Késsinnimek - Roots - RacinesFinding Anne Marie: The Hidden History of Our Acadian Ancestors
Parts 7 -10
by
Marie Rundquist
Parts 7 -10
by
Marie Rundquist
Version française
Part Seven: Exiled
Along with the pivotal marriage record of Simon Gosselin and Harriet Denelle, my Grandmother's " Gosselin File" also contained her own, hand-written pedigree of her maternal ancestry, with notes. At this juncture, we MUST give credit to Lorraine Gosselin Harrison. She and other Gosselin family members compiled the entire document to define the descent of the Gosselins of Quebec. Asselia perhaps never even read the file. It was mailed to her by Lorraine, probably after Pioneering was completed.
Unknowingly, my Grandmother Asselia, by assembling the "Gosselin File", prepared the way for me, more than ten years after her death, to begin my own search of my maternal line. My Grandmother Asselia's research ends, along with her hand-written notes, in Maryland, with the birth of Angelique David in Maryland in 1765 to her parents, listed in my Grandmother Asselia's notes as Genevieve Hebert and Michel David. Being a life-long Marylander, my interest was piqued as to why they had settled in my State - but after Genevieve and Michel's names, all I saw was blank paper -I saw no more of my Grandmother Asselia's hand-written notes that would have explained how or why these two individuals of obvious French ancestry, based on the surnames of their descendents, would have found themselves living in Maryland. At the time of my initial research into my maternal line, I knew little about Acadians and even less of their history. What my Grandmother Asselia did provide me, however sketchy her notes, was the lynch-pin of our Acadian ancestry, the fulcrum on which our Acadian past balanced with our present lives in the United States, the name of Genevieve Hebert, the daughter of Acadians Marguerite Gautrot and Michel Hebert of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia.
My search for the marriage and children of Michel David and Genevieve Hebert yielded stories of forced exile, loss, and desperation, at once sad, horrific, tragic, and unexpected. Family names were no longer verified by researching the burgeoning census and birth records of Louisiana; instead, the family names of our ancestors appear, in long lists, on the registries of sailing vessels. Carrying the few possessions they were allowed to take with them in their hands, our early Acadian families, mothers and fathers, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and their many children crammed themselves on board these sailing vessels, destined for points south and across the Atlantic -after the British showed them a very hostile way out the door of their Acadian home in 1755. Genevieve Hebert and her husband, Etienne- Michel David, their children, relatives, and friends who were exiled from their home in Acadia to a temporary refuge in Snow Hill, Maryland survived the trip (reference, "Arrival of the Acadians in Maryland," by Robert Dafford, www.acadian-home.org/acadiansmaryland. html), and were therefore considered fortunate; others were exiled to France, and often died en route. Genevieve Hebert's Acadian father Michel Hebert, for example, had re-married after the death of her mother, Marguerite Gautrot. He and his second family were exiled to France; Michel Hebert died at Sea. There were stories of exiled young children, toddlers, who, separated from parents who had died at Sea en route from Acadia to France, wandered hand-in-hand into French hospitals after disembarking from their ships, only to die in their hospital beds weeks later. Published, first-hand accounts of this time in our history can be read - but how could they have been lived? Imagine your Acadian ancestors, family-oriented people of the highest integrity and honesty, who knew (and wanted) nothing more than productive lives as farmers and trades people - wrenched by the British from their lands, livestock, and businesses they had tended and managed with their own hands, their little children in tow, crammed together aboard ships, never to see their homes again. The heart-sickening trauma and devastation experienced by the Acadian families during their forced exile by the British, described in first-hand accounts, can be compared only to those reported by the German Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust.
Disembarked in Snow Hill, a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (the Free State), Genevieve and her husband Michel David, their family and neighbors, would contemplate their future. All possessions lost, their lands, livestock, and their homes stolen out from under them by British scoundrels of the highest order on whom History has spared no damnation, the exiled Acadians first thanked God for sparing theirs and their children's lives. Genevieve, who had already lost her mother, would never see her father, Michel Hebert, who had died at Sea, again. But time was precious, and the couple could not afford the high price of grief; Michel and Genevieve had many children to feed, with many more promising to be on the way. Michel and Genevieve would rebuild their lives, and ten years later, after the birth of their daughter, Angelique, they, with other exiled Acadians, willingly boarded another sailing vessel, this time to leave Maryland's Eastern Shore, their final destination a friendly French territory down south in Louisiana.
Part Eight: Picking up the Thread
Genevieve Hebert carried my MtDNA from Acadia to the United States, unchanged. Her MtDNA had been the same MtDNA carried by her maternal ancestors before her - back to an earlier time, when we were "Pioneering with our Acadian Ancestors," to coin my Grandmother Asselia's phrase. My search for Anne Marie, and my Aboriginal ancestry was almost thwarted by another Genevieve Hebert who threatened to unravel the delicate MtDNA thread that I was so meticulously following from the United States back into our Acadian history in Nova Scotia. Genevieve S. Hebert (aka Genevieve Salomee Hebert) appears numerous times in Acadian records, as you'll find should you wish to re-trace my steps on your own. Her lineage is deceptively similar to that of our Genevieve Hebert; and although I'm certain that she was from a fine family, Genevieve Salomee Hebert does not belong in our family tree. Do not follow her path; her lines are not ours!
My stomach knows that something isn't quite right long before my brain gets the message; when my stomach analyzed the line I had traced back from Genevieve Salomee Hebert back to an Aboriginal maternal ancestor who had married a French settler, it reported that we were suspicious of this information; we had little confidence in its credibility, it was of poor quality - all of the things you want to hear from your stomach. Indeed, my stomach would not let my research (nor me) rest. After about two weeks of incessant nagging from my intestinal quarters on this matter, I awoke early one morning, advanced to my computer, and searched again, this time prodding the computer with complex search techniques that caused my high-speed CPU to labor, my fingers to ache from typing and my eyes to burn from staring at the screen. Pounding query after query into my keyboard, I reviewed scores of "hits", refining my searches until I found gold - Genevieve Hebert's and David Michel's marriage record linking the right Genevieve Hebert decisively back into to my Acadian maternal ancestral line. My stomach told me that I could now pick up the thread and continue my journey back into my ancestral past. When you study the same record that I found, I'm sure your stomach will feel better too:
"Genevieve Hebert, daughter Marguerite Gautrot, m. Michel David 1/20/1744
Reference: http://www.acadian-cajun.com/gaudet.htm."
I checked and double-checked my facts, and found multiple instances of the same marriage record appearing on an Acadian family geneology website, http://www.acadian-cajun.com ultimately finding a reference to the marriage as it was documented in Grand Pre Church Records of that period. Of course, like anything, once you solve a problem, it's easy to solve the same problem again; but finding the right answer to begin with - that's the trick!
Part Nine: The Hebert Mystique and the Role of the Metisse in Acadia
From Genevieve Hebert, I followed my MtDNA thread back to her mother, Marguerite Gautrot, daughter of Francoise Rimbault. Referencing the family records reported on the www.acadiancajun.com website, I found that Marguerite married Michel Hebert, son of Michel Hebert (the 1st) and Elizabeth Pellerin) in Grand Pre in 1726. The Hebert name is legendary in early Acadian history, beginning with the arrival of Etienne and Antoine Hebert in Acadia, in approximately the 1640's, from who knows where (was it France)? Indeed, the absence of information about the Hebert brothers' origins is as legendary as the two brothers themselves. It's amazing to consider that the original Hebert brothers, Antoine and Etienne, who were the starting point of so many illustrious and colorful family lines that wind their way through Acadian-Cajun families all over the United States and Canada, had in fact no pedigree. So was the nature of the New World - for many it was a new start, and for the Hebert brothers, perhaps a new identity as well. Genevieve Hebert inherited her ambiguous identity from her father, Michel, who was descended from Etienne, winding his strand among those contributed by her mother, into her family line. Her ancestral heritage was not untypical of other Acadians, the majority of whom were "Metisse" - a self-sufficient, articulate, and talented people who resulted from the marriages of their newly-arrived European settler and native Mi'kmaq (Pronounced "Mic-Mac") parents.
From the early days of Acadian history, the Metisse, with their lively fiddle music and their Native traditions and customs, were the heart and soul of Acadian society, and their hard work and industry drove the region to prosper, which ultimately caused the British to covet their lands to such a degree as to wage war and as victor, drive Genevieve Hebert, her husband and children, their neighbors, family and friends, out of Acadia and into a forced exile. Genevieve Hebert's maternal grandparents, Charles Gautrot and Francoise Rimbault, married in 1685 in Grand Pre (see referenced website, http://genealogy.leblancnet.us/2483.htm), were a typical Metisse couple, each having a French/European father; Francoise Rimbault's mother and Charles Gautrot's grandmother were both American Indian. (Note: A U6a genetic test result has been found for a participant who reports to be a descendent of Edmee LeJeune. 12/08/2006.
But, as Genevieve Hebert's parents and grandparents discovered, for a French/European settler in the New World, the path to success was shared with the Mi'kmaq natives of the area - in matters of trade, economics, and agriculture. Indeed, the inter-family relationships that grew among the European/French and the Mi'kmaq natives who intermarried with amazing rapidity, became so strong as to obscure where the French part of the family ended and the Mi'kmaq part began, causing many of the children of these blended, "Metisse" marriages to take leave of the census and take up life with their Mi'kmaq cousins entirely. (That was a census joke - sorry, but it showed up, was appropriate, and I'm going to allow it to remain in my story).
Spiritually, the Acadians were tightly bound to the Catholic Church. Based on my very recent, non-scholarly impressions of Acadian history, I believe the Catholic Church played a large role in solidifying and "Catholicizing" the newly forming Acadian society, ensuring that all new Acadian babies were baptized in the Church, including those born of Native marriages, as well as those of Metisse and French/European parents. If a couple wished to marry, regardless of their pedigree, it appeared to me that a Catholic Priest was more than happy to officiate at the wedding ceremony. I'm sure that when called upon to report, any Catholic priest in the area at the time would have been on very solid footing in stating that there were no non-Catholics in the vicinity of Acadia, or its environs, thus quelling any need for further investigation by outside Church officials.
In studying the early Acadian census reports now documented on various Acadian websites, searching primarily for evidence of my own ancestors' census data, I've noted that from census to census, there was a seemingly logarithmic increase in numbers of children born to and numbers of livestock acquired by the farmers and laborers who made up the mix of the Acadian population. The Acadian economy and the Acadian population were indeed booming. Most significant to our Acadian ancestry, was the relative fecundity of the Rimbault, Gautrot, Hebert, and David families, with an honorable mention going to my own great-great-great-great grandmother, Harriet Denelle of Louisiana who didn't stand on ceremony, but instead forged ahead, giving birth to her eight children in advance of an official marriage certificate. In each family mentioned, numbers of offspring, and the duration of what is considered a normal, child-bearing lifespan, exceed all notions of what is "average" for a modern woman. As I counted the numbers of children had by my maternal ancestors, and considered their relative ages, it dawned on me that my maternal ancestors were truly Olympiads in the realm of obstetrics. If the dates and ages on record were correct, my maternal ancestors produced babies every few years, from their early marriages at eighteen and twenty, continuing well beyond the fragile age of forty and remaining active in this sense until their late forties, or perhaps early fifties. My ancestors' reproductive success and the health of their offspring factored significantly in my being able to trace my maternal line back twelve generations - ending my search with Anne Marie, unable to proceed any further in my search, as Anne Marie's parentage was not a matter of public record.
Part Ten: Anne-Marie (?)
The question mark following my maternal ancestor Anne-Marie's name is no accident in punctuation; it is, however, a marker, or as some may interpret it, a stigma; either way, the question mark, as it appears after Anne-Marie's name, indicates that Anne-Marie, wife of Rene Rimbault originally of France, had no surname (reference: http://www.leveillee.net/ancestry/d737.htm). Without a surname, Anne-Marie had no French/European heritage of her own to claim for her descendents. In the mid 1650's, Anne-Marie married her second husband Rene Rimbault, her first husband, another French settler, having died, leaving her the widowed mother of a baby son, Phillippe Pinet. In her second marriage to Rene, Anne-Marie once again took her husband's surname, appending Rene's name to hers, obscuring her lack of documented pedigree behind the name "Rimbault."
As often as Anne-Marie is characterized as "Metisse" by researchers, she is also branded "Mi'kmaq." At once, Anne-Marie is settled into the relative obscurity of the "UNKNOWN," and then she is thought to be "Aboriginal". On the pre-eminent Acadian website, "http://www.acadian-home.org/frames.html," site owner Lucie LeBlanc Consentino has lately advanced Anne-Marie to the status of "Unknown Origin - Probably or Possibly Native(with updates pending)," in reporting her marriage to Rene Rimbault.
For Anne-Marie's descendants, now living throughout the Maritime regions of Nova Scotia, and in the United States, her inconsistently reported status proves confusing and frustrating. By all accounts, Anne-Marie is an Aboriginal, a true "Native" of the area, who, like other Mi'kmaq women, had married a French/European settler, newly arrived in Port Royal, single, without a French wife in tow.
I remain confident of Anne-Marie's "First Nation" ancestry, and encourage others to feel the same way as I do. My journey started when I received my "Haplogroup A," Native American" MtDNA test result, and continued as I traveled time, exploring each consecutive generation, until I had traced my MtDNA thread back to my earliest maternal ancestor, who is, without a doubt, Anne-Marie. The twelve generations that I explored on my quest for Anne-Marie are unique portals - views into the lives of my maternal ancestors. Other descendants of Anne-Marie are investigating these portals as well, exploring their own family histories, intertwined, yet separate from mine. I know that my newly discovered ancestors have only begun to tell their stories-and I will have to visit them again to hear more. Anne-Marie's Amerindian story is but one in the (until now) hidden history of our Acadian ancestors; but to really "find" Anne-Marie, I must explore my newly-found family roots further, learn more about Acadian and Louisiana history and discover the roles which Anne-Marie and other Native American Indians of her time had in the shaping of the New World.
Marie Asselia Rundquist's Maternal Ancestral Line
Notes: Detailed Record of Marriages Chronicled in Finding Anne- Marie
First Generation: Marie Asselia Rundquist, daughter, Nancy Beville Pierce married Edward Nowicki, January 19, 1997, in Rockville, Maryland.
Second Generation: Nancy Bevill Poore, daughter Asselia Strobhar Lichliter, married Frank H. Pierce III, December 21, 1952, in Washington, D.C.
Third Generation: Asselia Strobhar, daughter of Marie Asselia Gashet d'Lisle, married Emery Bruce Poore, 1932, in Detroit, Michigan.
Fourth Generation: Marie Asselia Gaschet d'Lisle, daughter of Marie Anais Gosselin, married Cecil Strobhar, 1906, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Fifth Generation: Marie Anais Gosselin, daughter of Harriet Denelle, married Charles Gaschet d'Lisle, about 1867, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Sixth Generation: Harriet Denelle, daughter of Celeste Mary Elizabeth Ouvre (aka Oubre, Hoover) married Simon Gosselin on 10 January, 1853, according to St. Tammany marriage records, File 2.
Seventh Generation: (Celeste) Mary Elizabeth Ouvre (aka Oubre, Hoover), daughter of Angelique David, married Jean Baptiste Ginel-Denelle, July 22, 1806 in St James Church, St James Parish, Louisiana.
(Celeste) Mary Elizabeth Ouvre Denelle married Antoine Lavigne, 11 Sep 1819.Eighth Generation: Angelique David, daughter of Genevieve Hebert, married Henri Francois Houwer (Ouvre), September 24, 1787, in St. James Parish, Louisiana.
Ninth Generation: Genevieve Hebert, daughter Marguerite Gautrot, married Michel David, 1/20/1744, Grand Pre, Nova Scotia. Source: Parish Registers for Grand-Pre.
Tenth Generation: Marguerite Gautrot, daughter of Francoise Rimbaux, married Michel Hebert, 8 May 1726, in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia. Source: Dictionnaire genealogique des familles acadiennes by Stephen A. White, published 1999, page 696 #5i
Eleventh Generation: Francoise Rimbault (Rimbeaux, Rimbaut, Raimbault), daughter of Anne Marie, married Charles Gautreaux (Gautrot) in 1685, in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.
Twelfth Generation: Anne-Marie, daughter of (UNKNOWN INDIAN) married Rene Rimbault, 1653, in Port Royal, Nova Scotia.
And at last - there she was, my ancestor Anne-Marie, an "unknown Indian" and the ultimate reason that I was so surprised at the results of my MtDNA testing.
Joint Copyright held by either Frank H. Pierce, III or Marie Rundquist -2006
E-mail the author Marie Rundquist
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Created 1 Feb 2003