This is the family tree of my maternal grandparents, Marcel and Annie Levesque of St-Andre, New Brunswick. Annie and Marcel married in 1917 and owned a farm on Comeau Ridge in St-Andre. There they had 11 children, 10 of which had families of their own. Their grandchildren and great grandchildren, including me have spread across Canada from Victoria, BC to Halifax, NS, as well as New Hampshire and England. Some of their grandchildren and great grandchildren remain in the St-Andre - Grand Falls area. Annie and Marcel both share the Levesque surname. They were indeed related and needed a dispensation in order to get married. A close examination of their family tree will reveal how they are related. The ancestors of Annie and Marcel were predominantly from Quebec who settled in that province as French immigrants in the 17th century. Significant branches of the family were Acadian however. These were the French who settled what would become Nova Scotia. They were expelled from Acadia by the English in the 1750s. Many of the expelled Acadians wound up in Louisiana, the English colonies in what is now the United States, and some in France and England. Some of these Acadians made their way west and were the first settlers of the upper St. John river valley in the 1780s. These include some of Anne Levesque's ancestors. At the Acadian Village in Van Buren, Maine there is the Roy house, the actual home of Anne Levesque's ancestor, Boniface Roy and his family that was built in the 1790s. Needless to say our ancestors are French-Canadians. My research has found that this is actually not so simple. We have at least one documented First Nations ancestor, a Mi'kmaq woman named Marie Aubois from a native village near what was Port Royal, the original French settlement in Acadia and what is now known as Annapolis Royal, NS. We also have ancestors from Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, England and Scotland who emigrated to Quebec. In my research, when such information was available I have tried to add interesting information like occupation, census records, and immigration dates. When possible I have traced each line back to their home village-city in their native country. In time I will be able to add photographs of these communities and the actual churches where the immigrant ancestors originated. I will continue to update the family tree as a find additional information. In particular there is one branch, the maternal great-grandmother of Marcel that so far has eluded tracing back. In my research I have tried to use the most reliable sources that I could find, in particular the University of Montreal's PRDH database, the "Dictionnaire Genealogique des Familles Canadiennes" by Fr. Cyprien Tanguay, and actual church records when they can be easily found. If anyone out there finds errors or can provide additional detail I would appreciate your input. I hope that my research will prove interesting to my fellow relatives as well as useful to others who share some of the same ancestral lines.
|