Bay Province, 1755-1766. Boston: K. S. Giffen

Delaney, Paul. 2005. “The Acadians Deported from Chignectou to 'Les Carolines' in 1755: Their Origins, Identities and Subsequent Movements.” In Du Grand Dérangement à la Déportation. Nouvelles perspectives historiques, edited by Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc (Moncton, Chaire d’études acadiennes) pp. 247-289.

• One group, which had been on The Jolly Phillip and were mainly from BaieVerte, was headed by Jacques Vigneau dit Maurice (p. 264).

• Marie’s future husband was on the Prince Frederick, in Massachusetts 1756-63, and in Miquelon in 1764 (p.359)

Faragher, John Mack. 2006. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland. NY: W. W. Norton & Co.

Griffiths, Naomi. 2005. From Migrant to Acadian : a North American border people, 1604-1755 Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press.)

Hodson, Christopher. 2012. The Acadian Diaspora: an Eighteenth-Century History. NY: Oxford University Press

• Jacques Maurice Vigneault (p. 59), a pilot and a fisherman with an independent streak, he resented the “heavy-handed French.” Whether it was the French or the British, he just wasn’t into taking an oath of allegiance. (If you read this section, take note that Jacques wasn’t on the Prince Frederick, but on the Jolly Phillip [Delaney]). This is an example of where I argue in my head — and now in public — with an historian. Hodson says that, in 1755, Jacques decided which side to take. I’m not so sure he did. He may have been someone who didn’t suffer fools easily no matter their politics. How do we know that what some call “flexible loyalties” isn’t, instead, diplomacy and the hard work of staying neutral?

• Vigneau “family” (p. 63) — another place I quibble. Why put family in quotation marks? Seems to me, Acadians don’t orient only to a nuclear family identity. There’s a cousinage that lives in many of us through the generations. Jacques could easily have over 100 close and extended family members given the size of families and the marriage alliances.

• November 1757 (p. 77), Jacques had dinner with Congregationalist minister Ebenezer Parkman in Westborough, on a visit from Leominster. I wonder what he was doing in Leominster MA.

Jobb, Dean. 2005. The Acadians: A People's Story of Exile and Triumph. Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

Murdoch, Beamish. 1865. A history of Nova-Scotia, or, Acadie. Halifax NS: J Barnes. https://archive.org/details/ahistorynovasco01murdgoog p. 273

Plank, Geoffrey. 2000. An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

• Vigneau mentioned on 24 pages

Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? 1990. California: Northpoint Press Albany. posted on https://www.eplhstory.ca/

It’s a sobering moment to come across a bit of history in which the ancestors of our traumatized and deported Acadian ancestors participated in traumatizing and deporting others.

There they are in 1696 on Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula — “…Canadians, Indians, and Acadian adventurers…” about to wipe out English fishing villages. (see For More Information, Williams, p. 34)

The question arises: “what the hell is going on with people?”

The answer comes with a frisson, a shiver, a pause, a shift in knowing. Something to explore, to reflect upon, to confront.

This moment began with a trace up an Acadian Bourgeois branch, from my great-great-grandmother (Angele Bourgeois) to an English name in my genealogy shrub: William James.

How did he, an English youth in late 1600s Newfoundland, become a French ancestor in early 1700s Montreal?

D’Iberville. A home-grown military icon of Canadian history.

Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville, who history credits with founding the colony of Louisiana.

But before he went south, he went north. At his own expense, he brought along the Canadian, Indian, and Acadian adventurers.

The particular genealogical moment for William James, the moment that changed him from English Episcopalian to French Catholic, began with d’Iberville’s 1696-7 raids on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. The raiders — Canadian, Acadian, Mi’kmaq, and Abenaki — decimated 23 English villages.

William was a 14 year-old lad living on the shores of Conception Bay in one of them.

The other ancestors were not the good guys in this episode.

View of the Colony of Avalon NHS (© Parks Canada | Parcs Canada)

Why would they do that?

Payback and trade wars.

In 1688, over in Europe, France to be precise, Louis XIV started a war to expand his territorial and dynastic claims: the War of the Grand Alliance. Catholic and Protestant conflicts were high. The Bourbon and Habsburgs each itched to take control over Spanish possessions when epileptic and half-mad Charles II died.

It was yet another reason for cousins, whether they remembered their ancestry or not, to wail on each other for power and resources.

In Newfoundland, the French lived in Plaisance, and the English in the other island villages.

They were there to fish.

https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?idnumber=2926914&app=fonandcol&ecopy=c003686

And to skirmish with each other, as they had for decades, on behalf of their monarchs, to control the fisheries.

One of the first significant conflicts occurred on February 25th, 1690, when Plaisance was attacked by an English party of privateers, mostly composed of Ferryland residents. Arriving by sea, the English took the community by force, killing at least two soldiers and imprisoning members of the community inside the local church for approximately six weeks as they looted and ransacked the town. (1)

— If history were a novel, this would foreshadow events in 1755 at Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, when the British locked the Acadian French in a church before pillaging and burning that community, then deporting the villagers. —

Back on the Avalon Peninsula, after 1690, there were a few more back-and-forths between the English and the French, until in 1696-7 French leaders D’Iberville and de Brouillan led a campaign by land and sea against the English villages. They wiped out 23 English settlements from November 1696 to February 1697.*

Nicolas Langlois (1697). “The sacking of English settlements in Newfoundland in 1696 by the French. War of the Augsbourg.” Credit: Gallica / Wikimedia Commons. License: public domain.

After capitulation, Ferryland’s residents stood by helplessly and watched as the “enemy […] burnt all our houses, household goods, fish, oil, train vats, stages, boats, nets and all our fishing craft […]” (1)

— If history were a novel, this would foreshadow events at Beaubassin, NS in 1755 when my Bourgeois and Vigneault ancestors, among the many Acadian families there, watched their homes burned and pillaged before they were deported to the British colonies on the now eastern U.S. seaboard. —

pngtree.com

The story begins to have the feel of a dual timeline historical novel.

In William James’s genealogical transition moment, when he lived in Bay Verde, NF, he may have been the new boy in the neighborhood. His Catholic baptism record says IL A ETE ENVOYE VERS LA FIN DE L'ETE 1696 A BAIE-VERTE, ILE DE TERRE-NEUVE. Translated: He came to Green Bay, Newfoundland at end of summer 1696.

At age 14, was he old enough that he was there without his parents? Did they die in the skirmishes? Did they return to England?

Of all the unlucky times to find yourself in a new place

tide-forecast.com

William was captured by French soldier Claude Robillard in January, 1697. “Pris à la Baie Verte, Terre-Neuve en janvier 1697 par Claude Robillard, soldat, d'Iberville.” https://www.nosorigines.qc.ca/GenealogieQuebec.aspx?genealogie=James_William&pid=26605

Had William come to know his neighbors in the four or so months between the end of summer 1696 and his capture in 1697?

Abbé Baudoin’s 1697 journal noted that "there were in this harbour fourteen settlers well established and ninety good men" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_de_Verde

And probably an iceberg or two. It was winter in Newfoundland.

ehcanadatravel.com

Many of the English settlers caught up in d’Iberville’s Avalon Peninsula campaign were sent on ships back to England.

Why was William, instead, brought to Montreal? And who were the other prisoners and where did they go?

In 1698 Montreal, he was a pensioner with Sulpician priest Léonard Chaigneau when he was baptized into the Catholic faith. Robillard, a master butcher (2), was one of his witnesses.

From the Catholic baptism record, we know that William, was born in Pimperne, Dorset, England on Dec. 27, 1682.

https://www.opcdorset.org/Pimperne/Pimperne.htm

In Montreal, he became Guillaume Langlais (William English). Or Jacques Sansoucy. Or Guillaume Jacques. Someone on nosorigines decided to settle it with Guillaume Langlais-Sansoucy-Jacques.

In 1703, William married Catherine Limousin de Beaufort, who has her own backstory worth exploring someday. She was said to have “plusieurs amants” (many lovers) and to have been 7-months pregnant when she married William. Her child, and two others before this one, died.

That’s at least curious, and I sincerely hope not nefarious, given that Catherine and William had six living children.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Were William and Catherine two lost souls living on the margins of their communities, two souls who happened to find solace in each other? Who recognized trauma when they saw it, even if they had no idea what it was called?

Some of their offspring married into both Acadian and English refugee families(3) : Littlefield tracing to Wells, Maine, Stebbins tracing to Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Bourgeois tracing to Beaubassin, Nova Scotia.

They wove ancestral stories of French and English victims at the hands of English and French oppressors. Their heritage — my heritage — became a bit more complicated through them.

I begin to wonder, is there a gene, or an epigenetic change that renders one more inclined to recognize other refugees, a sort of radar for detecting the trauma and uprooting that makes one a refugee rather than a migrant?

Because they weren’t migrants in the sense of willing emigrants or immigrants, seeking fortune, escape, or adventure. They were forced out of where they’d known into places where they eventually adapted, and, I hope, came to love or at least find peace.

Nicole's Acadian Memorial List

Without William James at the tip of a genealogy branch, the Avalon campaign in Newfoundland would have remained for me another historical incident in the interminable military encounters that populate recorded documents. You know, the ones that make your eyes glaze over and your brain turn to pudding.

I wonder: Who in the now, in our global conflicts about trade, is the William James to a future generation? Whose story needs to be remembered?

letterpile.com

* I wondered about the wisdom of a late fall to early winter campaign that far north. Seems Bay Verde has an average temperature range of 25-degrees Fahrenheit in winter and 60-degrees Fahrenheit in summer. Cold but manageable — as long as the snow doesn’t fall or the ice forms.

Thank you to Donna Doucette, Library Assistant VIII, Centre for Newfoundland Studies, QEII Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador for help in locating information.

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Sources

(1) A casualty of the 1696 French attack on Ferryland, Newfoundland By Eric Tourigny

(2) ENGLISH CAPTIVES & PRISONERS REMAINING IN NEW FRANCE by Roger Lawrence, AMERICAN-CANADIAN GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE 2015, p. 171. Available at: https://acgs.org/product/english-captives-prisoners-remaining-in-new-france-2nd-edition/

(3) William and Catherine’s daughter Marguerite James dit Sansoucy married Deerfield captive Joseph Stebenne’s in 1734 Fort Chambly. Joseph’s sister Thankful-Louise-Therese, also a Deerfield captive, married militia captain Adrian-Charles Legrain (dit Lavallee) in 1711 Boucherville. Thankful and Adrian are also my ancestors.

In 1753, William and Catherine’s granddaughter Marie Parent married Francois Letrefils, son of English refugee Aaron Littlefield. Aaron Littlefield was kidnapped during the Northeast Coast campaign of 1703 during a raid led by Alexandre Leneuf de La Vallière de Beaubassin. (Marie and Francois are my ancestors)

Leneuf’s family seigneurie in Beaubassin had been raided in 1696 by New England military forces (les Bostonnais), a raid reported to be in retaliation for a French raid on Pemaquid (Bristol, Maine). D’Iberville was at Pemaquid before heading up to Newfoundland.

And, weaving the thread back into Acadie, Francois and Marie’s daughter Archanges married Francois Bourgeois in 1814 in St. Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Vercheres. Francois is the son and grandson of Acadians booted out of Beaubassin during the Grand Dérangement.

Francois’s Acadian grandfather Pierre was brother to Claude Bourgeois, husband of Marie Vigneault, the ancestor whose story is the kernel of my historical novel-in-process.

One more thread to the tapestry of interconnections — d’Iberville was the nephew of my ancestor Anne Lemoine. She and his father were siblings. He is my first cousin 9 times removed.

For more information

Abbe Baudoin's Journal

Before the French and English, Basque fishermen in Newfoundland

Colony of Avalon, National Historic Site of Canada

Colony of Avalon planned as a utopia

Calvert chose the name for his new property himself. “Avalon” evokes a couple of English legends. In one, “Avalon” refers to a place of sanctuary located in Somerset, England where Christianity is said to have been first received in its more or less unified, pre-Reformation configuration. In another, Avalon is an island, a refuge, where King Arthur and his knights went to be healed. Perhaps it’s within the bounds of possibility that the name choice indicates Calvert’s desire for an enlightened, peaceful place where Anglicans and Catholics could live harmoniously side-by-side even if their faiths remained unreconciled.

Father Baudoin's War: D'Iberville's Campaigns in Acadia and Newfoundland 1696, 1697 by Alan F.Williams. 1987, Memorial University of Newfoundland

This book is hard to find, but your local librarian can work miracles and borrow a copy for you. Chock full of intrigue, petty squabbles, and the horrors of war on civilians, the so-called normal consequences of war. Hard to this modern eye to read about massacres and adventures in the same paragraph without needing an anti-nausea aid.

Heritage Newfoundland

Pictures about the 1696-7 battles.

Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville

statesymbolsusa.org

If you’re a reader in the U.S., do you remember learning about Casimir Pulaski in your U.S. history courses?

I don’t.

Casimir’s name came up a few weeks ago in a lively discussion with somehow-Acadian cousin Savanna King in Louisiana about not-Expulsion Acadians who may have traveled the Atlantic Ocean from Cape Breton to France to St. Domingue (Haiti) to Georgia and New Orleans.

I only knew Casimir’s name because when we were kids we’d pass Casimir Pulaski State Park on our trips from Southbridge MA to Point Judith RI.

waynebarbersoutdoorscene.blogspot.com

So I Googled Casimir.

Turns out Casimir, the Father of the American cavalry, saved George Washington’s life. We may not have celebrated Washington as our first President without Casimir.

Turns out Casimir was an immigrant.

Turns out Casimir was an intersex person.

So much for the current screaming in some U.S. political circles that non-binary folk don’t belong in the military. There are a lot of parks, monuments, and roadways honoring Casimir’s prominent role in the American Revolution.

You can’t believe everything you think.

I passed the story along on Facebook where a friend suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to collect these sorts of stories before they are erased from U.S. history.

Like stories of Acadians?

Yes, I’m still a little bitter. So, remembering Yvon Labbé's advice, perhaps it’s time to squeeze that lemon. Time to dig into my abundance of Acadian books, papers, and journals, most collected these past two years from out-of-the-way places.

Ironically, I recovered, a 2012 book titled Acadia Lost by A.M. Hodge.

Cousin George Comeaux gifted it to me in 2012 when he met the author at a July 22 book fair at the John Winslow house in Marshfield MA. Yes, Winslow of Acadian Deportation notoriety. Irony noted.

George included a note about the Acadian talks held at the end of the day. Most visitors had left. Those who stayed comprised a small group of Acadians and Acadian-adjacents telling their stories to each other. Irony upon irony.

Before I began to read the novel, my idea of Acadia, after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) until the Grand Dérangement (1755), was that it was a land of peaceful, well-fed, fecund farm families and roguish sailor-traders, whose extended family included Mi’kmaq kin. They spent a lot of time building and fixing dykes, collecting apples, and learning about how they were related to each other so that they didn’t marry too close a cousin.

Take the Cultural Pledge

I imagined the occasional outbreak of nonsense and dispute because, even when you are related somehow to most people you encounter, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get along with or even like your relatives.

I saw our ancestors as tolerant of French and English claims to their lands (much claimed from the sea rather than stolen from local inhabitants), while not taking claims all that seriously because one never knew when either country was going to claim to be the government of record.

Then I read Hodge’s end notes.

You can’t believe everything you think.

She mentioned Gorham’s Rangers (1744) and their raids of terror in Acadia.

Raids of terror? Eleven years before the Expulsion?

Sure, there had to be British and French soldiers traveling hither and yon about the countryside because that’s what soldiers do on behalf of their sovereigns. But I had this picture of them staying out of each other’s way for the most part, and of Acadians offering a meal to whomever. Because offering meals seems to be built into the Acadian genome.

https://tourismnewbrunswick.ca/story/9-acadian-foods-you-have-to-try-in-new-brunswick

You can’t believe everything you think.

O my, my. John Gorham was a Yarmouth, Cape Cod militia man who led a company of Cape Cod Wampanoags and Nausets on missions and raids to protect British interests, mainly the garrison at Annapolis Royal. And whatever else the British were interested in along Bay of Fundy shores.

Seems he learned tactics from Benjamin Church (1639-1718), a New England colonial officer, who Americans tout as the Father of the Rangers. Acadians tend to see him differently. I wonder how today’s Wamapnoag see him since he’s responsible for killing the sachem Metacomet.

You can’t believe everything you think.

In “Savages” in the Service of Empire: Native American Soldiers in Gorham's Rangers, 1744–1762, historian Brian D. Carroll says

“GORHAM’S RANGERS, formed in 1744 as an auxiliary unit of the Massachusetts provincial army, was an amphibious strike force that patrolled the coasts, inlets, bays, and rivers of the Canadian Maritimes in modified whaleboats.”

unrealengine.com

Why would indigenous men join conquerors to protect other conquerors? And from whom were they protecting them? What did they have against Acadians and Mi’kmaq?

The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth (Massachusetts) website has a partial answer:

“Overseer accounts indicate that Gorham’s call to arms had strong appeal for these men, since it played to their martial traditions. In addition, one third were in debt, and another third were indentured servants, both conditions inclining them to recruitment. There was also a promise of extra pay from bounty money, typically a reward for enemy kills and captures in frontier campaigns.”

If that’s true, then the indigenous men were mercenaries killing and capturing Acadians and Mi’kmaq on behalf of the Brits.

What about the French? Seems the Brits might have more of a problem with the French. It was their monarchs who engaged them in repeated cold and hot wars, wars that originated from extended family squabbles about who owned what through hundreds of years.

Was there a more going on among Acadians during the Golden Age than building dykes and aboiteaux, raising cattle, and trading? Weren’t Acadians famous for neutrality?

pixy.org

Was there an Acadian militia or army that’s somehow disappeared from the story? Was this a matter of conflating Acadians with French soldiers? Were there Acadians who were anything but peaceful, neutral farmers and traders?

I think the answer is “it’s complicated.”

By 1744, when Gorham formed his Rangers, Acadia was full of children, sort of like the Baby Boomer horde after World War II. If you have doubts, notice how many children and babies were on the deportation ships out of Port Royal in 1755 (see Acadian Odyssey, in which those deported from Port Royal are enumerated).

Acadian Memorial List

I wondered, “Were they really terrorizing a largely youth-based population?”

“Gorham’s strategy to subdue local resistance included subterfuge, “skulking,” surprise attacks, and terror against enemy noncombatants, including taking captives (some used as hostages, some killed, and a few sold for servants in New England), and killing and scalping Mi’kmaq women and children. (p. 396, Carroll)”

Terror against enemy noncombatants.

Killing and scalping Mi’kmaq women and children.

Well THAT certainly did not come up in my U.S. history classes.

“The scalp bounties were not only a potent recognition of Indians’ war prowess; they were for many rangers and their families the only money they would receive for their service.” (p. 406, Carroll)

Paid for scalps. THAT’s the bounty the Old Yarmouth Historical Society means by “promise of extra pay from bounty money, typically a reward for enemy kills and captures in frontier campaigns.”

Even if you say “standards were different then,” it’s still creepy. Still terrifying. Still requires a person to engage in mental acrobatics to feel okay about doing that to children so that you can have an income.

You can’t believe everything you think.

Or feel as the case may be.

It’s one thing to read about these military conflicts and believe they were one-and-done, or that a Klingon-style glory was achieved from battle, or that combatants incurred no moral injury, or that non-combatants incurred no generational trauma.

It’s quite another to imagine yourself standing on a shore looking out over relatives who were terrorized and scalped.

This, too, is part of history.

The image that emerges for me now of this period of Acadia is of a more anxious time for our ancestors. I wonder whether some part of the community stood lookout for those modified whaleboats, whether some hamlets and villages were safer than others, whether a squirrel gun was adequate protection.

I have more admiration, too, for those trying to live peaceful neutral lives while surrounded by the threat of bloody skirmishes.

Next time I’m in Mashpee, I’ll have to stop at the Wampanoag Indian Museum and learn their version of the raids on Acadia. I wonder: do they even know? How do they tell this part of their history that intertwines with ours?

mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov

For more information

Gorham's Rangers - the forerunners of the US Army Rangers

Colonel John Gorham’s Account Book

John Winslow's Diary

Military History of Acadians

Ordinary Men by historian Christopher R. Browning about ordinary men enlisted in an auxiliary police force that terrorized and murdered Jews in World War II. Netflix made a documentary of it telling this story through the eyes of the perpetrators.

Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma

Seeking answers to the questions: how long do memories of trauma travel down the generations? How do they show up even when they aren’t talked about directly?

thepleasantdream.com

I keep coming across statements that say Acadians are invisible. That the more dominant cultures of Canada and the U.S. exclude our stories from history, sociology, everyday discourse.

And, yet, every time I turn around (metaphorically), it seems I’m bumping into a fellow Acadian, a cousin with whom I can trace genealogy to our shared ancestors. On Facebook. In Substack. On Etsy. In a chat room of an online writer’s workshop. On a park bench or a retreat center deck while I’m writing in a journal minding my own business.

It’s like there’s an ethereal transgenerational magnet out there gathering iron-filing descendants.

livescience.com

One discovered cousin — Ian, who’s retired to a cottage in Wales — calls it cousinage.

The first known use of the word was in the 14th century. In modern written English, its frequency of use is .01 in a million — that’s 1 in every 100 million words. That feels like the right word choice for an invisible people with a long history.

sandiegobirdspot.com

I come to the revelation of a specific cousinage through what looks to me like a human (platonic) version of the western grebe mating dance. It begins with a simple hello, erupts into an enthusiasm of flying words, and settles with joy.

Is this one answer to the question of how long does something travel through the generations? After 269 years, we’re still looking for family members? And erupting with joy at each discovery — as if we’ve found the Lost Treasure of Oak Island?

This behavior could be a lemonade made from squeezing the lemons of traumatic separation (see The trauma of the expulsion of Acadians, part 2).

And then I wonder: How much of what we call culture is a resilient response to trauma and its unbearable losses?

This is the sort of thinking that drives my siblings nuts — and has since we were kids in the so-long-ago. I can see the eye rolls, the stunned looks, the comments: you know most people don’t think of these things, right? They’re more interested in what’s going on today.

True. Yet, here we are again.

Transgenerational transmission without awareness can show up in behaviors, fears, and assumptions both individually and familially. Changes to body biology — epigenetics — can show up generations after a primary trauma.

We know about big, adverse, behavioral and emotional responses to unresolved trauma — alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, high anxiety, perpetration of trauma on others. Those get talked about. Those lemons have a chance to have the juice wrung from them.

But what about more subtle, unquestioned, maybe benign, maybe not benign ways in which we adapt to hidden ancestral trauma?

freepik.com

I think of my childhood irrational fear of fire and water.

My mother took aside my 7 year-old self and insisted I learn to light a match. I have no idea why she thought this was a necessity, but I stood in her kitchen and went through a matchbook.

Same with water. Swimming lessons for 5 year-olds were a rite of passage at a community pond in our town. The first step was to put one’s face in the water and blow bubbles. My terrified screams were enough to wake the dead.

I wonder: Are memories of burnt homes and drownings somehow encoded in my genes?

wccftech.com

I think of the invisibility cloak worn by Acadian culture.

In a Wikipedia entry about Oak Island (Nova Scotia), Templars, Masons, Incas (?!), Spanish conquistadores, and pirates are mentioned. But not one hypothesis about Acadians or Mi’kmaq. As close as the article comes is the idea that the French Army might have buried the treasury of Fortress Louisbourg there during the Seven Years’ War.

What’s it say that, even in a host of wild and offbeat ideas, and all these possible odd ducks sailing in and out of the Oak Island area, no one mentions Acadians or Mi’kmaq?

I also think about Mr. Leblanc — a discovered Acadian cousin I once met at Sackville Waterfowl Park (NB).

I was sitting on a riverside bench writing in my journal when he started a conversation about geese. They were new to the park, he said, there just the past two years. He worried they might be hit by traffic on the nearby Trans-Canada highway.

photo by Ann G. Forcier

“I haven’t seen any geese,” I said, “but I did see a little bird with a big mouth.”

“Sounds like my wife,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

His story unfolded slowly. The wife persuaded a veterinarian to come to the community. Then, he said — was it shyly or apologetically? — he was French.

“Moi aussi!! J’suis Française!”

“T’ parle français?”

“Un peu.”

“I’ll talk with you in English then.”

Oh, my, but his wife was (is?) a force of nature. The vet supposedly yelled at her once. To which she replied, “Don’t yell at me you French bitch.”

I’m stunned. Here in 21st century Canada, “French” is part of the slur?

Sounded like the vet was surprised, too. “You married a Frenchman!” was the purported reply.

Looking at this now, I have more questions.

What if I had to deal with that daily, the accommodation to less-than because of an ethnic minority status? That would be a chronic stress, n’est-ce-pas? Something that becomes an accumulated trauma because it is like “death by a thousand slices”?

Isn’t this a kin feeling to what the ancestors — deported, migrated to Quebec, hiding with Mi’kmaq kin, fighting back — would have felt from those who wanted them out of Nova Scotia because they were French Catholics? And kin to what their descendants would feel today in areas where “French” is considered less-than?

How did Mr. Leblanc manage to love, marry, and live with someone who carried that attitude about his heritage, and so, him? Did she even know she was doing that? Did he? Did it matter to either one of them, or was it something they both took for granted?

Had they made lemonade of ‘otherness’ or was Mr. Leblanc doing the best he could to carry around a very old lemon?

Maybe part of the issue is that, while our stories are excluded from the main Canadian and US cultures, they are also excluded from our families and ourselves. Maybe we take for granted behaviors and beliefs that ought to raise questions.

hobbiesinharmony.com

I think about my great-niece Katelyn. She’s starting to take a deeper interest in family history. In her teens, she’d asked her father about his French heritage because of what she’d learned in school.

Katelyn: Most of what I had learned in school or on social media described the French (all throughout history) as weak/timid. Napoleon was the exception, of course, but even that didn’t count to me because it was described as one powerful man rather than a powerful country. I was only ever taught about France’s losses and failures - their defeat in the French & Indian War and their capture in WWII, specifically. Although, I did learn more about their contributions to the Allied victory in WW1 after Dad and I had that conversation.

Still, I don’t know much about France’s history in general (which is unfortunate because I would like to be more connected to my heritage), mostly because I would have to do that research in my free time.

Auntie Annie: Oh, no, my darling. The research is done. Point me in the direction of what you want to know. You don’t know about your Canadian roots?

Katelyn: Yes, even with my 23&Me test, I only got approximate locations in France that my ancestors lived - nothing about Canada - so I never learned where we came from or why. I had honestly just assumed that French-Canadians were one big monolith with no subgroups, and that most of them just trickled into New England. I had no idea there was so much I didn’t know! Thank you for the list of people we’re descended from, too! That’s really interesting and I’ll be looking into them now because I’m curious. I appreciate the information!

Without shared family and heritage stories, Katelyn inherited lemons. In the 21st century U.S., she’d learned to feel less-than about her ethnicity.

Telling and hearing her ancestral stories will make lemonade from that lemon of feeling less-than.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Some stories curated through a new lens emerge at the unsqueezed lemon stage. Such is the case with The Acadian Expulsion Memorial List.

Take a look at what genealogist Nicole Gallant-Nunes recently released to raise awareness among us and to remember our relatives who died during the Expulsion.

The Acadian Expulsion Memorial List

Though I knew that “thousands died” during the Upheaval, the numbers kept the reality of that experience distant from my feelings. When I looked at Nicole’s list, when I said aloud some of the names, I felt the loss. Each one, as Nicole says, was loved by someone.

They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time. — Banksy

Say their names.

Resources

Legacy trauma

Epigenetics

Recent remembrances for Acadians

Dec. 8, 2024, unveiling of Acadian Odyssey monument in Annapolis

Location of other Acadian Odyssey monuments

Some things people are doing to remember others:

Bryan Stevenson Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

Stolpersteine Holocaust

Hibakusha Stories (2024 Nobel Peace Prize)

Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women

LGBTQ monuments

Apartheid monuments

Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Cafe

exile

At this point on a calendar cycle, 269 years ago, the Vigneaults and other families (paternal names: Bourg, Hebert, Cyr, Bourgeois, Girouard) have sailed down the Eastern seaboard of the now-U.S. on the schooner the Jolly Phillip under ship’s captain John Waite. They were deported in October 1755 from Beaubassin (Sackville, New Brunswick).

They were among those the British considered the most troublesome so they were sent from what was then, for all intents and purposes, the 14th Anglo-American colony (Nova Scotia) to the furthest southern one of Georgia.

Part of what made these Acadians troublesome was that, though they were Acadian men or descendants of Acadian men who signed conditional oaths of allegiance to the British kings before 1755, they had moved from English-held Acadie to French-held Acadie. They were the “Deserted French inhabitants” (see Paul Delaney in resources).

“Moved” is a euphemism; it fails to capture the reality of the experience. It was hardly the “oh, let’s go join French Acadie because we’re treasonous rebels” that British General Charles Lawrence claimed it was.

Acadian homes on the English side of the Missaguash River were burnt in 1750 under French orders executed by French and Mi’kmaq allies. The Vigneaults “moved” in with relatives whose homes and lands were yet intact on the French side of the river. Several Vigneaults ended up in Port Toulouse (St. Peter’s, Cape Breton) as refugees, and then back in Baie Verte (NB) by deportation time.

That’s a lot of rootlessness in the life of the particular person I’m following: Marie Vigneault. From age 10 to 15, she lived hither and yon in a land claimed by French and English monarchs. A land that belonged to the Mi'kmaq. At age 15, her latest home destroyed, she boarded a schooner going to lord-knows-where. She was a “Deserted French Inhabitant” having had no say in her residence by virtue of her age, sex, and consequences of military actions.

To make matters worse, the night before the Jolly Phillip had headed out, British troops — probably including New England colonials — robbed the passengers of “a great deal of money and many clothes” (see Delaney, p. 261).

Trauma, after trauma, after trauma.

Because they were “other” to the British and Bostonnais.

Better to remember or forget?

If the answer is “forget,” then why learn any history at all?

If the answer is “remember,” then how to do that without getting stuck in misery?

How do you reconcile that, but for a few hundred years, this could have been you or me?

But for a few thousand miles of geography now, it could be you or me in Ukraine or Gaza.

Or the experience could be closer in both time and space.

Though it is not an experience of mine, many cousins tell family stories of prejudice and outright violence because of their minority status as French Catholics through time.

Which reminds me of those told during The Rassemblement of August 1991.

In a moment of then uncharacteristic boldness, I’d asked the organizer whether I could come though I wasn’t from Maine or an alumni of the University of Maine.

Sure, of course, the more the merrier.

At this gathering of Franco artists, the distress these creatives expressed about the ongoing harm they felt by Anglo culture gobsmacked me. Stories of the KKK coming to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes and burning crosses on their lawns. Anger and hatred. Impaired sense of pride in heritage.

I asked Yvon Labbé (Director of the Franco-American Centre) how could it be that so many weren’t proud of being French, that they complained instead about their status and the way they were treated.

Thankfully, he had a wisdom that saw through my naiveté.

He told me about fruit: Ah, Ann, you have to squeeze lemons before you can make lemonade.

I never forgot, and have appropriated and shared it.

Complaining = squeezing lemons.

The first lesson of cultural trauma recovery, then, is complain about it. In a contained environment with other people who know what you’re talking about. With someone who can hold space for empathetic witnessing with the expectation that there is sweetness at the end. But bitterness first. Get all the juice out of those lemons.

And grieve the losses for the ancestors who couldn’t.

Like the children who died on the Jolly Phillip.

from John Waite’s ship’s log

In a few weeks, on December 13, New Brunswick will commemorate the Acadian losses. On that day, you can visit Descendants of Michel Hache dit Gallant and other Acadians where administrator Nicole Gallant Nunes will release the first of her Memorial list of Acadians who died due to the Expulsion. Hold vigil with them on that Acadian Remembrance Day.

Take the Cultural Pledge

Thank you to Patrick Lacroix and Steve Riel for identifying the year of that Rassemblement.

Resources

Paul Delaney, "The Acadians Deported from Chignectou to 'Les Carolines' in 1755 : Their Origins, Identities and Subsequent Movements". In Du Grand Dérangement à la Déportation. Nouvelles perspectives historiques, edited by Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc (Moncton, Chaire d’études acadiennes, 2005) pp. 247-289.

Passenger lists of Deportation ships

“Trauma is not what happens to us. But what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”

— Peter A Levine, PhD

print of a painting by Claude Picard (Acadiann’s collection)

Imagine — you are the masters of your communal destiny. You spin, sew, garden, farm, hunt, fish, preserve, carve, build, sail, herd, play, fiddle, tell stories, chop wood, bundle hay, gossip, laugh, cry, birth babies, raise children, make love, loom cloth, buy imports from France and the English colonies, trade with your Mi’kmaq neighbors, look out on the marsh and sea and feel blessed. Despite the cranks in the village. Or maybe because of them. Soldiers and overlords are more nuisance than impediment.

19th century print, unknown artist

Imagine — you are ripped from your land, separated from your family and neighbors, watch your homes burn, your gardens trampled, your livestock slaughtered. You have only what you wear. You are frightened, too frightened to cry or rage. You may be able to hide behind your Maman’s skirts. Or speak the language of the invaders to ease the terror of your loved ones. Or set aside your cares because the times call you to lead your band of survivors through territory unfamiliar to you and among people you don’t understand. You have little to no means to provide and protect. Or you wonder why your Maman and Papa look like your Maman and Papa but don’t act like them. You land in a place where people despise you. Where you are accused of being lazy and shiftless after the evidence of your hard work was destroyed by the agents of the people who now despise you.

How do you NOT experience that as what we’d now call trauma? The trauma of ethnic cleansing. Some would say genocide.

The Big Upheaval — what a minimizing euphemism THAT word is for the events the ancestors endured from 1755 to 1763.

But, since it happened about 275 years ago, does it still matter? Has enough time passed to heal wounds and forget about it? If you don’t talk about it, does it disappear?

Seems to matter to other humans who collectively endured like traumas — 400 years ago (enslavement, land grabs from indigenous peoples), 160 years ago (U.S. Civil War), 80 to 100 years ago (World Wars, Holocaust, dropped nuclear bombs on Japan), or in the now (Ukraine-Russia, Israeli-Palestinian wars). The answers, when I think about how people from these collectives talk about the ongoing harms they endure, would be “yes, it matters. And, no, not enough time has passed to forget it.”

Then what happened to disappear awareness of the harms heaped on Acadians?

GKillick on YouTube

I want to understand the consequences of ethnic cleansing of our Acadian ancestors without blaming or shaming. I think of the metaphor of someone slamming a car door on my finger. I’d try not to blame or shame them for doing that, but my finger would still hurt and need healing once the door was opened.

The compelling drive to understand now comes from the surprise sorrow I felt in response to cousin Nicole Gallant Nunes’ latest project: to enumerate by name each of the Acadians who died due to the Grand Dérangement.

Nicole: My big project this summer was to highlight all the key facts about the 765 Filles du Roi in Quebec and it was really a test for this much bigger project that I've had in mind for a while: to list our Acadian ancestors and cousins who were lost.

Well lost isn't really the right word is it?.. since it almost sounds unintentional or accidental...but they were murdered. It was genocide. 

We often stumble across their names while researching our family trees and perhaps some of us pause for a moment to reflect and make note of them. Maybe we dig deeper into their lives to learn about their specific story but it's really just us descendants and cousins who do that. The majority of the rest of the world has no idea that this brutality existed for our people. I know this list will end up being thousands of names so it will need to be released in parts but it's a start on a long road to honor them all. I've always felt like I had to do something to bring light into this darkest part of our history. It's that pull that I can't quite explain.

I know there have been some descendants, like myself, who have made these memorial lists for their own families, which is amazing, but I found the information is all spread out. At first it surprised me that no one had compiled all of these names before, but then realization hit of how daunting of a task it is, especially to do it alone, but it would be incredibly powerful to see all of these names, dates and locations in one place. A virtual memorial to those taken too soon. I think the real impact will come when everyone sees the ages. Children.....babies.

It's haunting and heartbreaking and maybe that's part of the reason why this isn't talked about more, but it is SO important. They meant something, everything, to their loved ones who carried their spirits with them through the generations, and they mean something to us now. To be named and spoken of is to live on. If we can honor them in this small way, then we must.

Tell me you aren’t now shedding a few tears yourself.

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Nicole asked our Facebook collective to send in the names of people we knew about in our individual family lines — to make sure, as best as possible, no one is forgotten.

Forgotten. How is it that THAT word reached straight into my heart?

Deportation by Acadian artist Patsy Cormier

By sending out the first two lost names I could recall, I left the realm of historical reports. These were no longer among the vague images of “thousands died,” but the once living, breathing, loving, funny, irritable members of my family.

They were real people resurrected in my historical fiction-in-progress: Marie Theotiste Vigneault, sister of my ancestor, at age 11 dying alone and apart from her family on November 13, 1755 in Quebec City. Her maman — Agnes-Anne Poirier — dying probably in Massachusetts sometime between 1758 and 1763. But in which town and how — unknown.

Before the deportation, they lived in Beaubassin. On October 13, 1755, 269 years ago today, the residents of this isthmus were deported on seven ships that left Chignecto for exile to the southern colonies.

I knew these as facts. But I hadn’t felt them so personally until Nicole shifted the lens from those who survived to those who perished. I grieved them. I wondered whether I was becoming a little nutty.

But Nicole also found herself shedding tears as she added names to the list.

So if I’m nutty, at least I’m not alone. There is solace in that.

Then it hit me: We are the empathetic witnesses for our Acadians ancestors, are we not?

Resources

1600 deaths from drowning and illness

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“After 1670, the Acadians were much more free-ranging in settlement, no longer depending on the seigneurial system.”

These words come from Chignecto & Remsheg prior to 1755: Mi’kmaq, Acadians, French by Stephen G. Leahey.

The image of free-ranging Acadian ancestors seems at odds with the idea of settled dyke-building, agrarian people living in hamlets of relatives.

The term reminds me of the way these words landed in the brain of a friend’s granddaughter. As a tween Abby (à Tony à Judith) placed several eggs from a carton marked “free-range” on the floor and waited. When Judy asked what she was doing, Abby said she wanted to see eggs range freely.

That some of our Acadian ancestors moved around a lot and that they weren’t a monolith of settled souls living idyllic lives, planting and harvesting by day, and fiddling and smoking clay pipes by evening isn’t really news. But how much free ranging did they actually do? And who was doing it? And why? And when?

For example, when Jacques Bourgeois left wife Jeanne Trahan in Port Royal in 1671 while he and their two eldest, Charles and Germain, headed up to the Isthmus of Chignecto to found the Bourgeois colony, did Jeanne think “Oh, there goes my husband, free-ranging again while I wait it out here”?

Or was she more of a mind to think “Thank goodness they’re looking for a new place because I’m tired of the way this one keeps going back and forth between the French and the British. I’ve had it with pirates and looting. I’m sick of cleaning up all the soot and smoke from those guys torching our homes”?

The question “why leave home?” gnaws at me.

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Once upon a time, in a Paris cab en route to the airport, I asked my brother John why he thought our ancestors left Paris. “For a better life,” he said. “Or because they were explorers.”

“That’s not enough of a reason,” I said, “to uproot your family, some of them toddlers, get on a ship that’s going to bob about for two months in storms and wayward currents, at the end of which you’re eating wormy meal. Or, if you’re a single woman, to leave for a life with a stranger in a strange land. What else was going on?”

He looked like a deer in a headlight. My brothers often do when I try to engage them in speculations on what motivates people to do what they do. Especially family members.

Why hadn’t the story of Acadian migrations come up in school history classes? Sure, we heard a bit about the French: La Salle and the Mississippi River, the British win on the Plains of Abraham, and Lafayette coming to help the rebelling colonies.

But the migration of Acadian people? Practically anyone else’s migrations, forced or voluntary, got at least a passing mention: Pilgrims, enslaved peoples, Chinese railroad workers, Scandinavians to the prairies, Italians and Polish immigrants at Ellis Island, Irish escaping a potato famine.

But not a word about Acadians. Heck, I didn’t even hear about Evangeline until I was an adult poking around in the world of poetry.

It’s not like there aren’t a lot of us.

ameriquefrancaise photo

The idea came to me that maybe if I followed around one group of Acadian family ancestors, I might glimpse how forces from the outer world — what we call history and politics — intersected with the inner worlds of their selves and their relationships with each other. Maybe if I watched them range freely, I could understand some part of how they felt about their lives and why they went where they went when they did.

If I’d started with one of my Bourgeois lot, I knew I’d quickly get into the weeds of Acadian endogamy. So, I picked a paternal line that began — or ended, depending on how committed a person is to identifying heritage through male names — with a Vigneault daughter. Start with a less common Acadian name. Start with Marie Vigneault.

Easy, right? Just look at where she was born, married, and died. Born about 1740 in Beaubassin, married in 1764 in St.Pierre-et-Miquelon, died in Nicolet, Quebec in 1819. Not a lot of ranging about, heh?

That’s like looking at an unopened carton of free-range eggs. You know they came from a hen somewhere, but the details just aren’t there. You just don’t know much about any one hen’s life or progeny looking at those crated orbs.

And so it is with Marie, and probably most ancestral Acadian women.

Two years into this, reading umpteen history books with occasional mentions of a male Vigneault family member; scanning census records from Port Royal, Port Toulouse, and Beaubassin; and reading records from the Massachusetts Archives, I have a glimmer of Marie’s life and where she ranged before her mid-20s.

Ai-yai-yai.

This ordinary young woman likely lived on the wrong side of the Missaguash River in the years before the Big Upheaval. Circa 1750, when she was 10, the French and Mi’kmaq alliance burned homes on the south side of the river in English Acadie.

Marie became a refugee on the north side in French Acadie. At age 12, she and her family are at Port Toulouse where one of her uncles (Joseph) lived and where her dad (Jean-Baptiste) grew up.

During the next few years, she returned to the Chignecto isthmus to Baie Verte from where, in 1755, at age 15, she was loaded with her Vigneault relatives onto the schooner Jolly Phillip en route to Georgia.

La déportation des Acadiens en 1755. Photo: Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton https://l-express.ca/deportation-des-acadiens-la-liste-de-winslow-expliquee/

The story goes that the British sent the Acadians they considered the most dangerous to Georgia. Probably Marie’s Uncle Jacques was among those so considered, and the reason the Vigneaults were sent to that southernmost British colony.

At least this extended family stayed together, which wasn’t always true during the deportation. Except for Marie’s younger sister Marie Theotiste, who somehow ended up in Quebec City, where she died of smallpox.

I can only imagine that, by the time they reached Georgia, Mama Vigneault, aka Agnes-Anne Poirier, was exhausted. And that Marie, now age 16, struggled to make sense of moving around after one home after another was burned by people she might have considered friends or neighbors. How did they endure? I tried to imagine how they might wrestle with a moment of despair (Her Mother’s Daughter).

In Spring 1756, from Georgia, like some 18th-century Moses, Uncle Jacques led a flotilla of rickety boats carrying about 100 extended family members up the East Coast. Destination: Acadie.

Uncle Jacques may have been a “silver-tongued devil” as one historian called him. Or maybe the governors of the colonies didn’t want French Catholic immigrants living among them. Wherever the Vigneault flotilla put in, the colonial governors were more than happy to give them a pass to move on.

Until they reached Massachusetts.

By then, Gov. Charles Lawrence in Nova Scotia, the man responsible for the deportation, had sent a message to Massachusetts Governor William Shirley that no way, no how, was he to let those Acadians return to Nova Scotia. Split them up and keep them away from the coast. Those guys know too much about sailing.

Marie and her family landed in Sandwich/Bourne where local officials brought them food and necessities until the sheriff showed up to remove them. These Vigneaults were stuck in Massachusetts until 1763 when the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War) ended.

From Massachusetts, Marie went to St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, where she got a break long enough to marry. She was 24.

During 14 years from age 10 to 24, she watched her village burn at least twice, was a refugee at the hands of combatants on both sides of a war, traveled down the East Coast of colonial America in a schooner then up the coast in rickety watercraft, lived among English-speaking Protestants who may or may not have tolerated her and her family, then migrated to the one island group France claimed when it relinquished its claim to Canada to Great Britain.

Politics, war, youth, family ties — all played a role in her travels. Marie was about as freely ranging as the eggs in Abby’s carton. Her travels were not for adventure, exploration, or a better life.

And this is between “she was born” and “she married.” I have yet to follow her around from St.Pierre-et-Miquelon until she settles in Nicolet, Quebec.

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Lineage

Ann (Acadiann) à H. Wilfred Forcier à Angelina Chenevert à Ulderic Chenevert à Marie-Louise Belisle (Chevrefils) à Marguerite Benoit à Marie Victoire Bourgeois à Marie Vigneault à Jean-Baptiste Vigneault à Maurice Vigneault (and Marguerite Comeau)

Maurice Vigneault, though he came from Quebec, had ties to relatives in Acadia. His father Paul, a soldier in Quebec, was the nephew of Marie Catherine Vigneault, a French Pioneer of Acadie

Resources

1752 Census of Ile Royale (Cape Breton)

Acadian census lists and links

Evangeline

Prior to the influence of Longfellow's poem, historians generally focused on the founding of Halifax (1749) as the beginning of Nova Scotian history. Longfellow's poem shed light on the 150 years of Acadian settlement that preceded the establishment of Halifax. In: McKay, Ian; Bates, Robin (2010). In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 978-0-7735-3703-3. JSTOR j.ctt81b7b.

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.

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The French Cross in Morden, NS

The Acadian Odyssey Monuments

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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:

Read The Promise

Resources

The Acadian Landing Monument

Maine Acadian Day June 28

historical faction

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