Since my 10th great-grandparents Mathurin Meunier and Françoise Fafard were the first European couple to have been married in Montreal, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they also had the first European child born and baptized in Montreal! The birth of their first child, Barbe, must have brought great…

Plaque commemorating La Grande Recrue de 1653 In the autumn of 1651, after Mathurin LeMeunier had finished assisting Chomedey sieur de Maisonneuve in building the societies mission on the the Isle of Montreal, Sieur de Maisonneuve left for France to engage at least 100 new men to protect the colony…

My 10th great grandparents were Mathurin Meunier and Françoise Fafard. This is their story. Mathurin Meunier was born to Rene Lemonnier and Marie Leroux in St-Lambert de Clermont, France. He was baptized at the parish church, St-Lambert de Clermont, on 22 Apr 1619. It is likely his baptism occurred within…

I noticed today that I had not recorded the 1860 census for Eunice (Crane) Williams. I found her in the 1860 census, but while looking at the census page I realized that there was a cluster of Williams’ families in Roxbury. Of the 15 families numbered #763-777, six of them…

My 4th great-grandparents were William Williams and Eunice B. CraneThis is their Life Story William Williams and Eunice B. Crane are my second gr-grandparents on my father’s side. William Williams parentage remains one of my few remaining brick walls. WILLIAM WILLIAMS1-6 was born in 1791 (Based on age of William…

Philip Durrell, the progenitor of the Durrell family of Maine and New Hampshire, immigrated from Guernsey, according to family tradition, and first appears in New England records on 20 Feb 1689/90, when his mark was affixed to a New Hampshire province petition. While his original settlement was in Exeter, Philip…

Sally (Susan) Fisher was probably born between 1805 and 1815 in the sleepy little town of Lyndon Vermont. Little is known of her childhood, but she was able to read and write in her adult years, so she probably attended local schools in her early life. Lyndon Vermont is a…

In the first part of this series I explained how I was making an effort to further my chances of matches through Ancestry DNA by expanding my Grénier lines downward from siblings of my Grénier ancestors. In conducting this research I came across an interesting marriage record between Francois Henn…

In an effort to further my chance of making matches through Ancestry DNA, over the past week I have been expanding my Grénier lines downward from siblings of my Grénier ancestors. In conducting this research I came across an interesting marriage record between Francois Henn and Marguerite Illégitime Anonime. This…

I came across an old photograph in my mother’s album of old family photographs which depicted my great-grandfather, Valentin Brönner, and several of his fellow soldiers posed in a unusual manner. Considering the time frame that this occurred (1918) and the fact that Germany would shortly surrender, moral should have…