(Another) Canadien in the American Civil War: Cyprien Racine Becomes George Root

In an earlier post I told the story of Philibert Racine alias Philip F. Root. Philibert was a Canadien veteran of the Civil War and the brother of two of my great-great-grandmothers. He served with the First Vermont Battery Light Artillery that saw action in the Red River campaign in Louisiana.

I mentioned in that post that Philibert reportedly had a brother who called himself George S. Root who served in this same unit in the Civil War. I surmised that “George” was an alias for Cyprien Racine, baptized May 30, 1843 at Saint-Damase-de-Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec. I believe that I can now confirm the theory that George S. Root was Cyprien.

In the records of the U.S. National Archives I find the following pension document recording the February 25, 1928 death of a George S. Root.

The record appears to indicate that George S. Root’s rank was Artificer, that he served in the 1st (Independent) Battery Vermont Light Artillery, and gives his place of death as Mendon, Michigan.

The place of death was significant since I had information from Racine genealogist extraordinaire, Jules Racine of Québec, that another brother of Philibert, Charles Appolinaire Racine, had contracted his second marriage in Mendon, St. Joseph County, Michigan.

I turned to the 1920 U.S. Federal Census, eight years prior to the veteran’s death, and found a George S. Root living with his wife Lucy in Mendon Township, MI. The census reports that George was born in Canada, his mother tongue was French, and that the same is true of both of his parents.

The census gives his age as 75 on January 9 or 10th of 1920, which, assuming he hadn’t yet had his birthday that year, yields a birth year of 1844. Tracing George and Lucy back through the U.S. Census of Mendon, MI, I find that George, a farmer by trade, in 1900 gives his month and year of birth as May 1844.

This is reasonably close to the May 1843 date of birth of Cyprien Racine, given that these discrepancies are often found in the census records. The information in the census seems fairly consistent with my theory that George and Cyprien are the same person.  

In 1880 I find George, Lucy and family in nearby Leonidas, MI. Here we learn that the couple had three daughters Mary, 9, Catherine, 7, and Virginia, 2. The two older girls were born in Kansas, while the youngest was born in Michigan. This places George and Lucy in Kansas from about 1871 to about 1873 but likely back in Michigan by 1878 or so.

Searching for the marriage record of George and Lucy, I find a wedding at Mendon, MI on May 27, 1869 of a George Root, born in Canada, to a Lucia Monton (also Mouton or Moutaw) born in Mendon. The age of the groom is recorded as 24, which is consistent with a birth year of 1844 or 1845.

The final document in this series is an application to the U.S. War Department for a veteran’s headstone made by Mrs. Virginia Lighthiser, most likely George S. Root’s daughter whom we met as a two-year-old in the 1880 census.

This record confirms that a George S. Root, who had close kin named Virginia, served in the Civil War in the First Vermont Battery Light Artillery, died on February 25, 1928, and is buried in Mendon, MI.

I have little doubt that my theory is correct that George S. Root is Cyprien Racine. I can now piece together the outline of his life.

Born in Québec in 1843, his family lived briefly in Richford, Vermont, on the Québec border, in the late 1840s and early 1850s before they eventually settled in Roxton Falls, QC. By 1861, Cyprien, says the Canadian census of Roxton Falls in that year, is back in the United States.

In January 1862, at the age of 18, he enlisted for service in the American Civil War and served until August 1864. He appears to have returned to Canada but, by 1869, he is married in Michigan to a woman from that state.

The family spends the earlier portion of the 1870s in Kansas before returning to St. Joseph County, Michigan. George’s is a farm family and he lives for most of his days in his wife’s hometown where he dies, at age 84, and is buried.

His brother Philibert lived in a Franco-American enclave in Brunswick, Maine, but George did not live among other Canadiens. Philibert used his Yankee alias, Philip F. Root, when it suited him and reverted to his ancestral Racine identity when that served him better.

His tombstone in St. John’s Catholic Cemetery in Brunswick reads “Philibert Racine” while the document above indicates that Cyprien's government issue headstone reads "George S. Root."

I see no evidence that Cyprien ever used his French name after coming to the States. The census says that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen and he was so not only by law, but also de facto.

Cyprien Racine, the son of a man who fought for the liberté of Québec in the Rebellion of 1837, became Grand Army of the Republic veteran and Midwestern farmer George S. Root.

Cartes mortuaires: Funeral Cards of My Grandmother's Relatives

My grandmother showed me these funeral cards when I was a young boy. They seemed to come from another world, a context that had long-since faded away. They are a remnant of the Maine Franco-American culture as it existed in the early 20th century.

I am sure that many of my fellow Franco-Americans will nod in sympathy and familiarity with these cards, which they may have piled in a box or stuffed in a bottom drawer. 

For me these cartes mortuaires are precious relics. I can remember the reverence with which my grandmother revealed them to me, as if whispering a secret. Seeing them when I was young provided a small spark of inspiration leading me to take an interest in our family's past.

These cards represent my grandmother's maternal relatives all of whom came from what was then called the County of L'Islet, QC, the parish of Saint-Cyrille (also known as Saint-Cyrille-de-Lessard). The handwritten inscriptions on the cards are my Mémère's. She made these inscriptions in English so that her posterity would not forget her forbears.

I offer them without further comment, a moment of silence for our dearly departed.

I. Louis Bernier: uncle and godfather of Ida Lavigueur (Vermette)

II. Clarina Couchon: aunt and godmother of Ida Lavigueur

III. Arthur Bernier: grandfather of Ida Lavigueur

IV. Marie Saint-Pierre: grandmother of Ida Lavigueur

In October 2005 I visited Saint-Cyrille-de-Lessard for the first time and took the following photos. I'm not sure that any of the descendants of our line of the Berniers had returned to their ancestral parish since the times of our ancestors whose lives are commemorated above.

Here is a portion of the small parish of Saint-Cyrille seen from the hill on which sits the Church.

 

Aiming the camera just to left of the photo above, this picture shows a little of the Saint-Cyrille landscape.

Explorer of the Pacific Northwest: The Amazing Voyage of François-Benjamin Pillet

My third great-grandmother was a woman of mystery called Cécile Pillet. She was somehow attached to the family of the prosperous fur trader François-Benjamin Pillet. This man was a pioneer and an adventurer who participated in what must be among the greatest journeys in the annals of North America.

François-Benjamin Pillet, also known as Benjamin Pillet (Pilet, Pilette) the son of Ignace Pillet and Marie-Josepthe Lamy dit Desfond, was born on August 12, 1791 at a mission near Montréal. The place was called Lac des Deux Montagnes in French but is better known as Oka.

Oka was the First Nations settlement that in Pillet’s day included separate villages for the Algonquins and Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”), with a small group of Canadiens many of whom were active in the fur trade.

Pillet was from a line of fur traders familiar with both the interior of the continent and the languages and ways of the native peoples. His father and his uncle, Jean-Baptiste Paschal Pillet, left a paper trail relating to their activities in the fur trade in the 18th c. They hired voyageurs and traded in the Great Lakes region as early as the 1770s.

In 1810, the wealthy American businessman John Jacob Astor hired the not quite 19-year-old François-Benjamin as a clerk for his Pacific Fur Company. Astor was well aware of the recent voyage of Lewis and Clark and smelled a business opportunity. He inquired at Montréal and enlisted a number of Canadians mainly of Scottish and French descent to establish a trading post on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

Astor sent two parties westward, one over land and one by sea. The former was to start from the Great Lakes, descend to St. Louis, and then retrace the route of Lewis and Clark to the Western sea. 

The Panama Canal still a century hence, the sea route was to sail the Atlantic to the southern tip of South America, around Cape Horn, and then northward in the Pacific to the mouth of the Columbia. Pillet was with the group that traveled by sea. His companion Gabriel Franchère preserved their adventures for posterity in a detailed journal.

The Canadians set sail from New York City in September 1810 on the Tonquin under the American flag. A skilled seaman with the dickensian name of Jonathan Thorn captained the vessel. Thorn, a veteran of the storied engagement on the shores of Tripoli, had more than a trace of Bligh in him. He took an instant dislike to the land-lubbing traders.

His animus became dangerous when the Tonquin reached the Falkland Islands in search of fresh water. Pillet, Franchère and some others took to exploring the strange island of penguins and missed the signal to return to the ship. Thorn weighed anchor and shipped off marooning the party on the islands.

Perceiving their predicament, Pillet and company rowed hard for three and a half hours so as not to lose sight of the ship. At last Thorn relented and they were taken back on board. Thorn’s mood may have been altered by one of the Scotsmen, a relative of one of the men he had attempted to maroon, who drew his pistol and threatened to blow the captain’s brains out.

Rounding the Horn, the Tonquin's next port of call was the Hawaiian Islands. Pillet and Franchère spent a night on land exploring and observing Hawaiian customs. At Hawaii, a couple of the crew members remained, while the Tonquin engaged a number of islanders, famously skilled boatmen.

This mixed party of Scots, French-Canadians, Americans, and Hawaiians finally reached the Columbia in March of 1811. They quickly established a trading post they called Astoria. The party traveling over land having been divided and with some loss of life reached Astoria in January and February of 1812.

From Franchère’s account, Pillet emerges as singularly curious and intrepid. When one of the Hawaiians is killed in an accident it is Pillet and Franchère who accompany his countrymen to the burial of their comrade and observe their rites. Pillet makes several side trips to the interior, to the region near Spokane and another in the Willamette River area.

He is a skilled hunter and fisherman and appears to know French and English as well as more than one Native language. In one encounter with the natives, when several attempts at communication in other tongues fail, Pillet comes forward to try the Cree language which his interlocutors understand in part.

One of the Astorians named Ross Cox who also wrote an account of these travels relates that during his Spokane adventure Pillet fought a duel with Nicolas Montour of the rival Northwest Company, “with pocket pistols, at six paces; both hits; one in the collar of the coat, and the other in the leg of the trousers. Two of their men acted as seconds and the tailor speedily healed their wounds.”

In January 1813 news reached Astoria that Great Britain and the United States were at war. This placed the Canadians, British subjects trading under the American flag, in an awkward position.

In September the Astorians learned that a British warship had been sent to seize the American post at Astoria. Representatives of the Northwest Company, Canadians under the British flag, made an offer to buy out the Pacific Fur Company. The offer was accepted in October 1813. The British Union Jack was hoisted and Astoria was renamed Fort George.

A number of the former Astorians signed on with the Northwesters. Pillet and Franchère were two among a party of ninety that chose to return to Montréal. The Tonquin having been destroyed, and its captain and crew massacred in a battle with the natives provoked by Thorn’s arrogance, the party had little choice but to set out by land. A flotilla of 10 canoes, with men, goods, and provisions headed eastward on April 4, 1814.

They traveled mostly along the waterways beginning with an ascent of the Columbia. With great difficulty they survived the mountains and, by the first of June, found their way to the mouth of the Pembina River, west of present-day Edmonton, Alberta.

By the tenth they had reached Fort Vermillion near the modern day border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. They arrived at Lake Winnipeg by the end of the month, achieving Fort William at Lake Superior (now part of Thunder Bay, Ontario) on July 14th.

Here the party appears to have divided, with Franchère traveling sans Pillet with an advance guard. The route from the Great Lakes, to the Ottawa River, to the St. Lawrence was well known to the Canadiens. Franchère’s journey ended at Montréal on September 1, 1814. 

We know that Pillet was home no later than April 1815 since he is a witness at a marriage in Les Cedres, not far from Oka, in that month. When he returned home he must have learned of the death of his father in 1811. 

Pillet married his first cousin Julie Pillet, the daughter of Paschal Pillet and Marguerite LaCroix, on January 16, 1817 at Oka. His eldest son François d'Assise-Benjamin, also known as Antoine, was born there on September 21st of that same year. Around 1820, Pillet and family relocated to the parish of Sainte-Geneviève-de-Pierrefonds on the island of Montréal. 

Pillet appears to have been a prosperous merchant. The notary records reveal his many business dealings and transactions. The will of his mother, who died in 1826, was litigated leaving a detailed account of the impressive Pillet holdings. His son Antoine received an education at Montréal. He studied medicine and practiced this profession among the people of Oka.

1879 Map of Ste-Geneviève
The Pillet ("Pilette") property is
along the river northeast of the church
Source: BAnQ

François-Benjamin supported the Patriotes in the Québec Rebellion of 1837. His son was deposed regarding an incident in this war. Pillet’s nephew, Rodolphe Des Rivières, was among the leaders of the rebellion and fought at the Battle of St-Charles-sur-Richelieu.

François-Benjamin Pillet, astorian, died on January 31, 1858. He was buried the following day at Ste-Geneviève. 

In the 1911 Canadian Census I find his descendants still living at this parish a century after Pillet’s Pacific adventures. They may be there still.

[See this post for more about French-Canadians in the Pacific Northwest.] 

The Beauty in the Heart of the Land

There is a beauty in the heart of the land of our ancestors. Yes, lands have hearts. Their hearts not only beat, they speak. They speak with words that call out over centuries. They call to us from lakes and rivers, from rocks and woods and maternal soils.

When I first laid eyes on the St. Lawrence the river spoke. It called to me in silence and I responded in kind. To speak of ancestral memory begs for a magical thinking that is uncongenial to me. There’s no mechanism to account for such a thing, no iron proofs, no stony reasons. And yet, the first time I saw this river I felt that this is home. I grew up far from its banks and yet I knew that I was home.

We, the exiles, through poverty banished from this land, feel only her lack. We feel her absence, since absences too are felt and known: love lost, departed family members, the faith we may no longer know, the dreams abandoned in a cynical age.

Québec is called aptly la belle province. No one would mistake me for a photographer but in rural Québec pictures come easy. The picture below I took in 2005 at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the south bank of the St. Lawrence down river from Québec City. The colors are music here, the river and sky blending their blues, the clouds and mountains beyond the water providing an obbligato. There is a quality of light here, a crisp purity in the air, that is distinctly Northern.

St. Lawrence at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli

This next picture I took on that same trip, near L’Islet not far from where the previous picture was shot. On this autumn day a huge flock of migratory birds had gathered in the sky. I followed the flock until it rested on the banks of the river behind a large, long-inhabited piece of property. I tried to take a picture of the birds, but at my angle I couldn’t catch them in a photo as they were obscured by a stand of trees.

An old man saw me from the house peering into his property. He marched out of his front door with purpose and I felt a need to explain myself. “Les oiseaux migratoires,” I said and pointed to the white, avian blanket beside the river. He answered but I could not quite catch what he said. He looked over at my car, parked opposite his house and espied a USA plate. He spoke again in a labored English pulled from some long-abandoned, basement storage area of his brain: “I own…all dis lan’…and I say…you can go down!” He then abruptly disappeared into his house.

It was a command I dared not contravene. I went into his backyard, an enviable piece of property planted directly on the river. There the birds, hundreds or thousands of them, were in the sky and beside the river like dense snowflakes in an early winter squall. Toward the center and left of this photo below you will see the white specks, representing my best attempt to shoot the sheer numbers of les oiseaux migratoires. They too felt, by some inexplicable ancestral memory, that this was a home.

Les Oiseaux Migratoires
Near L'Islet

This last picture I took in a different part of Québec, in a place called Lyster in the Eastern Townships region. This was part of the former Nelson Township, Megantic County. This picture, showing the Bécancour River toward evening, was taken right behind the church of Sainte-Anastasie. If you look at the map in a previous post, indicating the location of my ancestor’s property in the 1860s and 1870s, you can see that the Bécancour River ran right beside it not far from where this photo was shot. I have used this photo as the background picture for this blog.

Bécancour River at Lyster

As I took this photo I couldn’t help but imagine my great-grandfather, who grew up here, gazing on this river on a warm summer evening, after a day’s work. This portion of Québec bears a resemblance to northern Vermont or Maine. It is not as startlingly different from my familiar New England as is the Saint Lawrence Valley. But this too is la belle province.

I showed some of these photos to a young cousin and, struck by their beauty, he asked, with great energy, “Why did they leave?”  For the 19th c. habitants, along with the French language and the Catholic faith, the connection to the land was a third element that defined them, the third geometrical point that defined the plane of national identity. Contradictory strains existed in this people: the restless spirit of the voyageur and the sedentary ways of the habitant. Demonstrating the latter, for 200 years my Vermette line moved not 50 miles or so from where my ancestor landed when he came from France in the 1660s.

I am firmly convinced that in most cases our ancestors left this land not because they wanted to but because they had to. So many of our people would not have left their land and their rivers but for the most dire of necessities, the necessity of life or death for their families.

There is a beauty in the heart of this land. This heart beats silently. It takes a sympathetic silence to hear her heart beating, and a still and perceptive mind to receive her beauty and to hear the words she speaks.

Next: My Book A Distinct Alien Race Now Available for Pre-Order

A French-Canadian Pioneer of the Oregon Country

The French North Americans played an enormous, unheralded role in the European exploration of the continent. By 1700, these pioneers had traced the great water highway from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, via the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Great Lakes Region, and the Mississippi. By the first half of the 18th c. the land they knew as le Pays des Illinois in the present day American Midwest had farms supplying food to the French colonists of the lower Mississippi.

The explorations of La Vérendrye and son in the 1730s-1750s pushed westward to the modern day Dakotas and Wyoming, to Manitoba, and the Saskatchewan River. All but the latest of these adventures occurred before the Anglo-Americans had discovered the Cumberland Gap. 

French-Canadians of Québec were also pioneers of the West Coast. Among them was my third great-grandfather’s brother, Hyacinthe Delage a.k.a. Lavigueur.  Hyacinthe Lavigueur, as he was known in the West, was a pioneer of the area the Americans called the Oregon Country, but known as Columbia to the competing British claimants.

Hyacinthe Delage-dit-Lavigueur was born on July 26, 1796 at Saint-Eustache in the county of Deux-Montagnes not far from Montréal. Hyacinthe and several of his brothers, including my ancestor Joseph Delage-dit-Lavigueur, relocated from St-Eustache to the parish of Sainte-Geneviève-de-Pierrefonds not long before 1820.

At Sainte-Geneviève, one of the Lavigueur brothers had a next-door neighbor named François-Benjamin Pillet. Pillet was from a family of fur traders and was born and raised at Oka, a village in Deux-Montagnes then mainly occupied by Algonquins and Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”). Pillet was one of the famed Astorians, a clerk and free trader hired by John Jacob Astor for his Pacific Fur Company. In 1810, the Astorians were given the task of establishing a trading post on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

Pillet’s tale is a fascinating one I will save for a future post but for now know that Pillet returned from his Pacific voyages in 1814 having traveled over land to his home at Oka. Around the same time that the Lavigueurs arrived at Sainte-Geneviève, Pillet also moved there.

There were several connections between the Pillet and Lavigueur families. My third great-grandmother was a Cécile Pillet, the wife of Joseph Delage-dit-Lavigueur. It is certain that Cécile bears some relationship to the family of François-Benjamin but that relationship is, as of yet, unclear. The ties of family and proximity between the Lavigueurs and the Pillets suggest that it was through François-Benjamin's Astorian adventures that Hyacinthe learned of the Oregon Country and it was Pillet’s tales that probably inspired Hyacinthe to settle in this far away land. 

Among the documents of the notary Joseph Payment of Sainte-Geneviève is found a procuration of “Hyacinthe Deloge” to “F. Pillet,” dated May 2, 1820. The term procuration refers to a granting of proxy or power of attorney and the existence of this document establishes a direct relationship between these two men. 

Most of the French-Canadians who traveled to the Far West in this era were, like Pillet, associated with the great fur trading companies and Lavigueur was no exception. [EDIT 9/30/2021] Lavigueur signed on with the Northwest Company. You will find him in the Northwest Company contracts dated 1820, which probably accounts for his proxy agreement with Pillet. [END OF EDIT] 

In the Oregon Country, Hyacinthe formed a relationship with a young, Native American woman he knew as Marguerite Colville. Colville was the name given by those of European descent to one of the nations of Northwest Native peoples. It was common to use the tribal designation as the surname of a Native American individual. Marguerite, who was born around 1814, is also referred to as Marguerite Spokan, indicating the region from which she hailed.

Hyacinthe and Marguerite settled at what became St. Paul in Marion County in what is now the State of Oregon where a group of French-Canadian settlers and a few others formed a small community. In the 1830s, the residents of the settlement began to petition the Catholic Church authorities to send them a priest to help them form a proper French-Canadian parish on the West Coast. In 1836, the settlers built a log church in anticipation.

On November 28, 1838, Fr. François Norbert Blanchet and Fr. Modeste Demers arrived at Fort Vancouver. Father Blanchet served the very first Roman Catholic Mass known to have been celebrated in Oregon at the log church on January 6, 1839 and dedicated the church to St. Paul.

A couple of weeks later (January 21), Fr. Blanchet served what became known as “the big wedding” blessing the unions between the settlers and their common law, Native American wives. Over time, the children born from these unions prior to the big wedding would be baptized. His marriage record indicates that Hyacinthe Lavigueur was “of the parish of Sainte-Geneviève,” Montréal leaving no doubt that this Hyacinthe was indeed my ancestor’s brother.

Marguerite bore Hyacinthe at least seven children. He worked as a farmer as well as a maker of pottery, ironwork tools, and housewares. The traditional occupation of the Lavigueurs was menuisier, a joiner, a maker of home furnishings generally of wood but sometimes of other materials. 

He died on November 10, 1846 while performing heavy labor in a brick kiln in an effort to build a new church at St. Paul. His was the first burial of one of the French-Canadian settlers from this new church. His wife Marguerite died two years later on April 1, 1848 and was also buried at St. Paul.

Memorials at Saint Paul Including the Names of
Hyacinthe Lavigueur and his Wife Marguerite
(Courtesy of Deborah Guinther)

In the year of Hyacinthe’s death, the 49th parallel was established as the northwestern border between the United States and the British North American possessions. By this treaty, the St. Paul settlers had become residents of the United States. As an American Territory, the area became the home of peoples of many nationalities. At St. Paul, a small band of French-Canadians still find a place among the memories of the frontier.

A Canadien in the American Revolution: The Reluctant Patriot Charles Racine

The American Revolution was a conundrum for the Canadiens. Under British rule for a mere dozen years prior to Lexington and Concord, the Canadiens faced an American invasion in the first years of the War for Independence. The British Parliament’s Quebec Act of 1774 had secured the privileges of the seigneurs (lords) and the clergy winning these elites over to the cause of Great Britain. The great mass of the population, les habitants, was ambivalent.

Caught in the crossfire of what they regarded as a civil war between Englishmen, the habitant's tendency was one of neutrality with modest aid proferred to either side in accordance with the shifting winds of war.

During the American invasion of Canada in 1775, a certain Charles Racine, my 16-year-old 4th great-grandfather, was driving his cattle southward when he encountered the American invaders in the Richelieu Valley and was taken prisoner. Why the Americans seized Racine is unknown. It would take little imagination to devise that the Americans chose to “requisition” Racine’s cattle, that the latter took exception, and found himself arrested.

After serving time as a prisoner of war, the Americans gave Charles the choice of joining their cause or remaining a prisoner. He opted for the former and officially enlisted on December 16, 1777, becoming a Private in Captain M. Gilbert’s regiment of foot under Colonel Moses Hazen. Congress had given Hazen the commission to raise a regiment in Canada, which, since it was not part of any State’s militia, came to be known as Congress’ Own.

Moses Hazen was a man of great energy and determination but of questionable moral fiber. From Haverhill, Massachusetts, of Puritan stock, Hazen’s military career began with the British army in the Seven Years (“French and Indian”) War. In the epoch of the Deportation of the Acadians, Hazen bore the responsibility for the burning of four men, two women, and three children in a house he set ablaze, as well as for the scalping of six others. One of the women and the children Hazen immolated were the daughter and grandchildren of an Acadian leader who was forced to witness these killings.

During the siege at Québec in 1759, Hazen’s party was engaged in raids on the countryside, a mission that probably included the killing and scalping of a priest and thirty parishioners in the country near Québec City.

After the war, Hazen followed the victorious British armies into Montréal where he partnered with a merchant and succeeded in land speculation and development. When war came between Britain and its American colonies, Hazen first sided with the British and then switched allegiances. Before gaining his commission from Congress, Hazen had already been imprisoned by both the Americans and the British. He was later court-martialed by the Americans but acquitted. During the course of his career, Hazen was jailed no less than 14 times for debt, and was in an out of lawsuits for most of his life.

With Hazen’s regiment, Private Charles Racine, along with many other Canadiens, participated in some of the most storied events of the American Revolution. Congress’ Own was at Valley Forge, took part in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in the Philadelphia campaign, and was present at the climactic siege at Yorktown. Racine served for the duration of the war and mustered out on June 30, 1783.

Uniform and Equipment of Congress' Own

In the war’s aftermath, the Canadiens who had served with the Americans were persona non grata in their native land since they had fought against their country’s sovereign. For a time they were under the ban of the Catholic Church as well. Hazen’s litigious habits, however, appeared to be a boon to the veterans since he pursued Congress doggedly on their behalf, securing them lands in upstate New York.

A return of January 26, 1785 confirms that Racine had been granted two lots totaling 500 acres in Clinton County, New York. However, Racine, like most of the refugees, seems never to have taken possession. The lands required surveying and the destitute veterans had no money for these services. Neither had they supplies nor tools with which to work the land. Their plight was exacerbated by the fact that they had become Congress’ own problem – foreigners and not citizens of any of the thirteen United States.

Racine tiptoed back into Canada in 1785. Evidently back in the Church’s good graces, in 1791 he married Josephte Desrochers at the parish of St-Charles-sur-Richelieu. After his homecoming, Racine sold off his New York holdings in parcels to Hazen’s nephew, Benjamin Mooers, who sent his agents into Canada to buy the lands of the Canadien veterans. Mooers eventually controlled about a quarter of these lands.

Racine worked as a carpenter and fathered seven sons and two daughters. He died at age 68 in 1827 and is buried at Saint-Damase, QC.

In 1855, the adult children of Charles Racine attempted to secure payment of the pension due to their late mother as a widow of a Revolutionary War veteran. They hired an American lawyer to press their claim and acquired affidavits from men who had known Charles Racine. These men testified that they had heard Racine speak many times of his service in the American army in the Revolution. These affidavits also reveal that Charles had documentary proof of his service but a 1795 fire had destroyed his house and everything in it.

One of Racine’s sons, Louis-Augustin, also testified under oath that his father had spoken of his adventures in the campaigns “near Philadelphia” and that Charles had mentioned Livingston, Allston, and Campbell as among the officers under whom he had served. Livingston had also raised a regiment in Canada that was folded into Hazen’s late in the war. There is a great deal of documentary evidence for Charles Racine's military service, but this was unknown or inaccessible to the Racine family in 1855.

19th c. Transcription of the Roll of Hazen's Regiment:
Charles Racine is No. 23 in the list of Privates

 

The only surviving possession of the fire of 1795 was the rifle with which Charles Racine had fought for American independence. His family preserved the weapon until about 1880 when it was dropped in a lake during a hunting expedition.

This rifle may well have seen action in the Québec Rebellion of 1837, in which Charles’s son Prudent Racine, my 3rd great-grandfather, fought. Three generations of Racines were involved in signal events of North American history since Prudent's sons, Philibert and Cyprien Racine, were volunteers in a Vermont company in the American Civil War.

I have no evidence to support the claim but I tend to believe that Charles’s war stories influenced Prudent’s decision to serve in the cause of the liberty of “Lower Canada” (Québec) in 1837 and perhaps his grandsons’ efforts in the cause of preserving the Union Charles had, under duress, fought to establish.

And all of this because a teenager, tending his cattle, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I would like to acknowledge my distant cousin Janine LaFleur Penfield for sending me a large collection of documents regarding the story of Charles Racine. Most of these materials were scans of primary sources from which the majority of this post was gleaned. 

Genealogy and Family History: Narcissism or Love?

Is it narcissism? Blinkered sentimentality? Is it nationalism of the exclusive and pernicious sort? Is this concentration on self, on my history, my family, my community anything worthwhile or am I self-deceived?

These are the questions, the doubts that trouble me in this family and social history project of mine. It is a project of self-discovery, self-recovery, and several other hyphenated descriptions beginning with the prefix self. It is a project about me and mine isn’t it?

A voice whispers, “Humble yourself. You’re not that important and your community’s struggles are not as weighty as those of others.” In our little known Franco-American subculture, humility is a family value, a value that serves us ill amid the din from today’s chorus of carnival barkers. 

I am sitting on the porch with a small group of my fellow French-Canadian descendants. There are about 20 of us and we’re attending a gathering in a remote conference center in Maine. Night has fallen after a day of presentations, readings, and discussions that leave us stimulated but exhausted.  This is our time to just hang out.

Franco-American Baseball Star
Napoléon Lajoie:
"Nap, comment dit-on 'can o' corn'?"

Jokes are told in French and English. Someone bursts into song for a moment only to be drowned out by raucous laughter following a muttered quip. Someone asks how you say “pinch hitter” in French. Another person grabs an iPad and looks it up, which leads to a quiz of baseball terms in French, each person talking over the other while everyone hears all that is said. “How do you say curve ball?” “How do you say grand slam?” I want to know how you say “can o’ corn” in French but I’m not quite sure what that means in English. Bilingual conversations and sidebars start, stop, dart, and scatter like aquatic insects.

This is the way Franco-Americans hang out. It is different from the way New England Yankees hang out, or Latinos hang out, or African-Americans hang out although if asked to define these differences I’d find myself on thin ice. I do know that it is as familiar as my own hand and as loveable as my best friend.

What are we doing in affirming this sameness, in basking in this familiarity? The obvious question to ask is whether this affirmation of sameness is about excluding the other. Are we building a Great Wall of self-identification in order to hold back the barbarians or is this something else?

“It’s about love. I love these people and they love me.” So said Cajun musician and poet Zachary Richard in the film about Franco-Americans, Réveil -Waking Up French. It’s about love, Monsieur Zachary, if we want it to be.

To recognize the sameness, to feel the love and familiarity we had with each other on the porch, is to build up a reservoir that we may take with us when we return to our multicultural world. Most of us no longer live in le petit Canada, the neighborhoods in pockets all over New England where French was spoken and our identity affirmed. On the porch, we recognize our humanity in a way that is easy so that we may build up a reserve of this rare form of energy in the moments when this recognition proves more difficult.

I can draw from these reserves in those moments when I perceive irreconcilable otherness, the irritating clash of competing, but closely held, values; when rage at our differences, at “how wrong you are!” covers over our sense of the humanity of the other. In these moments I may draw from the natural resource I mined on the porch.

It is in these difficult moments that I will resolve to draw from a time when it was very easy to affirm our humanity, our personhood, that oxymoronic unique-sameness that makes love real. This sameness may give us access to the other, access to the beauty in the diverse, the many, the multiple. Once our people milled cotton and wood and now we mill something else, drawing on another natural resource as essential to human life as wind or water. “It’s about love.” 

This conference I attended driven by an interest in our unique culture, our histories, the progress of our DNA contributors through history, need not be narcissistic or exclusive. This is not a Nuremberg rally telling the troops whom they ought to hate and why. A Christian teaching, almost never applied in practice, says, “Love your enemies.” I’m not the first person to ask how it is possible to love our enemies when we can’t even love our friends. 

What am I doing gathered with a handful of fellow Franco-Americans in this remote spot in Maine?  I’m learning to love my friends.

I won’t stop there.

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A Distinct Alien Race, a book by David Vermette from Baraka Books, Montreal, 2018

Of How Many Does a French Canadian Family Consist?

The following item appeared in the Brunswick (Maine) Telegraph, May 28, 1875, page two.

Of how many does a French Canadian Family Consist?

A few facts will furnish a reply. There is a family at work in the cotton mill, which consists of a father and mother and twenty-four children, all the children large enough being at work. The woman is the fourth wife; a brother of the husband living with his fifth wife in Montreal, has twenty-five children. Three families arrived here last week to go to work in the mill and they numbered all told 37 persons. A lady friend of ours a few days since met a Frenchwoman, who, looking at the babe in the carriage said to our friend, “I have got fifteen of those.” The only possible reply of the lady with the one babe was, “Oh Lordie!” Ten and twelve and fifteen children are by no means uncommon in the French Canadian families, but twenty-four are a little above average.

My great-grandfather was one of 23 children by two wives. Another great-grandfather was one of 17, all born to the same woman. As astonishing at this seems by modern standards we might bear in mind that family size is conventional. There is no normal family size and customs vary.



The Ouellettes And Their Twelve Children

The picture on the right shows my great-great-grandparents Thomas Ouellette and Josephine (Racine), seated in the center, with their adult children in 1909. These are not their children accompanied by their spouses. All of these people are their children. One of the children, Thomas Ouellette fils, is not in the picture since this photo was taken in Maine and he had returned to live in his native Québec by this point. Another child seems to have died before this photo was taken. I can confirm that Josephine bore at least 14 children and there may have been others about whom I don’t yet know. (My great-grandmother Albina Ouellette Vermette, b. Roxton Falls, QC, 1868 is seated at the far right.)

I am often asked why they had such large families. The usual assumption is that the children were required to serve as the labor force on the family farm. This may have been one reason for the custom of large families, particularly in the earlier days when land needed to be cleared and more hands meant more axes chopping down more trees.

Another reason for the large families was political and involved what was known as la revanche des berceaux – the revenge of the cradles. The idea was that the Francophones would retake Canada from their English conquerors by out-reproducing them. I’ve heard some stories of priests in the confessional asking fathers (mothers seem to have had little say in the matter) why they were not producing more children.

The revenge of the cradle backfired. The rapid population growth outstripped the economic/agricultural development required to support it. This strategy, intended to bring about demographic dominance, led to the departure of a large percentage of the population. Historians will continue to debate the point but it seems to me that the flight from Québec in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, both to the States and to other Canadian Provinces, was the result of an underdeveloped economy.

Given the economic and personal risk, the emotional toll, as well as the social sanctions against making such a move, it seems unlikely that the rural poor would have left la belle province in such numbers unless they were under duress. Many families auctioned off all they had to finance their trip to the States. That’s a risky, desperation move.

Another reason for large families is that children were a farmer’s retirement plan, his and his wife’s Social Security. Life expectancy was considered to be about 65 years for those who survived childhood. In order to enjoy a few years of retirement after a long life of hard work on the farm, it was necessary to produce a son who could inherit the property and support the habitant and his wife in their old age. This son would need to be grown, established, and able to take over his father’s farm by the time his parents reached about 55 to 60 years of age.

About a third of the children born alive did not make it to adulthood. If a couple’s first children were girls, they had to keep reproducing in order to have a son ready to inherit at a suitable age. Since there was a one-in-three chance that any son produced would die in childhood, the couple’s insurance policy, at least up until a certain point in life, was to keep reproducing as long as they were able.

These practical reasons were probably not uppermost in the minds of the parents of these families, however. Once the custom of large families was established it persisted by the inertia characteristic of traditional societies. It was accepted and normal in their world that a woman would be pregnant most of the time between ages 20 and 40. 

Although large families continued to be a custom in the Québec Diaspora in New England, the birth rate began to drop slowly when these families moved into an industrial economy. In these New England Franco-American families, the “revenge of the cradle” factor and the motive related to the traditional socio-agricultural system lost their relevance. The Franco-Americans may have been influenced also by the relatively smaller family sizes of their Yankee neighbors. That said, large families persisted in many Franco-American communities well into the 20th century. The birth rate in Québec did not decline until about 1960.

Culture Is More Than Language: Notes to a Québécois Cousin

This week I received an e-mail from a cousin in Québec. He had seen the genealogical data I had posted on a web site. His mother, the daughter of my great-grandfather’s brother, was on her deathbed. She knew little about her Vermette family and my cousin was happy to be sharing my research with her in her last days. This touching message was the beginning of an extended correspondence. Here I share some excerpts (edited and expanded in places).

Cousin: Your perspective is very illuminating because you could extract something of value beyond the language loss, an idea that in Québec we cannot comprehend because we think it is all about speaking French, and possibly this is not the case!

Me:  C'est ça. There is more to our culture than language alone. Culture may exist consciously or unconsciously. Consciously, my parents identified as American and spoke English. Unconsciously, they were very Québécois: in their outlook, in their concerns and the way they spoke of them, in the foods they ate or didn’t eat, in the way they worked and approached a task, in the way they arranged their home, in their musicality, in the way they raised their children, in the way they celebrated, in the way they watched a play or a performance, in the way my father stood when he talked to his brothers. All of this is culture.

You can do all of these things in a Québécois way and speak either French or English. How could my parents, the product of many generations of Québécois be any other way than deeply Québécois? This is what I might like to impress on our cousins in Québec: although I regret the language loss our culture is more than just speaking French.

Cousin: Why would one `choose' to be different? This is one question I have at times.

Me: It’s an excellent question. In the case of the Québécois immigrants in the USA there are a couple of reasons why they may have wanted to preserve their “difference.” One reason is that they were indoctrinated in la survivance ideology of 19th c. Québec. As you know, the Durham Report circa 1840 called for a fairly aggressive policy of assimilation of the Québécois.  It is when an identity is threatened that it asserts itself all the more. To the immigrants, there was no difference between being surrounded by anglophone Protestants in Canada or in the USA. In either case, the preservation of language and culture was an unquestioned premise.

Cartier: "It's the rabble who are leaving!"

Another reason why the Québécois immigrants wished to preserve their language and culture is because the elites in Québec, politicians, Church leaders and journalists, stigmatized the immigrants as vendus. They were considered sell-outs who were just interested in getting rich. Georges-Etienne Cartier reportedly said about them, Laissez-les partir, c'est la racaille qui s'en va.  It was to prove to the elites back home that they were not vendus or racaille that the immigrants in the USA were eager to preserve their culture. They would prove themselves to be more Québécois than the Québécois!

The truth is that they were not vendus. They were poor people who could not make a living in Québec. Whether or not there was an agricultural crisis in Québec is disputed among historians. It seems clear to me that, whatever the cause, the economic development of 19th c. Québec could not keep pace with the population growth.

In a family with 12 or 13 surviving children only one or two of the sons could find a suitable farm, according to the traditional socio-agricultural system. Although the idea of a single “inheriting son” is an oversimplification, nonetheless younger sons were often driven to frontier “colonization areas.” One of these younger sons was our forebear Joseph Vermette who moved his family to Megantic County in the Eastern Townships after his older brother inherited the farm in the old parish near the St. Lawrence. The real wealth of this area was timber and minerals. But these businesses require a large capital outlay, something beyond your average habitant.

Is it that the modern economic development of Québec was enabled by our ancestors’ exodus?  A point to ponder…