Reuniting Family

Ceinture Fleeché Arrowhead Sash

Winter is here in Colorado and 2023 will soon be in the past, for better and for worse.  For FrancoAmericanGravy, your host, the days and seasons of 2023 moved quickly.  It was a summer of reuniting with extended family – some family members I had not seen in 30 years.  I made a deliberate effort to see family and I am glad I did.  Many of my first cousins are now grandparents and great grandparents.  Their grandchildren have no inkling about their Franco-American culture and tradition.  That, too, is all in the past.

Through this site, your host will try to bring some of that back into focus for our extended family who are now 4th, 5th and 6th generation Americans with little understanding of the Franco-American immigrant experience.  As immigrants continue to come to the United States,  the parallels  continue and cannot be overlooked.  Unless you are indigenous, you are a descendent of an immigrant.  Immigrant ancestors had hardships – more than can be imagined in our 21st century consumer culture.  Today we, descendants, enjoy the fruits of our ancestor’s labors. We all live on land once the homeland of indigenous.

Ceinture Fleeché Arrowhead Sash
Detail of a Sash in Musée des plaines d’Abraham

Thanksgiving is giving and acknowledging all we have been given.

 

Folks and Family

Welcome to FrancoAmericanGravy.  This is a family history and genealogy site with stories of people and places connected to me.  Some of these people and places I knew well;  other peoples and places I only know through reading and researching.   With a few exceptions, the families in  these stories emigrated from  Old Regime France to Quebec and Acadia in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Later, their descendants migrated to upstate New York and Vermont.  Some of their stories were passed to me; others were rediscovered by me.  Contrary to the hopes and dreams of family members, there are no royal bloodlines.  However, if you account for overcoming hardships, there are certainly many noble women and men.  The people in these stories were from the third estate – commoners.  In the 17th century, they were the pioneers of New France:  tradesmen and traders, ‘filles du roi’ who married soldiers who became farmers, voyageurs, mariners, weavers and laborers.  In the 18th century, many were deported from Acadia (present day Nova Scotia) to live as exiles shipped to New England colonies.

During the 19th century they followed the French speaking diaspora from Quebec to New York and New England,  leaving farms to become dayworkers, Champlain canalers, miners, masons, iron workers, and factory textile laborers in the new industrialized state.

Currently, the only the Wills Family has been published in this site.  The Wills family is here.

Some stories on this site originated on my blog.

Thank you for reading.