Un Canadien Errant

Richelieu River & Lake Champlain(This post is meant to be accompanied by the chart The Bombards of New York.)

In 1842, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie wrote a song called Un Canadien Errant.  The lyrics are about a melancholy young man who is reminded of his former life in Quebec.  I first heard and played the Leonard Cohen version of the song only recently.  I asked the vocalist what the song was about, and she mentioned that it had something to do with a rebellion in Quebec.  I realized that she meant the 1837 Rebellion.  When we performed the song, I introduced it with a brief history of the Rebellion, and mentioned that the title, often translated as The Wandering Canadian, would more accurately be The Exiled Canadian.

Many Québécois farmers left Quebec in the 1830's and 40's and came to the United States.  Some left as a direct result of the Rebellion, but many others left, throughout the 19th century, for the same reasons that led to the Rebellion in the first place.  In fact, throughout Europe and North America (including the United States), migration and rebellion marked the transition from agrarian to industrial economies during these decades after the Napoleonic wars.  The Irish, for instance, left Ireland for exactly the same reasons, further driven by repeated failures in the potato crop (which were not limited to Ireland).

Aside from the Rebellion, the emigration of the Québécois was peaceful and persistent.  The border with the United States was quite porous, as they say, and families moved back and forth easily from Quebec and Ontario to New England, New York, Michigan and beyond.  The difficulty in Quebec was due to the manner of land ownership and management, which remained almost medieval in nature, during a time of rapid population growth.  As more and more gentry tried to make income from the land, more and more habitants were trying to feed their families and pass their land rights to their children.  Because the gentry controlled the government, there was no political relief for the farmers.  You could fight for political reform, fight for land reform, or just move on.  Emigration to the United States had been happening since the war with England, so the various trails into New York and Vermont had already been blazed for this wave of nineteenth-century migrants.

In the United States, owning land for farming was possible, yet relatively expensive.  But employment, both agricultural and industrial, was readily available.  In the Ausable Valley, the iron industry was booming, and workers were needed for mining, the iron mills, and the nail factories.  Coopers, mechanics, and blacksmiths were needed.  Shipping on Lake Champlain provided work.  Local farms and lumber camps needed help, too.  A new state prison in Dannemora hired many.  There were few Catholic churches in the area, so missionaries from Quebec would visit New York and Vermont, and record the births and marriages back in Quebec.  Dispensations were constantly needed for civil marriages, marriages of cousins, marriages with non-Catholics, events not usual in Quebec.  Eventually the Valley built its own churches, in Keeseville and Black Brook and Ausable Forks, after other churches to the north in Champlain, Coopersville, and Plattsburgh.

I have been helping Bev Farrington, a well-known researcher and genealogist, untangle the many Bombard families in Clinton and Essex Counties of New York.  The name is relatively easy to follow.  Bombardier dit LaBombarde is the full handle; families used Bombardier or Labombard (or both), or, more simply, Bombard.  Families in the Ausable Valley fared rather well, apparently - the population boomed, and in three generations there were more Bombards than you could shake a stick at.  This was true for other Clinton County Québécois names:  Amell or Hamel, Seguin (Sawyer), Diguette or Guyette, Giroux, Thibeault, Danette or Dennett, Cusson, Demarais or Demara or Demarce, Duclos (Douglas), Freniere, Gauthier (Gokey), Pelletier (Pelkey), Lafontaine and Lavallee and Laramie and Lussier, Rocque and Rougier, and on and on.  There was another group of Bombards out in Franklin County, and another in Grand Isle County, Vermont.

Eventually overpopulation and the decline of the iron industry (replaced by the steel industry in the Midwest) led to more migration.  In the 1880's, the New York families began moving to mill towns in New York and New England, further south, continuing the pattern of southern migration down the Richelieu River from Montreal to Marieville to Henryville to Alburgh to Burlington, or Laprairie to Napierville to Champlain to Plattsburgh to Keeseville.  Or they followed the lumber industry to Maine or Michigan and Wisconsin, or migrated out to the western US and Canada.  Some went back to Quebec, to work in the growing mill towns there.

Of the sons of André Bombardier, it was André Jr, Jacques, and Joseph who had descendants who emigrated to Clinton County, New York in the early 1800's.  André Jr married Josephte Anne Poudrette dite LaVigne.  It was his son Augustin whose children emigrated south.  Jacques, or Pierre Jacques, who married Francoise Thibeault dite St Louis, had a grandson named Pierre, son of Jacques, whose children emigrated south.  And Joseph, who married Marie Francoise Fontaine, had four sons whose children emigrated; Benjamin, Joseph, Francois, and Antoine.  So this gives us six lines into New York (and Vermont) with twelve branches:

Augustin & Pelagie Boileau		Jacques & Charlotte Goguet		Benjamin & Anne Danette
René Augustin & Pelagie Masse		Pierre & Charlotte LaRose		Antoine & Rosette Ouimette
Joseph & Louise Hache				Joseph & Marie Louise Corneau
André & Suzanne Courtemanche				Pierre & Angèlique LeClerc
Jean Baptiste & Josephte DuGuay
Francois & Marie Louise Riendeau
Joseph & Celeste Beaudin		Francois & Josephte LaPlante		Antoine & Francoise Vaudrin
Jean & Flavie Belouin		Francois & Seraphine Patenaude		Antoine Ambroise & Archange Rougier

We have not attempted to document other branches into Vermont and Franklin County NY, nor branches that stayed in southern Quebec but which may have moved south in the migration wave of the early 20th century.  There are also a couple of branches whose attachments to the main tree have not been determined yet.  As is always the case in genealogy, this is a work in progress.

BC

Related websites:
Un Canadien Errant - history and lyrics.
Virginia Demarce's groundbreaking study of migrant families to Vermont.
The Genealogy.com forum for Clinton County NY.
The Genealogy.com forum for Bombardier, where Bev Farrington has posted her research.
The full New York Bombards database at Rootsweb.

The Origin of the Name McKnight

North ArgyllMcKnight is one of many variations on the name MacNaughton.  MacNaughton is the Anglicized version of mac Nechtan, which means son (or descendant of) Nechtan.  So who was Nechtan?  Why, Nechtan Morbet, known as Nechtan the Great, ancient King of the Picts, or so it is often said.  But there were three Pictish kings named Nechtan, not to mention two Dál Riata kings with sons and grandsons named Nechtan.  And then there was Nechtan of Moray, a noble who was loyal to his king, Malcolm IV, and rewarded with an estate.  In other words, it's not at all clear who Nechtan was.  In a sense, he was all of them.

The Dál Riata were the people who lived on the Scottish west coast, in what is now called Argyll.  Their roots were in Ireland, part of a larger collection of Celtic people called the Ulaid, and after whom Ulster is named.  By the fifth century AD the Dál Riata had become unified into a kingdom that included what is now north Antrim, Argyll, and many of the islands between in the Irish Sea.  The people, called Scots by the Romans, identified themselves as members of various kin groups, or cenéla, which were a broader version of the smaller clans yet to come.  Each cenél was said to descend from a particular king - whether this was actually true or not, or even whether the king actually existed, was beside the point.  The point was not to delineate a factual genealogy, but instead to invoke a heroic genealogy.  This was a way to honor one's ancestors (whoever they may have been) and to bring their spirit into one's present life.  One aspired to emulate the ancestor's character and deeds, as understood in the present, at whatever scale one was capable of.

The Cenél Loairn were the great kindred of northern Argyll.  They claimed descent from the mythical second king of Dál Riata, Loarn mac Eirc.  This cenél was further divided into cenéla descending from Loarn's sons and grandsons.  The ancestors of those who came to call themselves mac Nachten were of one of these cenéla, the Cenél Báetáin, a branch of the Cenél Muiredaig.

The Picts were a Celtic people who preceded the arrival of the Dál Riata by a millenium or so.  The northern Picts of Scotland were established around the Great Glen of what is now Inverness, around the Moray Firth, and further north.  The southern Picts lived south and east in what is now Aberdeen, Perth, and Fife.  The northern Picts and the Cenél Loairn shared a lot of territory, sometimes peaceably and sometimes not.

It is said that Nechtan is a Pictish name, yet the name appears among the Cenél Loairn and Cenél Comgaill nobility around the end of the sixth century.  This could indicate a diplomatic bowing to the Picts, a genuine trend of intermarriage, or simply the use of a similar and apparently popular name.  But by the beginning of the seventh century, there likely was intermarriage among the nobility.  It would not be long before the more important families of both the Dál Riata and the Picts could claim a mixed heritage.  In time, there was sufficient cultural intermixing and intermarriage to diminish the ethnic difference between Pict and Dál Riata Scot, though the political differences remained.  After the Viking invasions in the ninth century, these Picto-Scots began to consider themselves Gaelic, which was their shared language, and the vast shared territory came to be called Moray.

But before then, toward the end of the seventh century, the Cenél Loairn for the first time began to dominate the kingship of Dál Riata over the Cenél nGabráin to the south.  This might have been a benefit of the cultural alliance with the northern Picts, and may have paved the way for Pictish dominance over all of Dál Riata by Óengus I in the middle of the eighth century.

The mac Nachten line apparently descends from a son of one of these Cenél Loairn kings, Domnall Dunn mac Ferchair Fota mac Feredaig (bearing in mind how uncertain these medieval genealogies are).  Descended from Domnall are a remarkable string of Nechtans - father, son, and grandson.  To tell them apart, one is called the Elder (Nechtan Mor), another the Younger (Nechtan Og) and the one between is called Nechtan Nisin, Nechtan of the Wounds.

This Nechtan Mor is definitely not the great king of the Picts, Nechtan Morbet, who lived three centuries earlier, nor Nechtan II of the Picts.  His birth was probably in the early or mid eighth century, which means that his father lived in the time of the Pictish king Nechtan mac Der-Ilei.  Perhaps Nechtan the Elder was named by his father in honor of some connection with the king, and this honor was passed down three generations.  If so, it would probably have been a political connection rather than familial.  Still, at this early point, there would be no Clan MacNaughton as we think of it, the source of a surname.  Yet I'm sure there came to be a kin group who identified themselves as the sons of these Nechtans, and perhaps, in the heroic sense, of King Nechtan himself.

In about 1160, Malcolm IV, King of Scotland, moved several families from Moray to Perth as part of an effort to tamp down rebellion in Perthshire.  Among these families was a Nechtan of Moray, who was granted land in Strathtay, apparently as thane of Loch Tay.  It is almost certainly this Nechtan who is the eponym of the subsequent Clan mac Nechtan, honored as he was with land and title.  Over time, the MacNaughtons acquired lands to the southwest, and established a stronghold in Argyll, between Lochs Awe and Fyne.

Nechtan the Elder lived three and a half centuries before the MacNaughtons of Strathtay, some ten generations back.  It's possible that Nechtan of Moray knew about his Nechtan ancestors, but I'd bet that it was later generations of MacNaughtons who celebrated their name with a heroic genealogy stretching back to antiquity, containing a half dozen Nechtans and hinting at Pictish nobility.

BC

Related websites:
Clans and Families of Ireland and Scotland
Electric Scotland
Clan Macnachtan Association
The Records of Argyll (PDF document)
Celtic Scotland
Moll's 1745 Map of Argyle

Lost in Upstate New York

This is an article I wrote for Je Me Souviens, the semi-annual publication of the American French Genealogical Society.  It appeared in the Autumn of 2007 (Vol 30 No 2).  It's an account of how I searched for and located the records of my French-Canadian branch.  It's a bit technical (and long-winded), but if you research genealogical records, you may find it informative.

-  -  -

I'm not a very dedicated genealogist.  I reluctantly got started only because I couldn't match my mother's memory.  After years of asking her the same questions about our family history over and over, I finally figured out that a computer's memory is pretty good, if the software cooperates.  So I bought a genealogy program and filled it with everything my mother knew about our family.  Then I added everything my eldest aunt could remember.  Then everything my cousin had from a great-grandmother's Bible.  There was a distant cousin in New York who had my family tucked away in a corner of her own genealogy.  An unknown gentleman had sent my uncle a big handwritten record of his cemetery tramping in lower Scotland.  There was a lot of information out there, it turned out, and I was busy just recording it, let alone checking anything.

The funny part is that in any genealogy there are these gaps just begging to be filled.  I tried to ignore them, I'm still trying, but I really can't resist.  So I find myself going, again, to spend a couple of hours at the American French Genealogical Society.

When I first walked in to the Society's library, and they kindly assigned me a volunteer, I explained to him that my ancestors had come from upstate New York.  The poor man rolled his eyes – oh those records are terrible, what little there is, he explained, you'll be really lucky to make the connection to Quebec.  God bless him, he tried, and failed of course, but within minutes of opening the first index we looked at, I was staring at the first piece of genealogical information I had ever gathered by myself: a listing of the marriage of my great-great grandparents, Joseph Laramie and Delphine Grenier, at Immaculate Conception in Keeseville, NY.  So I had filled in one gap, and I was hooked.

At that very moment, I had also hit my first brick wall: the witnesses to the marriage were two Irish guys.  There were no parents listed.  So my volunteer showed me how to cross-reference the witnesses to other marriages and baptisms, teasing possible relationships out of the information.  He tried to explain dit names, and demonstrated the world of mis-spellings and mis-hearings, bad transcriptions and Latinizations and Anglicizations.  And that is how I became lost in upstate New York.

There's more, click here . . .

How I Finally Found the Parents of Joseph Laramie

I started by collecting names, lots of names.  I looked for any vital records I could find for Joseph and Delphine, and kept track of all the names that were included in those records as parents, children, godparents and witnesses.  I checked records that were on the Internet as well as at the AFGS.  I searched all the genealogy message forums online, looking for any postings that might contain vital records.

I also searched census records.  The more children of theirs I could identify, the more likely I could find Joseph and Delphine's family in the censuses.  When I did find them, I could add to or check the list of children I had, and then check their vital records.

I studied my collection of names, looking for patterns that might reveal likely siblings, or aunts and uncles, or in-laws.  There seemed to be connections between Joseph and a Xavier Laramee, a Euphrosine Laramee, a Moses Laramee, and an Emily Oprey or Oprix.

The dam burst when I found the 1860 census listing for Joseph's family.  Living with Joseph and Delphine Laramie was a Harriet Laramie.  She was listed after all the other children, and though young, she was too old to be Joseph's child.  I thought, could she be a sister?  I also remembered coming across a marriage record of Henriette Laramie and Robert Coventry.  Was Harriet also Henriette?  Henriette had a sister Celina, whose marriage record to Benjamin Belisle I had also found.

I checked the 1870 census, looking for Harriet/Henriette, and I found, right next door to Joseph and Delphine, a Ralph and Harriet Coveltry.  Could this be Robert and Henriette Coventry?  They were the right age.  And then my eye caught the names of Joseph's neighbors on the other side: Benjamin and Celinda Billings.  They, too, had ages that matched the marriage record I had for Celina and Benjamin Belisle.  Could Belisle have been Anglicized to Billings?  Could I take the leap and assume all these people were related?

I checked a message forum for Clinton County, and found evidence that the whole Belisle family had, in fact, changed their name to Billings during the 1860's.  So I allowed myself to assume that Henriette and Celina were Joseph's sisters, and that their parents, Joseph Laramie and Cecile Hebert, were also Joseph's parents. 

The genealogy message forums are worth investigating.  Some of them are very informative and lively, others are sparsely visited and not much help.  The Clinton County NY forum at Genealogy.com happens to be quite lively.  In such a situation, there are often a couple of people who seem to be experts, answering everyone's queries and commenting on everything.  I posted a query asking if anyone knew about my possible Laramie family: parents Joseph and Cecile; children Joseph, Henriette, Celina, and the others who I suspected were siblings.  I mentioned that I thought the full family name was Aupry dit Laramee.  I also checked to see if anyone had been asking questions about any of these people, and I found one query, posted by someone who seemed to be pretty knowledgeable.  I emailed him directly.

Some people like to focus their genealogical research on one name.  They want to know every descendant of a particular person born long ago.  These folks, if you can identify them, can really help you fill in those gaps, because they know all the different branches of a family.  They often have really large databases, tens or hundreds of thousands of names, and these databases are often available online.  As luck would have it, the person I had emailed was just such a person, out in Missouri.  He had been researching the Aupry dit Laramee family for many years.  He confirmed my assumptions about Joseph's family, and he was quite happy that I could fill in several gaps in his research.  Of course, I was equally happy that he had been able to help me connect the dots from upstate New York to Quebec.

How I Found the Parents of Delphine Grenier

While poking around the Internet forums, I had also visited Grenier forums, of course, with no luck.  But there did seem to be a Grenier expert, too.  I was thinking of him when I tried to find my Grenier forbears the same way I had found my Laramie ancestors.  As soon as I got enough information, I would write to him.

But the Greniers proved more difficult to track down.  Not many Greniers stayed long in New York.  Many went on to Michigan through Ontario, some went to Maine, others Rhode Island.  But eventually I was able to create a list of possible relatives to Delphine Grenier, who also went by Olive.  There was a Louis, and a Matilda, a Mary, and a Cecile.  Then I found an 1850 census listing for a Greener family in Ausable, NY.  The children were named Octave, Louis, Delphine, Mary, and Matilda.  Delphine was the right age to be my Delphine.  Maybe this was my family.  Unfortunately, only one parent was alive; a father named Louis.

I was going to have to find a Louis Grenier, born and married in Quebec, who had children by these names.  It's relatively easy to track down a Quebec marriage, but a baptism is another thing.  You have to go through the records parish by parish, and there are plenty of parishes in Quebec.  That would have to be my last resort.

I wrote to the Grenier expert, but unfortunately he had no record of Greniers outside of Quebec.  I posted messages online, scoured family trees both on the Internet and at AFGS, checked censuses and vital records, but to no avail.  I was left with my last resort.

So I looked up all the marriages of men named Louis Grenier.  I had a rough idea of when he was born, so I had a rough idea of when he might have married.  I was able to compile a list of about fifteen marriages – not an impossible number.  Through further research on the Internet, I was able to eliminate about four of those marriages.  Now all I had to do was go through the microfilmed parish records looking for baptisms, looking for a matching list of children.  I would be hoping that the newly married couple would have stayed in the parish where they were married, at least initially.

It took time, but I was able to eliminate half the list before I came across the likely family, at St Michel d'Yamaska.  Louis Grenier and Dorothee Joyal had the following children: Mathilde, Louis Octave, Louis Augustin, and Olive Delphine.  There were no more records after that.  Mathilde died within the year, and the next daughter was also named Mathilde, and she also died.  So I assumed that it was likely that they might have tried naming another daughter Mathilde.  Here was the matchup, with birth years:

Parish records (Quebec)	Census record (New York)
Louis Grenier (1802)	Louis Greener (1800)
Dorothee Joyal
Louis Octave (1831)	Octave (1832)
Louis Augustin (1836)	Louis (1835)
Olive Delphine (1839)	Delphine (1838)
Mary (1841)
Matilda (1845)

I think this is a pretty good match.  But whenever I pass my genealogy data on to someone, I always warn about the two big assumptions I've made: that the Delphine who married Joseph Laramie is the same as the Delphine in the 1850 census; and that the family in the 1850 US census is the same as the family from Yamaska.

The Bombard Mystery

The very first time I posted a query at Genelogy.com, it was on the Bombard forum.  Bombard was my grandmother's maiden name, and it seemed like a good place to start.  I immediately received a reply from a man in Montreal: I have all your Bombard ancestors, would you like the list?  On my first shot, I had found one of those family experts, and he was able to fill me in.  I didn't know at the time how extensive and well-researched the French-Canadian records are, so I was shocked to find the Bombard line documented back to 17th century Flanders.  Was genealogy always going to be this easy?  No, as I quickly discovered.  But this first victory had me eager for more.

The Bombards descended from the Bombardier dit LaBombarde line which began in Quebec in 1701 with the arrival of André in the French Army.  My 2nd great-grandfather Charles was the first in his branch to head south to the United States, in about 1837.  He lived in Alburgh, Vermont with a couple of uncles, and eventually moved to Keeseville, NY.  He had married Domitille Chenet (Matilda Cheney), and they had several children, one of them my great-grandmother Edwige Mary.

My family expert from Montreal had provided a list of the children of Charles and Matilda, but it seemed incomplete.  Many birthdates were vague ("before 1844," for instance).  But I kept coming across the same list in various family trees and forum postings on the Internet.  The list seemed to be accepted by everyone, but no one knew where it had come from.  I discovered that a cousin of mine had been in touch with a different Bombard expert, down in South Carolina.  That expert had the same list, too, and she didn't know where it had come from either.

Well, I had bigger fish to fry, namely the Laramies and Greniers, but as I researched the Clinton County NY records, I kept coming across the Bombard name.  There certainly were a lot of Bombards and LaBombardes in upstate NY, and I would have been a fool not to collect the records as I came across them, even if I thought I might not use them.  The more records I collected, the more I came to doubt that well-circulated list of the children of Charles and Matilda.

Unfortunately, the records I had collected were not entirely consistent.  Here's one example: Charles and Matilda had a child named Joseph who was baptized in Keeseville in 1858.  In the 1860 census he appears to be named Treffle, and a different son is named Joseph.  In 1861 he is listed as Theophile.  A death record in 1865 lists a Treffle, apparently but not definitively the same person.  And there is a gravestone inscription for a Timothy, 1859-1867, presumably the same person.

The biggest part of the puzzle involved a Charles Jr, who was either the eldest son, living in Clinton County until his death, or a different son who fought in the Civil War and stayed south in Louisiana.

The Bombard expert in South Carolina felt she had good evidence to support the latter notion; namely, the oral testimony of the elderly great-granddaughter of the Southern Bombard.  This presumed Charles Jr had named his son, her grandfather, Charles, after all.  Indeed, I had records to indicate that the Louisiana Bombard did have three children, including a Charles, who was his eldest son.

On the other hand, my research in the New York records kept indicating that Charles Jr had never left New York.  He had married Anastasie Diguette, and by 1860 was living in Saranac, and had children.  He apparently did not serve in the Civil War, and he died in 1871, at the age of 36.  In this case, the records were consistent.

I posted a letter about the children of Charles and Matilda to all the applicable genealogy forums online.  I detailed the discrepancies between the "accepted" list and my slowly-evolving revision.  I also emailed the two family experts, in Montreal and South Carolina.  The only response I got was from the South Carolina expert – she was intrigued, but wanted to stick to the story she had personally received from Louisiana.  She did have one puzzle, though, to work out, and maybe I could help her.  She had obtained the Civil War records of the Louisiana Bombard, and was having trouble making sense of them.  The difficulty was this; the Louisiana Bombard was named Thomas in the records, not Charles.

Thomas!  He was in the accepted list of Bombard children, and I had come across Civil War records for him that seemed to link him to other Bombard children.  So he was the Louisiana Bombard! But why did his great-granddaughter think he was named Charles?

At the same time as this discovery, I came across another.  It was customary in some parishes in Quebec to take a regular census of the parish.  Though it rarely happened in the United States, it did happen, and St Peter's parish in Plattsburgh NY took censuses in 1859, 1860, and 1861.  The censuses included a mission in the village of Dannemora, in Saranac.  My Bombards were not from the area, so I had not bothered to check these records, which were at AFGS.  But, I thought, since Charles Jr and his sister had lived somewhere in Saranac, at least for a while, maybe there would be something for me in this collection.  It wasn't indexed, I'd have to go through it name by name and year by year, but oh well, why not.

Sure enough, I found my Bombards.  The entire family, in fact.  Charles Sr had died in 1860, leaving behind a pregnant Matilda with 8 children.  So Matilda had packed up the whole family and moved north to Dannemora to live with Charles Jr and his family.  She had stayed just long enough to give birth, and had then gone back to Keeseville.  And she had stayed just long enough to be recorded in the 1861 parish census.

So now I finally had all the children, including Thomas, who was baptized Joseph.  The only thread still loose was why the Louisiana Bombards thought their forbear was named Charles, and for that thread I only have a theory.  Charles Jr, the eldest son of Charles and Matilda, died young in 1871.  Thomas, down in Louisiana, had his first son in 1872.  I think Thomas named his son in honor of his recently departed brother.  Thomas himself died young, in 1879 at age 37.  All of his children died young, too: at ages 14, 15, and 36.  So Thomas' great-granddaughter never knew him.  And her own grandfather Charles, named for his uncle, died when she was 8.  I'm sure it was easy to remember that Charles had been named for someone, but also easy to confuse whether he was named for his father or for his uncle.

By the way, the story about Thomas is that he was captured by a farmer during the Civil War, and held in a barn, and that he fell in love with the farmer's daughter.  Or he was arrested in town and held in jail, and fell in love with the jailer's daughter.  Thomas did fight in the 2nd Regiment of the NY Veteran Cavalry, which saw service in the deep South.  There is no record that he was ever captured, but the regiment was encamped in Talledega, Alabama at the end of the war.  Thomas married his Southern belle in Talledega just before the regiment was disbanded.  My guess is that Thomas was sowing wild oats in town before decamping, and found himself getting married at the end of a shotgun barrel.  It's just my theory.

BC
Contract post

The Laramies of Laprairie

Louis Bertrand Aupry dit LaRamée was a soldier, and he arrived in Québec sometime in the early 1690's.  He had been born in St Pierre, in Bordeaux, France, in about 1674, the son of Jean Aupry and Françoise Coiffard.  In 1694 he married Anne Dumas dite Rencontre, the daughter of another soldier who had arrived a generation earlier in the famous Carignan Regiment, and who had married one of the Filles-du-Roi, women sent to New France specifically to marry the soldiers and colonists.

Louis and his wife married and lived in La-Prairie-de-la-Madeleine, across the St Lawrence River from Montréal.  LaPrairie was a village that had sprung up around the Jesuit Mission that was ministering to the native Americans, specifically the Mohawk.  A successful colony of Catholic Mohawks had been established on the riverbank to the west, and it survives to this day as the Kahnawake Tribe Reservation.  Louis may have been part of a military detachment stationed at LaPrairie after it had been attacked, twice, by the English from New York in 1691.  He and his family would have lived within the wooden palisades of the village.

Louis' son, François Antoine, also married and lived in LaPrairie.  Sometime between 1755 and 1770, François and his family moved east to Chambly.  Perhaps it was after the death of his mother, Anne Dumas, in 1761.  These were the years of the French and Indian War, and of the loss of New France to the English.  François returned to LaPrairie County in the late 1780's, apparently with his son Denis and his family.

Denis, with his wife Marie-Elisabeth Lefort dite Laforest, established himself in St Philippe, where he lived until his death in 1806.  It was three of his sons who decided to emigrate to the United States.  Two of them, François-Xavier and Ambroise, decided to seek their fortune in the Missouri Territory in the United States in about 1805, where they took another dit nom, Constant.  They moved to the Florissant Valley, just north of St Louis.

Fifty years earlier, the French had controlled the entire Mississippi basin, from New Orleans up to the Great Plains, from the Ohio Valley through all of the Great Lakes.  It was called Louisiana, after King Louis XIV.  This was the backbone of the fur trade.  There was not enough French population to establish large settlements, but the French controlled navigation on the rivers, thanks in part to a network of alliances with Native Americans.  In 1763, the Treaty of Paris gave all French territory east of the Mississippi to England, and the remaining territory to Spain.  French settlers on the east side of the Mississippi moved across the river, and the Spanish established civil governments in settlements like St Louis, which became the capital of Upper Louisiana.  Fleurissant, the Valley of the Flowers, became San Fernando.

Napoleon secretly gained this territory back from Spain in 1800, with plans to recreate an empire in North America.  War with England was imminent, however, and when American diplomats approached him in 1803 to purchase New Orleans, he sold them instead the entire Louisiana Purchase.  Upper Louisiana became the Missouri Territory, and eventually St Ferdinand became Florissant.  To this day there are a large number of Laramies in and around St Louis.

The third son to emigrate, Joseph, was not seeking his fortune.  He may have been trying to save his neck.  These particular events would not unfold for three decades, though.  Until then, Joseph lived in St Philippe with his other siblings, having married Marie-Françoise Perrault in 1804.  He had twelve children, and by 1834 had moved to St Edouard, in neighboring Napierville County, to the south.

The early 1800's was a difficult time for farmers in Québec, especially French farmers.  Land continued to be controlled by a system best described as feudal, and though the government in Québec was technically democratic, it was actually controlled by a small elite.  Demand for political reform combined with a need for land reform, and by the 1830's agitation was growing for change.  Both the Roman Catholic Church and the British authorities were keen to squelch this agitation, and in 1837 a group of politicians decided that rebellion was the only course.  A number of public protests were held, farmers and laborers were recruited, and armed rebellion ensued.

Hundreds of Quebeckers, both English and French, pledged their support, and hundreds more were sympathizers.  The Richelieu Valley, which included Napierville, was one particular hotbed of rebellion.  Far fewer actually joined the insurgent militias, and fewer still actually fought, but British suppression was quick and brutal.  Many families thought it a good time to leave for Vermont or New York.  There is no written record of Aupry LaRamées being involved in the rebellion, but one of Joseph's sons-in-law, Antoine Achim dit St Andre, had pledged support.  In 1838, Joseph and his family relocated to Champlain, New York.

It was not complete exile.  The border with Canada was porous, and Joseph's children would go back to St Edouard to baptize their children.  But within a decade, the families had settled in the Au Sable Valley, in Ausable Forks and Black Brook and Clintonville and Keeseville, along with hundreds of other French-Canadian immigrants looking for work.  The iron industry in the Au Sable Valley was booming.  Work was available in the iron mines, in the cast-iron mills and foundries, and in the nail factories.  The barges in Lake Champlain needed crews.  There was always farm and lumberjack work.  And here Aupry dit LaRamée would become Aupry or Obry or Laramee or Laramie. 

One of Joseph's grandsons, also named Joseph, worked in an iron mine.  He lived in Ausable Forks, where he married Olive Delphine Grenier in 1856.  They had both been born in Québec, and had come to New York as children.  Now, five years after their marriage, with children of their own, they would once again return to Québec, this time to sit out the American Civil War.  Joseph was joined by his brother François-Xavier in Montréal.  It was during this hiatus that my great-grandmother, Edwidge Mary, was born.

Joseph returned to the Au Sable Valley after the war, and stayed for almost two more decades.  On the day Edwidge married in 1882, her parents packed up their remaining children and headed for Michigan.  Other Laramies headed for Michigan at about the same time, including Joseph's uncles François-Xavier and Theophile.  Better work was available in the timber industry, way up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Marquette County, which was easy to reach through Ontario.

Meanwhile, the iron industry was petering out in the Au Sable Valley.  Edwidge and her two older siblings, Euclid and Mysie, moved their families across Lake Champlain to Burlington, Vermont in about 1888.  Edwidge and her husband, Frank Bombard, continued on to Barre, where my grandmother Mildred Marguerite was born in 1901.

BC

Related websites:
The Carignan Regiment and Filles du Roi
The English Colonial Raid on LaPrairie
The French and Indian War (Seven Years War)
The Louisiana Purchase
The 1837 Rebellion

The McKnights of Galloway

The ancient kingdom of Galloway sits in the wild and isolated southwest corner of Scotland.  It is now split into two counties, Wigtownshire in the west, pointing toward Ireland, and Kirkcudbrightshire (or the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright) in the east, bordering Dumfriesshire, and facing south to the Solway Firth.

McKnights have lived in Galloway for centuries, ever since an estate was granted to a John MacNacht or MacNauchtan by the King of Scotland in the 13th century.  I have traced my McKnight line back to John McKnight, a blacksmith, born about 1796 in Girthon Parish.  He married Marion McJennet around 1825.  They first lived in Kelton, then Balmaghie, and finally Kirkmabreck.  Their son Robert, born around 1838, married Mary Dobie in 1858 in the city of Dalbeattie, in Urr Parish.  The Dobies came from equally long Galloway lines of Dobies, Griersons, Hunters, and Lindsays.

An industry that was growing quickly in Dalbeattie and elsewhere in Kirkcudbright was the granite industry.  Kirkcudbright granite was salt-resistant, thus useful for building piers.  It was also used extensively in building roads throughout Great Britain - cobblestones, curbstones, and gravel.  Robert worked in the granite industry, and eventually became a foreman of a quarry.  Two of his sons, David and Robert, became granite hewers, or stonecutters.

David was the first to leave Scotland.  He came to America around 1882, through the port of Belfast, Maine, apparently.  He married a woman named Arbella, who had been born in Maine, and by 1890 he was working in Barre, Vermont, as a stonecutter.

His brother Robert, in the meantime, had met Olivia Farrel or Farrell, who was working as a housemaid in Dalbeattie, and had begun having children by her.  Olivia was six years older than Robert, and had been born in Borgue Parish.  Her father, John, was from Belfast, Ireland, and her mother, Jane Moore, was from Monaghan County in Ireland.  Jane and John had married in Belfast, and soon after had skipped over the Irish Channel to Kirkcudbright Town.  John worked as a shepherd and a gardener, and died of pneumonia at the age of 44.

It appears that Robert emigrated alone to America in 1887 to meet up with his brother David.  Then he went back to Kirkcudbright, married Olivia, packed up his two children and his parents, and off they all went to Barre, Vermont.  They had five more children in Barre, including Howard McKnight, my grandfather.

Robert worked as a stonecutter until his death in 1919 at age 51.  He is said to have died from an accident in the stone-shed where he worked.  Olivia lived until the ripe age of 94.

BC

Related websites:
MacNauchts in Galloway
Dalbeattie Town History
Vermont Granite Quarries
Barre City Directory 1905

My French-Canadian Moment

When I moved to Woonsocket, I already knew about its history as a mill city dominated by French-Canadians.  In Rhode Island, Woonsocket is famously French.  Just don't come here, as someone I know once did, expecting French cuisine.  You'll get meat pies and pea soup (both quite good, by the way).

I knew that my mom was half-French, whatever that meant.  I would ask her about it, and all she knew was that her family came from upstate New York, where it had been for a long time, apparently.  Were they from-France French?  She didn't know.  Her mother could speak French, her grandmother spoke nothing but French, and pea soup was a part of her childhood, but she didn't know where they had come from.  Canada was never mentioned.

In Woonsocket, my wife and I became friendly with the older couple across the street, Marcel and Terry.  Marcel, born in Quebec, was a musician.  We would occasionally catch him playing at local events.  His big hit was the song "Charlie Brown," which he would sing in French.  It was pretty funny, especially the "Why is everybody always picking on me?" part.  Marcel was close with some other musicians we knew, a fact we learned only after Marcel had fallen ill, and was confined to his home.  My wife called up our other friends, and arranged to have the gang of us visit Marcel at home one afternoon.  It was great fun, and it would be the last time we saw him alive.

Woonsocket is home to the largest American-French genealogical library in the country.  It happens to be within walking distance of my house.  In time, I formed a habit of walking over, notebook in hand, to discover the history of my family.  One odd thing for me about living in Woonsocket was that many women in town seemed to resemble my mom for some reason.  Not until I started researching my family's genealogy did it begin to dawn on me that my mom's family was not just French, but French-Canadian.  I was a bit nervous asking her about it, but she really had not ever heard Canada or Quebec mentioned overtly.  She supposed it could be true.  There was a story that her grandmother had been born in Montreal, for instance.

The term "French-Canadian" is confusing.  In the US it is used to mean those Quebec-Americans whose ancestry is French-Quebec, or Quebecois.*  But Canada, like the US, is a melting pot, so "Quebec" isn't really an ethnicity.  To get the ethnic sense of a person, you refer to him as French-Canadian or English-Canadian (or Pakistani-Canadian).  In the case of French-Canadians this is misleading, since the actual connection to France is about three or four centuries ago.  As with African-Americans whose families have been in America for three centuries, the cultural connection with the "ancestral homeland" is pretty abstract.

I do think that "Quebecois" can be used as an ethnic term.  A relatively small number of French came to Quebec during a relatively short period of time, then lived together in relative isolation, intermarried, and created a unique culture over three centuries.  The people are no longer strictly French, any more than meat pie is French cuisine.  And though their language is obviously derived from French, even the French can't understand it.  So why did my mom know she was French, but not Quebecois?

We went to Marcel's wake at the funeral home down the street.  His mother and many of his siblings were there, some having journeyed from Quebec.  The room was lit an eerie pink, and packed with older people who all seemed to be speaking French.  Some of the people we recognized from the neighborhood.  It was lively, like a giant family gathering.  We introduced ourselves to Marcel's mother, who spoke to us in French until my wife explained that she only knew "un peu," which made everyone listening laugh.  Then a priest called for attention, and conducted a brief service.  This was followed by a statement, a reminiscence, read by one of Marcel's friends.  All of this was in French.  We were immersed in a part of Woonsocket that we normally only glimpsed.

My mother grew up in Barre, Vermont, as did her parents.  Her grandparents, both sets, had come to Barre in about 1890 to work in the granite industry, an industry so grand at the time that stoneworkers were regularly recruited from all over Europe.  Though a small city in the middle of Vermont, Barre hosted several ethnic communities.  These communities arranged themselves socially based on the status of their work in the granite industry.  Italians were the prized stonecarvers, they were at the top of the ethnic ladder.  The Scots were trained stonecutters, right below the Italians in status.  At the bottom were the unskilled laborers, more often than not French-Canadian.  In fact, French-Canadians were recruited as strike-breakers whenever there were labor disputes.  This did not help their status.

My mother's mother came from a line of French-Canadians who had left Quebec generations earlier, before 1840.  They had worked in New York's Ausable Valley, had fought in the Civil War, and generally regarded themselves as Americans.  When she married another Barre native, a Presbyterian Scot, in 1923, it was a scandal, but hadn't her family been in America longer than the Scottish family?  Hadn't her family been in America long enough to be called American rather than Canadian?

A couple of weeks after Marcel died, his friends and family held a musical tribute for him.  The tribute took place at a performance hall run by one of the musicians we knew.  The hall was packed, and there were several different groups of musicians who played fiddle tunes, French songs, and Country-Western songs.  The MC kept everyone entertained in French, sometimes translating into English (but not the jokes).  What most impressed me was when the entire audience sang along with the French songs.  The songs reminded me of songs my mother had learned from her mother.  I don't know if they were French songs, she never sang them in French, but the melodies had a similar lilt to what I was hearing that night.  It was dawning on me that I, too, was French-Canadian.

BC

* I am using the word "American" here to mean someone from The United States, though technically anyone from South, Central, or North America, including Canada, is an American.

André Bombardier

André Bombardier dit LaBombarde dit PassePartout came to New France in about 1701 as a soldier in the D'Aloigny Company.  It is probably safe to assume that his name indicated his role in the French Army as cannoneer.  He was born in about 1679 in Lille, in what had been Flanders but had recently become a part of the French Empire, won in battle and treaty from the Netherlands.  He was the son of Jean Bombardier and Marie Françoise Cambin Flamand Guillin.

One of King Louis XIV's first tasks in consolidating newly won territory was to improve the defenses of cities like Lille, and that meant improving the walls of the city and expanding its defensive brigades, including the cannon brigade.  Lille was a significant city in the Middle Ages, and had had a cannon brigade for some time.  Cannon were finicky weapons - they could explode while being fired, so the cannoneer had to be knowledgeable about the bronze of the cannon.  Thus cannoneers were often drawn from the families that made the cannon, a skill passed down from father to son.  Perhaps André was from such a family.

The French Army kept excellent records, and required soldiers to have both a family name and a nickname.  In the Middle Ages, it was not common to have a family name.  Aristocrats and other important people had identifiers, like titles and estate names, that eventually became family names.  Common people would just adopt a family name, based perhaps on their trade or where they lived or the name of the Lord of their land.  The nicknames, dit nom or nom de guerre, were assigned depending usually on which company you were assigned to.  If you left the company, you also left the nickname behind.  In Québec, however, the dit nom often became a family name.  André was unusual in having another dit nom of PassePartout - not too many other Québecois carried it.  It seems to mean "free to pass."  I have not seen an adequate explanation of it, so here's a guess:  if André was an expert cannoneer, and thus a specialist, he might have been assigned to different companies as needed, and he would have been allowed to keep his nom de guerre, LaBombarde, as he moved from company to company.*

In New France, André would have been part of the defense against both Native Americans and the British.  He may have seen service at Fort Frontenac, in what is now Kingston, Ontario, and at Fort Pontchartrain in Detroit, which was also a French colony.  In a few years, he served out his term and returned to Montréal, where he probably became part of the local militia, as did all other former soldiers.  In 1706, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, arrived in Montréal with a proposal.  He would give any former soldier willing to settle in Detroit free land.  The hitch was that the soldier had to be married, and had to be prepared to leave right away with Cadillac.

Marriage was not quickly done in those days.  Precautions were taken to ensure that the marriage would be legitimate, and those precautions took a lot of time.  Cadillac was in a hurry, though, so he convinced the religious authorities to allow marriages to happen quickly for the soldiers who wanted to go to Detroit.  André was among these soldiers, and he married the daughter of a long-time Montréal family, Marguerite Marie Dumais dite Demers.  Then off he went with Sieur Cadillac to his new home at Detroit.

Detroit was a very small colony out in the middle of nowhere, high on the banks of the Detroit River.  Cadillac had a small village inside the wooden palisade of the fort, large plots of farmland up and down the river, and small settlements of friendly Native Americans nearby.  Each soldier was given a tiny "city" lot inside the fort for constructing a house, and then allotted a plot for farming, for which rent was paid.  The houses were tiny one-room cabins, 20 feet square, made of small tree trunks driven vertically into the ground as pickets and topped with a roof of split rails covered with bark or thatch.

Cadillac ran the colony like a fiefdom.  He controlled every aspect of the colonists' lives.  Most of the former soldiers were loyal to him, but there were plenty of complaints.  There were also business interests trying to wrest control of Detroit away from Cadillac.  Finally, Cadillac was "promoted" by the King's minister to another colony (Louisiana), thus losing everything he had in Detroit.  Many of the former soldiers left Detroit at this time, including André.  It was 1710, and André and his wife moved back to Québec with their two sons.

André settled on the northern end of Île de Montréal, the opposite end of the island in the St Lawrence River where Montréal was located.  He farmed land somewhere between Pointe-aux-Trembles and Rivières-Des-Prairies until his death in 1754.  He was widowed in 1741, and married Marie Thibault dite LeVeille, who died a year later. 

During this time, New France was being regularly attacked by England.  By 1710, the English controlled half of Newfoundland and were raiding Acadia and Québec.  They took Acadia finally in 1713, and Cape Breton in 1745.  Ten years later, the French and Indian War, an extension of the Seven Years' War in Europe, went in favor of the French initially, but the English finally gained control.  The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ceded all of New France to Great Britain.

I am descended from André's fifth child, Pierre Jacques Bombardier dit Labombarde, born August 30, 1714.  He married Marie Françoise Thibault dite St Louis in 1738.  Not long after his father died, about the time Montréal fell to the English in 1760, Pierre moved east to the Chambly region, down on the Richelieu River.

BC

* My apologies for the all the guesswork.  It's equally possible that André was dragooned into the French Army, assigned a French name, and sent as far away as possible, to New France.  This would have been part of a standard policy of clearing men of fighting age from newly captured territories like Flanders.

Related websites:
Musée des Canonniers Sédentaires de Lille,
translated from the French by Google.
History of Detroit

The Héberts of Acadia

Joseph Aupry Laramee (or Aupry dit LaRamée), born in LaPrairie, Québec in 1807, is my 3rd great grandfather, and one of Mildred Bombard's great grandfathers.  He was the son of Joseph Aupry LaRamée and Marie Françoise Perrault.

On March 5, 1832, he married Cecile Hébert at St-Jean-François-Regis (St-Philippe), Québec.  Cecile was herself descended from an Aupry LaRamée:  her 2nd great-grandmother was Marie Françoise, daughter of Louis Bertrand Aupry LaRamée and Anne Dumas Rencontre.  (Joseph was descended from Marie's brother, François Antoine.)

Cecile was also descended from the long line of Héberts, ultimately from Poitou, France, who settled in Acadia in about 1650.

Cecile's 2nd great-grandfather, Rene Hébert, along with his wife and married children, was deported during the infamous English relocation of 1755, when the Acadian French were cleared out of Acadia and dispersed among the other English colonies or sent to France.  Many of these exiles, like the Héberts, found their way eventually to Québec.

Rene and his family were sent to the colony of Connecticut, where the authorities scattered the French families, about 900 people in all, throughout the colony.  Rene's son Pierre was placed with his family in a home in Guilford; this house still exists, and is now called the Acadian House.  Pierre's daughter Anne married her cousin Joseph Hilarion Hébert sometime around 1765.  Shortly after, Joseph Hilarion and his family relocated to LaPrairie, Québec.  In order to have their children properly baptized, the married cousins had to have their marriage "rehabilitated," and this happened in 1768.

Their son Isaac Charles was born in 1782.  He married Catherine Cassan or Cassant (dite SansRegret) in 1809, and daughter Cecile was born in 1812.

BC

Related websites:
Acadian History
Acadians in Guilford CT

Bombards in the Civil War

The New York Bombard family had three sons, brothers of Frank Bombard, who fought in the Civil War.  They were Moses, Thomas, and Edward.  They all fought in the 2nd Regiment of the NY Veteran Cavalry, which saw service in the deep South.  Thomas and Edward both enlisted at Chesterfield in November of 1863, and Moses enlisted at Plattsburgh in February of 1864

Moses was injured, hospitalized, and sent home in March of '65, but Thomas and Edward fought to the end of the war, and were mustered out of their regiment in Talladega, Alabama in November of 1865.  Thomas had already married his Alabama gal, Annie Davis, by then.  I don't know what happened to Edward - there is a rumor that he stayed south, too, but I have not found any such records.

Thomas eventually moved to Louisiana.  The Louisiana Bombards have a story that Thomas had been captured (or arrested) during the war and kept in a local jail, and that Annie was the daughter of the jailkeeper.

Our New York Laramie family, on the other hand, elected to sit out the war in Quebec, as did many other families (including non-French American families).  Joseph apparently brought his family to Griffintown, the Irish ghetto in Montreal where industrial jobs were available.  During this time two daughters were born; Delia and Edwidge Mary.  Right after the war, Joseph and his family returned to the Ausable Valley.  His brother Francois-Xavier also brought his family to Montreal during the war.

BC

Related websites:
2nd Regiment, NY Veteran Cavalry
Griffintown, Montreal