Reconnecting Family Ties

 

     

I received a picture of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my father's maternal grandparents. I did not know a picture of them even existed until recently, when a cousin sent it to me along with a family tree which traced that line back to the 1600's.  It is an amazingly clear picture considering it dates back to the middle 1880’s.  The names dating back to the seventeenth century fill pages and each name makes me wonder about their story.  I wonder what their lives were like and what happiness and sorrow were experienced by people who fill the pages in the family tree. 

            My great-grandparents came from France to Canada with five children, including my grandmother.  She was a very young child at the time, and would grow up to marry my grandfather and give birth to my Dad. Receiving the picture and the family tree was very interesting to me as I know little of her family or of their life before they came to Canada.  They did not maintain contact with family members left in Europe and so our own family history has always started with their arrival here and what happened from that time forward.  My father and his sisters must not have known much about their European family either because they never passed down any stories to us.  I don’t think my grandmother spoke much about her birth country, perhaps because she was so young when she left that she likely did not remember much about it.  The only thing she ever told me about her home and the voyage to North America was how throughout her entire life she never forgot seeing the “tall, beautiful ladies on the English shore” as her ship went by that country (my grandmother and her family were quite short in stature).  This sight must have indeed impressed her because she was well into her eighties when she told me about that experience.  I don’t remember her ever talking about the extended family left behind.    

Now, a little over a hundred years later, that family in France planned a family reunion and made contact with us, their Canadian relatives. They invited us to attend and to reconnect with them. .  Some members of the Canadian family attended this reunion and the family reconnected after a century.  So it was that the family on the ship never returned to the land of their birth, but their descendants did many years later and were able to retrace the steps taken so long ago.

The relatives in France asked each family in Canada to submit their family tree, going forward from our grandparents to the present generation. Once the tree from each branch was completed, it was sent to France.  All the Canadian relatives received a copy of this family tree as well.  Amazingly, from this one couple there are now over one thousand descendants! None of us would have guessed the number would be so high. We are now spread out all over Canada and all over the world.   I wonder what my great-grandparents would think if they knew how their little family of five had grow to over one thousand strong in the span of only a century.

Family ties which remain strong . .  it's a good thing!