Links Family History Blog

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 na...

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...