Links Family History Blog

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 pi...

Introducing Some "French Connections." On Links blog page The French Side , I introduced the main family branches comprising my French-Canadian heritage, including Despins and Levesques. Today I wish to remember a woman whose family (both on her father's and mother's side) had a nearly three-century long association with Quebec from the 1600s, until she left the province in the early 1900s to move 4,000 km westward with her husband and children to farm in Saint Paul, Alberta, Canada.  Her name was Marie Catherine Levesque, my great-great grandmother, and she was the last of the Levesques in my direct line before she married into the Despins family. Known as Catherine, she died 100 years ago from what is now a treatable disease. Marie Catherine Levesque (1869-1924) Catherine was born 25 November 1869, the oldest of twelve children, to parents Joseph Nazaire Levesque (1840-1892), a blacksmith, and Henriette Michaud (1847-1924).  An interesting side note, Henriette...

Welcome to Links Family History's first post!  With this blog, it is my aim not only to share the results of the past 15 years of researching my family's history, but to collaborate with others with similar research interests in the hopes of breaking through some pretty challenging brick walls.  Future posts will be broadly organized into the following branches of the family: Brant, Browett, Cole, Despins, Elder, Hutchinson and LeComte.  This is not intended to re-duplicate my family tree (which is publicly available on Ancestry.ca  and contains (at present) over 4200 individuals). Instead, it is my intent to focus on individuals' stories and to research family themes such as Scottish settlers in Québec, my recently-discovered Acadian connection, Irish Palatines' journey from Germany to Canada, or Ontario and Western Canadian pioneers, for example. I am not formally trained in genealogy research, so I am not an expert. But through practising this addictive hobby over...