Welcome
This is a family history and genealogy site with stories of mostly Franco American families who lived in upstate New York.
The Only Door
With a few exceptions, when historians write about the great Franco American immigration of the 19th century, they use New England for their base of information. Franco American immigration to the textile factories of New York are seldom given the same consideration. Historians write about the pull of Lawrence and Lowell in Massachusetts, Pawtucket in Rhode Island, Manchester in New Hampshire, and hundreds of other New England mill towns. Upstate New York had many rivers and creeks, great sources of hydropower, and hence had many factories and textile mills that attracted Franco Americans looking for employment. This cite hopes to reveal the stories and lives of a few Franco Americans in upstate milltowns from the Quebec border, south through the Champlain Valley to the Mohawk and upper Hudson River Valleys in New York State. On the southern end of these valleys, New York City sits but is considered ‘a different country’ by upstaters. Nineteenth century NYC was the ‘Front Door” of immigration while the New York-Quebec border was ‘the Back Door’. ‘The Front Door’ opened itself to immigrants from eastern Europe while ‘the Back Door’ opened itself to Francos and Irish from Canada. The ‘Back Door’ was not often acknowledged in the history of immigration to the US. That is changing and many historians now acknowledge that for Franco Americans the “Back Door’ was the ‘Only Door’.
The families and the locations…
Mylott (Milot) and Glode (Poissant) from Whitehall, Waterford, Coopersville and Champlain – and towns along the Champlain Canal in New York.
Bissonnette and Beauvais from the Richelieu Valley to Cohoes, New York.
Rivet and Lacasse from St Jacques de Montcalm to Cohoes, New York.
Wills and Reed, originally from west Cornwall UK, then Bolton in southern Quebec, to Moriah, New York and and finally to North Pownal, Vermont. Their stories are here.
With the exception of the Wills-Reed Family, the families in these stories emigrated from Old Regime, France to Canada and Acadia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The people in these stories were commoners. In the 17th century, they were the pioneers of New France in Canada: tradesmen and traders, ‘filles du roi’ who married soldiers who became farmers, voyageurs, and mariners. Others were Acadians, forcibly shipped to coastal New England in 1756 where they lived as exiles and indentured servants. These Acadian refugees eventually found a safe haven in designated villages in Quebec – St Jacques de l’Achigan and St. Jean l’Acadie.
In 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 rapidly industrializing American nation.
Contrary to the wishes of family members, there are no royal bloodlines in our families. However, if you account for overcoming hardships, enduring obstacles despite overwhelming odds, there are many noble women and men in our families!
Thank you for reading our pages.
Currently, only the Wills Family site is online. Click here for The Wills Family.
Some stories on this site began years ago on a blog. Click here for the blog.