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4. INTRODUCTION to the French Canadian families A family history is never finished. A searcher for family roots is always optimistic that another root can always be found just below the surface that has already been searched. One is reminded of digging for potatoes with a small spade when one is never sure whether the biggest potato has been left behind. Then, of course, there are always the demands of the living family, children, wives, brothers-in-law, physics, etc., who often make the present (that fleeting moment) and the future seem more important than the fusty, musty past. I suppose compromise is one of the names of the game: a game which, for the searcher in the past, clearly has only a finite length of time to play. So, let's stop here (for a little while) and draw up the accounts, as we know them now, at this instant, of the French-Canadian ancestors of that worthy couple, Merton Emerson HYNES and Arleen McCARTY. The following story should put things into perspective: Apparently, two genealogists once met to boast of their exploits: the first claimed that he had traced his ancestors back to the amoebae of paleontologic times. The second imperturbably replied that his were traceable back to the nitrogen molecules in the air. I shall not make such a claim, but I did (for real) hear a lady explaining loudly in the genealogical library of the Latter Day Saints in Wilmette, Chicago, how she had traced her ancestors back to the family of Jesus Christ: one of his uncles, I believe it was. The principal listener nodded and said she was trying to do the same. Unfortunately, she was finding the Roman period quite difficult, and she still had a few small gaps... This is the incomplete story of sixteen generations, from Antoine ARCHAMBAULT and Renée OUVRARD of Dompierre in South-Western France to the five young lady-cousins Mireille, Savannah, Ava, Tyra and Simone Berry. It covers a period of almost exactly 400 years from 1580 to 2007. To search for ancestors before this period becomes a very difficult task. In most European countries, and in particular, in France and England, laws were passed in 1560-80 requiring church parishes to keep records of all baptisms, marriages and burials. It took about a hundred years before all parishes kept regular registers, and clearly many early records were quite incomplete. The registers have meanwhile been exposed to the will of God and acts of man. The French revolution (1789), the Irish revolution, the English civil war (1642-50) and the many German invasions of France were particularly rough on Parish records; as also at various times and places have been floods, fires, and well-meaning lets-clean-up-the-place and burn-the-rubbish "friends". It's just like parents throwing away those boxes full of old broken lead soldiers, 78 r.p.m. records, primary school reading books etc... Some European cities or dioceses still have land purchase records dating from the Middle Ages, but the feudal system meant that only the Kings and Bishops (the Pope) really owned land. Therefore, very few such records exist before 1580. The minutes of the King's council meetings continue back to about 1200 A.D. in England (initiated by King John) and in France (King Philip, who was in the process of combining the various dukedoms of Normandy, Brittany etc. into the country of France as we know it today). But, only nobles are mentioned there. You may be pleased to know that none of your ancestors mentioned here are traceable to a noble family in France or England. The Irish connection may be different, but I'll come to that later. Before the age of printing (early 1500's), most of the peasants and lower classes did not have last names. They were known as "John the butcher", "Peter the ploughman", "Francois le tailleur", etc. Even the nobles only began to slowly adopt last names in the Middle Ages as the hereditary succession became more stable and as family lands became localized. The reader may be interested to know the nationalities of the ancestors of Emerson and Arleen: of Arleen's four grandparents, three were born in Ireland and the fourth, Elizabeth Morgan, had an Irish mother, Eliza Quigley, but born in Pennsylvania. Elizabeth's father, James Morgan, was at least a quarter Irish, possibly half, but undoubtedly has some ancestors from Wales, lets say half. Emerson's ancestry is a little more uncertain and more varied. His grandfather Dennis Hynes is from Ireland. Two grandparents, Mitchell and Marceline appear to be of pure French origin. An exception may be the claim that one family came to France from Ireland before 1580, but the evidence is minimal. The fourth grandparent, Lucy Brissette, is half French. Her mother was at least half English, and very probably completely English. Applying a little arithmetic to the above produces children of Arleen and Emerson who are 19/32 Irish, 5/16 French, 1/16 English and 1/32 Welsh. Emerson and his siblings are 1/4 Irish, 5/8 French and 1/8 English, while Arleen and her siblings are 15/16 Irish and 1/16 Welsh. It all adds up to a lot of Celtic and Viking blood, especially as most of the French come from Normandy, Brittany and the South-Western coast of France. There will be lots of genealogical tables containing thousands of related people in this “treatise (?)”, and so I have arranged them in chapters according to each family line. The first part (five to six generations) of the general chart of the direct ancestors shows these family lines. 4.(a) The French-Canadian Connection Emerson HYNES' mother, Mary Perrizo, was born in Winnebago on July 15th 1871, but her parents were both born in French Canada. Her father Mitchell (or Michel in French) came from Varennes, just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Many Perrizos and related families still live in Varennes and the surrounding area today. Her mother was Marceline Hebert, whos family came from the same region of Canada: we have recently verified (early 2007) that her parents and several of her siblings also stayed briefly in Fond du Lac, but soon moved on to Iowa and thence to places further west. Most of these families arrived in Canada in the 1600s and were the primary settlers of the Montreal region. Fortunately for the genealogist, the church records of these French-Canadian settlements are essentially complete from the founding of the churches in 1650 and later till the present day. In addition, many of these parish marriage records have been assembled in alphabetical order of the names, and published as photo-offset paperbacks. The nearby public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana has most of these in its excellent collection of French-Canadian genealogical material. In addition, the Newberry Library in Chicago has an excellent, easily-accessible genealogical collection, with many references concerning the French-Canadians and especially, their migrations to the United States. Naturally, the State Libraries of Wisconsin, in Madison, and of Minnesota, in St. Paul, are rich resources for tracking French-Canadians in their respective States. In the nineteenth century, Father (Abbé) René Tanguay extracted from the Parish records and elsewhere the genealogies of all the early French-Canadian families. His first volume covers the families up to about 1700, and the following six volumes continue the genealogies through to about 1750. This "history of the Canadian people" was his life's work. It is an often-acknowledged masterpiece which has no equivalence in any other country. Four small volumes of corrections and additions have since been published. In addition, the Drouin Institute of Quebec has covered a similar period (up to about 1770) with a four volume catalog of French-Canadian marriages. With the help of these sources and trips to Canada and France, we have been able to form a rather complete genealogy of the 6 or 7 generations of ancestors living in Canada for about 200 years. We begin with a brief historical introduction to life in France and Canada during these times and then discuss what we know about each family line in turn. 4(b) Origins in France: Early History of Quebec and Montreal The French first explored the St. Lawrence River in the early fifteen-hundreds when other European nations such as the English, Dutch and Spanish were beginning their explorations of the New World. The first person to map the coast continuously from Spanish Florida to British NewFoundland was Verrazano in 1524. His voyage from Rouen, in Northern France, initiated by the silk merchants of Lyon, showed that no clear passage to China was available. America was in the way, and thus the Lyonnais lost interest. The explorations of Jacques Cartier in 1535-42 followed, principally in the St. Lawrence regions, and were sponsored by other merchants of Northern France. Some of the French attempted settlements in "Acadie" (the country north of Maine on the south side of the St. Lawrence River) and in "Terre Neuve" (NewFoundland) but they were unsuccessful because of the extreme cold. Then came the period of religious wars in France, when trade and exploration came to a halt - the Protestants massacred the Catholic nobles, who with the Guises and Catherine de Medici got their revenge at the St. Bartholomew's day massacre (24 August 1572). In the end, Henry of Navarre decided that "Paris was worth a mass" and brought peace to France about 1590. The Edict of Nantes (1598) allowed the Huguenots to worship in peace.

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