My family of French descent breaks into two distinct branches, one on my mother’s side and one on my father’s. The branch from my mother are the ancestors of my great-great grandfather, Francis LaBree, who migrated to Minnesota in 1848. His predecessors were peasant farmers on the south coast of the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City. Many of them lived in towns that were destroyed by the English during the 1759 Siege of Quebec. Going back further, their ancestors had farms on Île d’Orleans and the Beaupré coast, with some lines tracing back to the very beginnings of the colony.
The branch on my father’s side had a very different story. My great-grandfather James Elwood grew up in Vincennes, Indiana, and three of his grandparents were of French descent. These ancestral lines were all established in Vincennes before the American Revolution, and most had a long heritage in the fur trade. They had lived in places that included the remote outposts of Detroit and Kaskaskia, and one ancestor even lived on the Gulf Coast before New Orleans was founded. Nearly all trace back to the Montreal area, with some who were among the first settlers there.
Outposts where my ancestors lived and the dates they arrived there.
New France was different than other colonies in many ways. Few of its settlers arrived as families; instead they were individuals who wanted to escape the conditions in Europe to start fresh in America. The colony was set up to make money for investors back in France, and the first Canadians were largely recruited by them. Many men came alone at first under 3-year labor contracts. Then when the authorities realized they needed to build the population, they paid women to come over as well. This effort was eventually run by the government of King Louis XIV, and the women became known as the Filles du Roi (the King’s Daughters). A third group who added to the settlers were soldiers sent to defend the colony; when their service ended, many decided to stay in Canada rather than facing civilian life in France.
The mass migration from France happened during the early years of the colony, and after the mid-1670s, the wave of newcomers ended. To grow the population without settlers coming over from France, married couples were rewarded with money to have large families. This dynamic was unique in the American colonies; it resulted in a massive family tree where most French-Canadians living today are distant cousins of each other. And more than that, they can prove it with documentation. Since New France came under the direct control of the king and the Catholic Church, careful records were made of every baptism, marriage and burial. It was important that brides and grooms showed they weren’t too closely related to each other, so the maiden names of the bride, and of the bride and groom’s mothers, were included in each record. Genealogists of the future became the beneficiaries of this, and it’s what makes French-Canadian family lines so traceable.
Example of a parish register.
Geography was another factor in my ancestors’ stories. There’s only one place where a waterway penetrates deeply into the North American continent: the St. Lawrence River. So while other Europeans settled only a few miles inland from the Atlantic, the French were living as far west as the Great Lakes. The St. Lawrence was like a highway that took them there, and the river soon became lined with farms all the way to Montreal. But not all French settlers lived on the St. Lawrence; a few chose to make their homes in Acadia, located at present-day Nova Scotia. These people had their own history, and it ended tragically in 1755 with their brutal exile at the hands of the English. I have a small amount of Acadian ancestors on each of my two French-Canadian branches, but they left Acadia well before the expulsion. (As an interesting side note, one ancestor in a New England branch was a soldier who helped kick the Acadians out.)
The colony of New France was founded for the purpose of making money, mostly by acquiring beaver pelts and shipping them back to Europe. Those doing the actual work to trade for the pelts were people who were both rugged and adventurous. Many men on my pedigree signed contracts in Montreal to paddle canoes great distances, traveling with other fur traders on long expeditions. Each generation pushed further and further west, until eventually it made more sense to just move there. These ancestors were among the first Europeans to live in the American Midwest.
Because many French-Canadian men lived in such remote places, they developed a closer relationship with the Indigenous people of America. Some of them lived for months and years in camps and villages without any women of European descent nearby, and so they had sexual relations with Native Americans. When children were produced, to some degree the French accepted them into their society, and intermarriage was allowed with them. In this way, I have three proven connections to Native Americans on my pedigree, and two of them gave me DNA segments which clearly show up in my test results.
When I first added the two big branches of French-Canadian heritage to my pedigree, I wanted to see if they connected with each other. Usually two branches like that would have many common ancestors, but because of the migration stories of my people, I found only one place where they converged in a single person. And that was Hélène Desportes, who has the claim to fame of being the very first person of European descent born in Canada. How fitting it is that my family tree ties up into such a neat little bow — I can prove that the ancestors of both of my parents founded an entire country.
