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A Complete Surprise. In building out The French Side of my family tree, there was a knowledge gap around the maternal ancestors of my 2nd great-grandmother Marie Olivine Trial (grandmother of my maternal grandfather). This was due to the fact that her mother died shortly after Olivine was born, Olivine being raised by her father and step-mother. For the longest time, all I knew was Olivine's mother's name: Hermine Champagne .  The surviving records about Hermine Champagne were few and far between. And because she had died so early in life, no family lore from her side of the family survived. So it came as a complete surprise to me one day to discover that: Hermine Champagne was a direct descendant of founding Acadian settlers at Port Royal-Annapolis Royal in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia;  some of her family had survived the Great Deportation of 1755 and re-settled in Québec years later; and she was the last in my direct family line to bear the Acadian nam

Les Filles du Roi In an earlier post,  The French Side: Marie Catherine Levesque , I mentioned several Filles du Roi (King's Daughters) in the direct paternal and maternal family lines of my 2nd great-grandmother, Marie Catherine Levesque (see also Levesque and Michaud on blog page  The French Side ). Filles du Roi were the more than 700 courageous female pioneers who, between the years of 1663 and 1673, left everything and everyone they knew in France to cross a vast ocean during a war with Britain and settle in a dangerous new French colony.  But these fearless women did it, and became the progenitors of a vast number of Canadians possessing French heritage. VIDEO: Family Line Founder - Jeanne Marguerite Chevalier (1645-1716) Figure 1: Lineage of Jeanne Chevalier to Marie Catherine Levesque Today, with the help of Lisa Elvin-Staltari and her YouTube channel,  Have Roots, Will Travel,  I pay tribute to Jeanne Marguerite Chevalier : Fille du Roi, Québec pioneer, family line founde