"My Ancestors' City" a Montreal Travel Page by emilienoelle

Of all the cities I have visited in North America, Montreal is the most special to me. One of my ancestors was among the original residents of this city, moving there from St. Laurent, Paris in 1652. My family lived there until the late 19th Century when my great-great grandmother moved to Massachsetts to be close to her sister after her husband died. It was in Massachsetts that my great-grandmother, Aurore, her sister, Pricille, and their brother, Philipe, spent their younger years.

When they reached adolocence, the girls were sent back to Montreal to a convent school so that they would grown into adulthood among their own people, speaking their own language. For some reason, their brother was sent to boarding school in Nova Scotia where, to everyone's horror, he met and married a PROTESTANT,a sin for which he was never forgiven. The famliy pretended that he had died and had a funeral for him. In fact, neither I, nor even my father, knew that he had existed until a few years ago when we were researching our family tree. Interestingly, he and his wife were among the first people to populate the city of Los Angeles, and my relatives, his great-grandchildren, still live in the West today.

My great-grandmother married a proper French Catholic and moved back to Boston to take care of her mother. She had 4 sons, one of whom was my grandfather. It is said in my family that he and his brothers could not speak English until the age of 6 when they went to school, a fact they apparently suffered for, living in a neighborhood of mostly Irish immigrants. Until his death my grandfather had a stern prejudice against anything Irish.

My great-grandmother's sister, Pricille, remained in Montreal where she never married but was reputedly the favorite mistress of an older married man. When my great-grandmother's husband left her for another woman, returning to Canada with her, Pricille left her lover to help her sister take care of her 4 sons, now fatherless.

The two women never saw eye to eye on anything. My great-grandmother, a stern Victorian, strongly dissaproved of her sister's life choices and when I was a young child I vividly remember her complaining to my mother about Pricille's habit of drinking too much wine and watching "steamy" soap operas. In reality, they were two sides of the same coin, taking care of one another until each of them died in the mid 1980's.

It is because of these two women and their stories that I still feel so attached to Montreal, a city where I share genes and a name with thousands, but know no one. My immediate realtives were one of the only branches of the family to leave Canada, so when I go to Montreal today people with my last name take up three to four full pages in the phone book, an uplifiting sight for a girl who grew up where no one could pronounce her name correctly.

Today when I visit the city I feel both proud to be part of its history and aplogetic when I hand over my credit card and upon reading my name, the clerk strikes up a conversation in French, sure that I must understand him.

I wish that my French were better, that I knew more about these people, because in getting to know them, I feel that I will somehow come to understand important something about myself that I do not know. Of course, I am lucky in this way: I do not need to travel far to visit this city where my ancestors lived. I have the opportunity to go there often and each time that I do, I get a little closer to my ancestors and to my family, and my French gets a little better, or at least I hope that it does!