Essay: Buying a "new" car for the first time in years

When I was a young fella, back in the Jurassic, the car-buying experience was simpler than it is today, but also more unpleasant. You'd pop into a dealership, chat with a pushy, annoying salesman, take a car out for a spin, peek under the hood and wait while the salesman claimed to be checking with his manager to see if they could accommodate your request for a small cut in the price. (They couldn't.) 

I was reminded this week that times have changed. When Liz and I visited a dealership Monday to check out a four-year-old car we had spotted on the lot the day before, the salesman was polite and humorous, a nice guy, actually. There was no hard sell. The process of buying the car took longer than it did in years gone by, with more paperwork and documentation than I remember. But we got the car we wanted, and for a fair price. The three employees involved in the transaction were pleasant to deal with.

The biggest change I noticed, though, was the proliferation of bells and whistles on new cars. (Call me an old timer, but I think a four-year-old car is new-adjacent.) This technological transformation jumped out at us because we’ve been out of the car-buying game for quite a while.

The car we replaced this week is a 2007 Toyota Prius with more than 100,000 miles on it. (It was brand new when we bought it.) Our other vehicle, which we’re holding on to, is a 2015 Toyota Rav4 with over 80,000 miles. Our “new” car is a 2022 Toyota Corolla that has logged a mere 50,000 miles. So it’s just entering middle age.

But let’s get back to the bells and whistles. Through no fault of his own, it seemed to take forever for the salesman to explain the Corolla’s many buttons and switches and tabs and other assorted doodads, gizmos and thingamabobs.

It’s an impressive array, especially to people who drove the same Prius for 19 years. I suppose, once we master these wonders, we’ll enjoy the car even more than we do already, although a minimalist like me would have been perfectly happy with one bell and one whistle.

In the meantime, I’m playing it safe by steering clear of any Corolla doohickeys that I don’t fully understand. Because the last thing I want to do is punch an innocuous-looking button and inadvertently launch the next moon mission.

Essay: My grandfather and his fishy license plate

Wilbrod Lévi Archambeault, my maternal “pépère" (that's informal French for grandfather), died 40 years ago this month, three days before my wedding day.

I dearly loved pépère, who was born and raised in Québec. There, he married my soft-spoken grandmother, Albertine Marie Rose Laliberté, in 1917. By 1919, the couple had settled in New England, first in Connecticut, and then in Massachusetts. The Bay State is where pépère and mémère lived for the rest of their lives, she until 1981 and he until 1986.

I have two especially cherished possessions that belonged to pépère. One is his pocket watch, which, amazingly, still keeps good time. The other is this license plate, which has a tale (or perhaps a tail) to tell.

 

A few years back, The New York Times ran a story headlined “The Great, Fishy Massachusetts License Plate Fiasco of 1928.” The article explained that the plate in question was controversial in its day. The cod fishery in Massachusetts declined from 1920 to 1940, and the 1928 license plate's design made already grumpy fishermen even grumpier. They were irritated because the fish on the plate, which was supposed to represent a cod, looked more like a guppy. Adding insult to injury, the tiny fellow was swimming away from the state name rather than toward it.

The design was changed in 1929: a bigger, more cod-like fish  and a relocation of the state abbreviation from the lower right corner of the plate to the lower left. (That second change -- switching the placement of the year and the state's abbreviation -- reportedly was an annual practice in Massachusetts back then, to discourage motorists from faking registration by repainting outdated plates to match the color of new plates.)

 

I’m sure my no-nonsense grandparents, who had four children by 1928, couldn’t have cared less about this dust-up. And neither do I, really. What matters to me is that whenever my eyes fall on that plate, which hangs in our house, my thoughts always turn to pépère and mémère. They are warm thoughts, pleasant thoughts, but they're tinged with sadness as well.

Essay: Christmas in "la Nouvelle-Angleterre"

By Paul Carrier

When I was a youngster growing up in a mill town in Massachusetts, my parents, and my younger brother and I, always went to midnight Mass on Christmas.

Though many years -- decades, really -- have passed since this ritual drew to a close, it remains one of my fondest memories of the holiday season.

Mom and Dad would send David and me to bed early on Christmas Eve, so we could rest up for the big event. Then they would wake us up around 10:30 or so, to get dressed and prepare ourselves for the one-mile drive to Sacred Heart Church.

I always enjoyed watching the 11 o’clock news out of Boston or Providence while we waited to hit the road because it usually featured a story tracking Santa’s progress on his travels from the North Pole. I seem to remember that the “data” for these reports came from NORAD, which provided an air of authenticity.

But the highlight was the Mass itself. The familiar Catholic rite was accented by the holiday decorations and the soaring voices of the choir in the loft that held our church’s magnificent organ.

In those days, Sacred Heart Church (l'Église du Sacré-Coeur), was a Franco-American parish whose parishioners had roots in Québec and, going further back in time, in France. Initially, the Mass was celebrated in Latin, and later in French. But the Christmas hymns always were French carols that my ancestors had brought from Québec to "la Nouvelle-Angleterre" (New England).

I grew up in a French-speaking home. We spoke French exclusively at our house until I started school, although I understood English early on. At St. Joan of Arc School (l'École Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc), the Sisters of the Assumption taught half a day of classes in English and the other half in French. So, hearing French carols sung in church was simply part of the natural order of things during my childhood.

Les anges dans nos campagnes (the French carol known in the English-speaking world as Angels We Have Head on High) was one of my favorites. So were Minuit, chrétiens (the original version of O Holy Night), Dans cette étable and Il est né, le divin Enfant, among others.

I remember the music from many French carols, and the lyrics of some of them, even though it has been many years since I’ve heard them sung in a church. More than anything else, it is French carols that instill the Christmas spirit in me, to this day. At least once before Christmas each year, I always listen to a cherished recording of them.

Sung as they are in my first language, these carols instantly transport me back in time. The years slip away. Once again I am an awestruck but delighted child sitting in L’Église du Sacré-Coeur in Southbridge, Massachusetts, attending midnight Mass on a dark and cold, but gloriously new, Christmas morning. The whole world was filled with joy and reverence during that service. Or so it seemed to an impressionable little boy.

Essay: Fond memories of the holidays of yesteryear

By Paul Carrier 

When my parents and mother-in-law were still with us, my wife Liz and I mumbled and grumbled our way through an exhausting Christmas ritual year after year that involved extensive logistics, many hours on interstate highways and a wearying trek across state lines.

Loading up the car with gifts, luggage and dogs, we would hit the road on Dec. 24 for a 200-mile drive from Maine to my mother-in-law’s house in southeastern Massachusetts, or, in her later years, to her in-law apartment in Rhode Island.

After spending Christmas Eve there, we’d hop into the car on Christmas morning for a 90-minute trip to my parents’ home in central Massachusetts, where we’d spend the night. We'd meet friends for brunch on the 26th. Often, we’d then head back to pick up my mother-in-law Georgiana, who returned to Maine with us.

A week or two later, we took to the road again to bring Georgie back home. Or we would drive 100 miles to Portsmouth, N.H., where we sometimes handed her over to in-laws who drove Georgie the rest of the way back to Massachusetts or Rhode Island.

I remember how, in those days, Liz and I used to speak longingly of what it would be like to have a relaxing Christmas at home, minus the hustle-bustle of hauling seemingly everyone and everything across much of New England over the course of three days or more. It’s not that we didn’t want to spend time with our parents. Quite the opposite. Yet getting there and back became more problematic with each passing year, as our own aging made these long excursions less appealing.

Then, my father died in 2003. Georgie passed away in 2009. And my mother Rita died the following year.

Now, at long last, Liz and I spend the holidays quietly, at home in Maine. We do enjoy the tranquility. But how I wish I could make that maddening, tiresome, inconvenient trek to southern New England one more time, to spend another Christmas with parents whose absence is especially painful when the holidays roll around.

I wouldn't even grumble. Not for a second.

Essay: Remembering Dad on Veterans Day

Leonide D. Carrier (1912-2003)

By Paul Carrier

If you define a hero as someone who has been honored for his valor and courage under fire, then my father didn't fit the bill.

But there are other definitions of heroism.

Leonide Daniel Carrière (my Québec-born grandfather William Carrière dropped the final "e" after Dad came along) was a member of what Tom Brokaw has called the Greatest Generation. Born to Franco-American parents in Southbridge, Mass., the first of three sons, he was drafted into the Army in 1942, when he was already 30 and hoping to get married. 

Dad started out in an artillery unit. He expected to end up on the front lines. But his right knee locked up at sea; he couldn't walk. When his outfit landed in North Africa, he had to stay behind for surgery while his buddies headed to war. The operation was a success. Once Dad recovered, he was transferred to the 136th Military Police Co., with which he served in North Africa and Italy.

So, my father did not see combat. He did not earn a Purple Heart, like my late uncle, Albert Archambeault, my mother's brother, who was wounded in France. Dad did not receive a Bronze Star, like my wife’s late uncle, Alfred Mello, who fought on during one battle in France as the lone surviving machine gunner in his outfit.

Instead, Dad was an MP. His wartime stories involved, not battlefield heroics, but touching personal vignettes.

Like the fact that he failed to reach his fiancée (my mother, Rita) when he called her unexpectedly from North Carolina to say goodbye as his unit shipped out ahead of schedule. Mom was out shopping, picking up a new hat for a planned rendezvous with her future husband in New York before his outfit sailed. Preoccupied with seeing him, she lost out on her last chance to speak with him by phone before he deployed.

Like the remarkably tall soldiers from Senegal whom he met in Casablanca. He was intimidated by their fearsome-looking scimitars, but they befriended him because French was his first language, and theirs as well.

Like the British soldiers he encountered who, as my father once put it, “were friendly enough, but they talked so fast I never could make out too much of what they were saying.”

Like the heart-stopping terror of seeing German bombers over North Africa at night, the sky alight with Allied anti-aircraft fire.

Like the time he went to midnight Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Rome on Christmas Day.

Like the Army buddy who took tons of pictures when he and Dad went to Switzerland on leave, and then promised to send the negatives to my father stateside, but never did.

Like the fact that Dad and my mother (they married in 1946) wrote to each other almost every day during the years that they were apart, usually in English, but sometimes in French.

Like the frighteningly rough crossing when he finally sailed home late in 1945 aboard a storm-tossed aircraft carrier.

Dad was discharged from the Army as a private first class on Dec. 8, 1945. He once told me, somewhat apologetically, that he never got a shot at a promotion because he was "just an MP."

But he did his part in that rare thing -- a just war -- when the forces of light and darkness wrestled for control of the world. He showed up. He was prepared to face the enemy, if fate decreed it. He knew the meaning of duty. And that makes him a hero in my book.

Essay: Sgt. Alfred Mello, U.S. Army, World War Two

Alfred Mello (1905-1980)

By Paul Carrier

On Oct. 25, 1944, a German infantry unit issued the following warning to its officers regarding the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry, the famed Cross of Lorraine Division:

The 79th Division is said to have fought particularly well in Normandy, and is considered as one of the best attack divisions in the U.S. Army.

I don’t know if Sgt. Alfred Mello, my wife’s uncle, ever came across that warning, but he wouldn’t have been surprised by it. Mello knew as well as any German officer how aggressive the Cross of Lorraine Division was; he earned a Bronze Star for his service in it. 

Born in 1905 in Tiverton, R.I., the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, Mello wasn't a young man when he was drafted into the Army during World War II. The 79th Division took its nickname and its insignia from a legendary doubled-barred French cross that Joan of Arc carried in the 15th century. The division trained in the United Kingdom in 1944, landed in Normandy about a week after D-Day and went into combat on June 19, 1944. 

The 79th Division liberated Cherbourg and captured La Haye du Puits in house-to-house fighting. It took Lessay and Le Mans, crossed the River Seine, and captured Charmes on Sept. 12. Then it successfully fought what Wikipedia calls “a severe engagement” in the Foret de Parroy, a large forest in Lorraine. More on that particular engagement in a moment. 

My wife Liz tells me that her uncle, a quiet bachelor and landscaper who died in 1980, didn’t talk about the war, at least not in her presence. But there’s no doubt that he remembered the Foret de Parroy. The citation accompanying his Bronze Star reads as follows:

From Sep. 27, 1944, until the cessation of hostilities, Sgt. Mello, on that date a corporal, discharged his duties as a gunner for a heavy machine gun in Co. M in a superior manner. He has participated in every action that the Third Battalion has been in since that time and his efficient handling of his piece under fire has materially aided the battalion's success. 

At one time Sgt. Mello, during the engagement in the Foret de Parroy, was the only remaining gunner in his platoon, and as such was called upon to place constant fire on enemy positions and at the same time break in another (gunner) so that a second heavy machine gun could be put into action.

With only brief periods of rest, he was on the job steadily for three days and nights. His actions over this period are typical of his entire service and reflect highly upon himself and his organization.

Athough Alfred Mello is no longer with us, his Bronze Star, stored in its original case, sits beside my computer as I write this. The ranks of the Greatest Generation grow thinner by the day, but the legacy of the men and women who stared down evil will never die.

Essay: A daylily with a very old backstory

By Paul Carrier

When a museum in Deerfield, Mass., offered these daylilies for sale years ago, I knew right away that I had to have them. A brief history lesson will explain why, if you have patience. Trust me. All will be made clear.

In 1691, John and Dorothy Stebbins of Deerfield had a daughter, whom they named Thankful. Thirteen years later, Thankful Stebbins, her five siblings and their parents were among many Deerfield residents who were captured in a predawn French and Indian raid on their tiny settlement. They were marched to New France (Canada) in the dead of winter.

Amazingly, the entire Stebbins family survived that journey. John, Dorothy, and their son John were later “redeemed,” and returned to Deerfield. The other five children remained in Canada, although one of them, Samuel, eventually returned to Deerfield as well.

The Stebbins children who stayed behind in New France included Thankful, who was ransomed from her Indian captors by the Canadian-born Joseph François Hertel. Raised in a Puritan family on the New England frontier, Thankful became a Catholic and a French citizen as a teenager. Renamed Louise Thérèse, she married a French Canadian, Charles Adrien Legrain dit Lavallée, in 1711. Over time, she may well have forgotten how to speak English. Thankful (Marie Thérèse) had 11 children during her short life, which came to a tragic end when she died during childbirth in 1729. She was 37 years old.
 
"Hey," you ask. "What does all this have to do with the flowers in the photo?"

The bulbs were marketed by the Historic Deerfield museum as Thankful Stebbins daylilies. Thanks to her marriage into a Canadian family, Thankful Stebbins is my 8th generation grandmother. And the man who ransomed Thankful after she arrived in New France, Joseph François Hertel? His son, Jean Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, is my 9th generation cousin. It was Jean Baptiste Hertel de Rouville who led the 1704 French and Indian raid in which Thankful and her family were taken captive.

So, my Frecnh-speaking cousin kidnapped the English-speaking child who would later become my direct ancestor. Soap operas predate television.

Every summer for many years, the Thankful Stebbins daylilies bloomed in our backyard. They are gone now, but they live on in my mind, a reminder of my tangled roots in Puritan New England and Catholic New France.

Essay: A photo chronicles a New England tragedy

By Paul Carrier

I’ve posted in the past about the 1704 French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Mass., which was then a tiny Puritan settlement on the English frontier, even though it sat a mere 80 miles west of Boston. But it wasn’t until a few days ago that I came across this photograph, which offers a telling reminder of that attack.

The marker in the photo sits atop the mass grave, in Deerfield, of 48 men, women and children who were killed during that raid more than 300 years ago. Many others were kidnapped and forcibly marched to New France (Canada). Some died en route. Others survived the journey and settled in New France or, in some cases, eventually returned home.

One of the people buried in that mass grave is my 10th-generation uncle, Benoni Stebbins of Deerfield. His niece, Thankful Stebbins, who was then a child, survived the horrors of that day. She was hauled off to New France, where she changed her name to Louise Thérèse. She became a French citizen in 1710, converted to Catholicism and married a Frenchman, eventually giving birth to 11 children. Louise Thérèse Legrain did Lavallée is my grandmother, on my mother’s side of the family, going back nine generations.

All of which is dramatic enough, in and of itself. But here's the kicker. The leader of that raid? He was the Canadian-born Jean Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, a lieutenant in his 30s in the French troupes de la marine. Hertel is my first cousin on my father’s side the family, nine generations back in time. So the assailant, too, is a relative, together with some of his victims. It would be hard to find two more tangled but separate branches in one family tree.

Essay: When a DNA test confirms personal beliefs

By Paul Carrier

People who have their DNA tested often seem to come up with exotic genealogical ties they knew nothing about. Some guy who thought his roots were German learns that his people were Hungarian, for example, or that he's more mutt than purebred. So when I sent in a saliva sample for analysis, I assumed the same might prove true in my case as well.

It's not as if I knew nothing about my family tree. In fact, I've worked on "growing" it for years. My genealogical research indicates that my ancestry is almost entirely French Canadian and, before that, French, when my 17th-century ancestors migrated from France to New France (Canada). 

But all that digging on my part predated what is now readily available DNA testing. So I got to thinking. Was I unaware of a major link that, thanks to DNA, would dramatically alter my perception of who I am and where my people came from? Or would DNA reveal that I had been right all along?

Yesterday, the results came in. The test lists my "ethnicity estimate" as 97 percent France, with the remaining 3 percent hailing from Ireland and Scotland. In fact, my French connection could be even stronger than that number would suggest. The 97 percent estimate falls within a possible French range of 94 to 100 percent. Similarly, my Scottish and Irish range runs from 0 to 3 percent.

I was momentarily disappointed to find no grand, eye-popping revelations, but ultimately thrilled to learn that I am who I've always "known" myself to be. Sometimes, confirming cherished beliefs is more satisfying than making unexpected discoveries.

Essay: Getting our facts straight about that first Thanksgiving

By Paul Carrier

Years ago, while my wife and I were visiting family in Massachusetts, I got it into my head that Liz and I should kick things off on Thanksgiving morning by zipping over to PlimothPlantation in Plymouth, about 30 miles from where we were staying.

My fevered brain had conjured up a soothing image of a leisurely stroll through what I assumed would be a largely deserted reconstruction of the village originally inhabited by the Pilgrims. I figured everyone else would be hunkered down at home, busily preparing a turkey and fixings, or getting ready to head out to a restaurant with the family.

This seemingly clever scheme was anything but. Plimoth Plantation was mobbed that morning. There were long lines for tickets. You could hardly walk through the village because of the crowds. And a strong wind off the water made an already bitterly cold day even more uncomfortable.

Just as I engaged in a bit of personal mythmaking about what to expect in Plymouth that Thanksgiving, the nation as a whole has cooked up a few fallacies regarding that first Thanksgiving back in 1621, according to author Nathaniel Philbrick.

In an essay he wrote for National Public Radio a few years back, Philbrick noted that all of our information about the first Thanksgiving comes from a letter written by pilgrim Edward Winslow.

Winslow describes a celebration that occurred in September or October, not November. He does not call it Thanksgiving, nor does he mention turkeys. The pilgrims shot some ducks and geese for dinner. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader who brought 90 of his people with him to Plymouth that fall, contributed five freshly killed deer. The feas

t also included pottages, or stews, made with meat and vegetables.

In fact, the myths surrounding the Pilgrims extend far beyond that first Thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims first landed at Provincetown, Mass., five weeks before they relocated to Plymouth. It was at Provincetown that the Pilgrims celebrated their first birth, learned about corn and signed the Mayflower Compact.

Oh, and that business about Plymouth Rock? It may be true. Or maybe not. The Pilgrims left no written account of stepping onto a rock. That story seems to stem from a town elder who, in 1741, pointed out a rock that his father had identified as the landing spot of the Pilgrims . . . 121 years earlier! Not exactly rock-solid documentation. 

But Thursday is Thanksgiving, after all, so let's get back to the main event - dinner. In his NPR essay, Philbrick wrote:

Instead of a pious warm-up for a glum Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws, the Plymouth Harvest Festival of 1621 was more like Woodstock, an outdoor celebration that just sort of happened. It's a legacy of spontaneity, goodwill and hope that is needed today more than ever before.

Amen to that. If your Thanksgiving captures a bit of that “spontaneity, goodwill and hope,” perhaps it will help you deal with squabbling relatives, unruly children and meddlesome guests who wander into the kitchen with unsolicited advice. Not to mention the storm clouds that darken American skies as 2017 draws to a close.

Essay: Remembering Mom, on her special day

By Paul Carrier

Rita Loretta Carrier (née Archambeault) would be about to turn 100 if she were still with us on this Mother's Day. She died in December 2010, a few months shy of her 92nd birthday.

Mom was born in Connecticut in 1919 to Wilbrod and Albertine Archambeault, recent immigrants from Québec. The family moved to Massachusetts shortly thereafter. In the late 1930s, she was one of only three students - all of them girls - in the first graduating class at what was then a new Franco-American high school in Southbridge, Mass., where she spent the rest of her life.

I remember my mother telling me, many years ago, that there was nothing especially memorable about her life. She wasn't wrong about much, but she sure was wrong about that. The dictionary defines memorable as "worth remembering," and Mom's life certainly fit the bill in its own humble but life-affirming way. She was unknown to the world at large, but like so many members of her generation, she traveled life's highway with more grace, decency and goodwill than did many a globe-trotting celebrity, politician or tycoon.

Mom and my father, Leonide, became engaged before Dad went off to war in late 1942. She wrote to her fiancé daily when he was serving in the U.S. Army overseas, usually in English but sometimes in French. Dad saved her letters. I later found these priceless treasures in a green cardboard Manhattan Shirts box in the attic of the home my parents shared for more than half a century.

After their marriage in 1946, Mom raised two sons while holding down full- or part-time banking and bookkeeping jobs. She worked well into her 80s, and she remained married to my father for 56 years, until his death in January 2003. When we took her back to the cemetery the day after Dad's funeral, she was quiet and thoughtful, until we drove away. "It's cold to be in the ground," she said, before falling silent once again.

Mom was deeply religious, scrupulously courteous and unfailingly honest. She almost always was upbeat. She was profoundly generous, and she placed a premium on tidiness. She survived two bouts of breast cancer with strength and characteristic good humor. When her father died on a Wednesday in April 1986, she buried him that Friday and was on hand for my marriage to Liz Soares the next day, wearing a convincingly brave face that hid the conflicted emotions she must have been experiencing.

She loved to play the lottery and she was meticulous about her appearance, which drove my father crazy sometimes because it seemed to take her forever to get ready to go anywhere. In hindsight, I see now that Mom was a bit obsessive, especially about her household budget. An early riser, it was not unusual to find her sitting at the kitchen table as the sun came up, balancing her checkbook to the penny or planning her weekly expenses in a small spiral notebook filled with her precise cursive handwriting. She was the CEO and the CFO of our childhood home, juggling work, parenting, her marriage, cooking, cleaning and God knows what else, and getting by on very little sleep, although she was the master of the cat nap.

Mom was so fluently bilingual, having grown up in a French-speaking home in Yankee New England, that she routinely switched back and forth between English and French during conversations with friends and relatives, sometimes in mid-sentence. She was very proud of her heritage. She was well-spoken in both French and English, even though the latter was her second language and she didn't learn it until she started going to school. Her English carried such a slight trace of a French accent that people normally didn't even notice it, unless they were meeting her for the first time, or talking to her on the phone.

And that's just scratching the surface. So yes, Mom, your life is worth remembering, especially on Mother's Day. It was, in its own way and within your circle of family, friends and acquaintances, véritablement mémorable.

Rita Loretta Archambeault, circa 1921

Essay: Ethnic cleansing in 18th-century Canada

"Ships Take Acadians Into Exile," by Claude Picard

By Paul Carrier

An often-overlooked chapter in the lamentable history of ethnic cleansing began 262 years ago this month when British officials ordered the deportation of thousands of French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

The exiles were dispersed to British colonies in America, as well as to France and England. Families were broken up. Many died when transports sank, or after they became ill in prison or at sea. Some eventually found their way back to Canada. Others made it to Louisiana, where their descendants are known today as Cajuns.

Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval) dragged on for years. Maine poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized it in his epic poem Evangeline, in which an Acadian girl searches for her love, Gabriel. The Acadian diaspora probably would be largely lost to history if not for Longfellow’s poem, but facts tell an even more compelling tale than fiction. My family tree holds several Acadian cousins from that period who were evicted from their homes and exiled.

Here are two of their stories.

Michel Bastarache dit Basque was separated from his wife and imprisoned with his brother Pierre. More than 80 Acadians, including Michel, escaped from the fort where they were being held through a tunnel they had dug, but Michel was soon recaptured and sent to South Carolina with his brother.

In 1756, Michel, Pierre and a dozen other Acadians fled through the woods and made their way north on foot across North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. They were captured by the Iroquois, but a fur trader ransomed them and took them to Québec.

From there, Michel and Pierre went to New Brunswick, where Michel learned that his wife was on Prince Edward Island. The reunited couple returned to New Brunswick, where they and their four children later became British prisoners. In 1763, the Bastaraches tried to relocate to France, but in the ultimate irony, they were barred from doing so because they were considered British subjects.

 ******************

At 19, Étienne Hébert was separated from his family in 1755 and deported to Baltimore, where he landed a job and eventually saved quite a bit of money. He found his parents and one brother in Maryland, but he could not locate six other siblings.

Moving to Boston with his parents and brother, Étienne set out for Canada with a compass, axe, musket, tinder-box, saucepan and birchbark canoe. He found three of his sisters in Canada - Marguerite, Françoise and Marie - bought some land there and returned to Boston.

In 1767, he brought his parents and brother Jean Baptiste to Canada, where his mother died that year. Étienne eventually found his remaining siblings - sister Anne and brothers Joseph and Honoré. The entire family had been reunited by 1771, 16 years after the Héberts were separated and deported. 

Source: The Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Essay: La Fête Nationale . . . or as we know it, Bastille Day

By Paul Carrier

I'll use any excuse to discuss genealogy. Today is Bastille Day, which fits the bill nicely, at least in my case.

My 7th generation paternal grandfather, Noel Lebrun dit Carrière, sailed from France to New France (Canada) in the late 17th century. It was in New France that he married the Canadian-born Anne Brochu, whose parents hailed from France.

On my mother’s side of the family, Jacques Archambault and his wife, Françoise Tourault, who were married in France, settled in New France about 1645.

Over time, the Lebrun dit Carrière surname was simplified to Carrière and, later still, to Carrier. My Carrier and Archambault grandparents did not emigrate from Canada to the United States until 1899 in one case and the early 20th century in the other. So by the time they settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively, their families had been living in Canada for more than two centuries.

The “old country,” for my family, is Canada, not France. How could it be otherwise? And yet the Carriers and Archambaults were, originally, French, in the sense of being from France. My roots, when traced back far enough, were French before the family tree sprouted French-Canadian branches.

In the French-speaking household of my Massachusetts youth, we always had a complex sense of our own identity. We were Americans, of course. My parents were born in the United States. So was I. We were Franco-Americans, too, because our ancestors, over the course of more than 200 years, were Québécois.

But there was one more layer. In some ill-defined, half-lost, almost-mythical sense, we saw ourselves as being French, meaning of France, as well.

By the time Parisians stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, my ancestors were long gone from France, having arrived in Canada more than 100 years earlier. But roots run deep. With that in mind, July 14, Bastille Day, the preeminent national holiday of France, deserves at least a passing mention. And a glorious photo as well.

Essay: My conflicted memories of Dad, on Father's Day

By Paul Carrier

Today is the day on which we're expected to describe our fathers as friends, teachers, heroes, inspiring role models, etc. No doubt thats true for many people, or so they claim, but truth be told, Dad and I were never very close. He was somewhat detached, taciturn, introspective. I loved him, and I know he loved me. But I don’t remember doing all that many things with him as a kid. I guess in today’s parlance you’d say we never really bonded all that well.

My younger brother David acquired Dad's knack for all things mechanical, which gave them something in common. I seem to have misplaced that gene somewhere along the way, if I ever had it. Maybe that helps to explain our far-from-intimate relationship.

Yet I miss him terribly.

Perhaps it’s because there wasn’t a lot of father / son stuff going on between the two of us that I have such fond, precise memories of what I did get to share with my Dad.

Like the time -- I was about six years old -- when he took me by the hand one Sunday morning and we walked a mile or so to visit an old pal of his who owned a convenience store in our hometown. I don't recall him saying much, but I happily held his hand all the way out there, and all the way back.

Or the walks we occasionally took in the woods across the street from our house in Southbridge, Mass. My father had a drop or two of Indian blood. There were French explorers in his family tree, as well as French-Canadian woodsmen, the famed "coureurs de bois." That may be why we always felt at home on that forested hillside. In later years, I'd take the same route with book in hand, and prop myself against a huge boulder to read.

Dad and I would sit on the back porch after he got home from work, just hanging out while he quietly sipped a beer and read the afternoon paper. We'd set up shop on the larger, more sheltered, front porch during a cooling summer shower, which always seemed to brighten his spirits.

Near the end, I shaved him periodically with his electric razor. He was living in a nursing home by then and couldn’t shave himself anymore.

Leonide Daniel Carrier (it's "Carrière" on his birth certificate, which is the old Québécois spelling) died on Jan. 29, 2003, two months shy of his 91st birthday. I was planning to drive down from Maine to Massachusetts that morning for what I assumed would be our last visit, because we all knew the end was near. But as soon as I got up that day, word came that he was gone.

Sometimes, in a painful twist of fate, I feel closer to him now than I did when he was still with us. More's the pity.

Essay: The joy of genealogy, where secrets are revealed

By Paul Carrier

The cult of celebrity baffles me. So I never got too excited when I saw the Hollywood types who used to turn up on the now-defunct NBC genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are? Still, I am fascinated by history, including family history, and my curiosity always outweighed whatever reservations I may have had, as the series helped yet another star find his or her roots.

So it was a few years ago, when the program featured actress Ashley Judd, who appeared to be so deeply moved by her journey back in time that I couldn’t help but empathize. Judd not only discovered a Civil War ancestor whose leg was amputated before he was taken prisoner by Confederate forces, but her inkling that she might have New England roots turned up a remarkable family connection. More about the latter in a bit.

Working on my own genealogy over the course of several years has shown that, when it comes to ancestry, family lore ranges from the incomplete to the downright unreliable.

My roots are French Canadian. All four of my grandparents were working-class Québec natives or, in one case, the American-born child of Québec natives. All of them grew up in French-speaking homes. And all of their families arrived in New England fairly recently -- in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

From this set of facts, combined with information supplied by relatives, some things seemed clear as I began my research. First, my ancestry appeared to be entirely French Canadian. Second, there was no reason to believe there is any fame to be found in my humble family tree. It was reasonable to assume all of my early Québec ancestors were "habitants" (farmers). And third, because of the relatively late timing of my grandparents' migration to the United States, we had no evidence that my family played any role in the early history of this country.

All of which is dead wrong.

For one thing, it turns out there are Puritan branches in our Québec family "arbre." During French and Indian raids on Massachusetts in 1704, two English children from different towns - Mathias Farnsworth of Groton and Thankful Stebbins of Deerfield - were kidnapped and taken north. Both settled in French Canada and eventually married into the families of my French ancestors. As a result, I had roots -- English roots! -- in colonial New England, long before my Québécois ancestors settled here. And there's more on that score. One of my early French ancestors, explorer Jean Nicolet, fathered a daughter -- my 10th generation grandmother -- with a Nipissing Indian whose name has been lost to us. So my ancestry, unexpectedly, includes a bit of Indian blood as well.

As for the presumed obscurity of everyone in my family tree, the aforementioned Nicolet is believed to have been the first European to cross Lake Michigan and reach present-day Wisconsin. Another ancestor was the brother of Louis Jolliet, the famed explorer of the Mississippi River. A third, Jacques Hertel de La Fresnière, was one of the first settlers of Québec and a prominent interpreter who was skillful in Indian languages.

Accepting how little one knows is a sign of wisdom. Just ask Ashley Judd, who used to describe herself as a Sicilian hillbilly with Italian-American roots in Kentucky. That was before she learned that she also descends from William Brewster. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it's because he sailed to Massachusetts in 1620 . . . aboard the Mayflower.

Essay: When is a hometown really a hometown?

By Paul Carrier

My wife Liz and I have lived in Augusta, Maine, for close to 30 years. We own a house here. Both of us have made a living here. We have experienced life's joys and sorrows here. We like the place, and feel attached to it.

But I would never describe Augusta as my hometown.

“Hometown” can be defined in a couple of different ways, I suppose, including the place where you live. The most meaningful definition, though, is the place where you were born, the town where you grew up.

Although I haven’t lived there for four decades, my hometown is, and always will be, Southbridge, Massachusetts.

It’s not a famous town, or especially picturesque, although it has a handsome Victorian business district, a beautiful library and its share of impressive churches. Located on the Massachusetts-Connecticut border, Southbridge is a working-class community of triple deckers and modest, tidy, single-family homes, far from the bustle of Boston.

All in all, it’s a fairly anonymous place, really, a small, ethnically diverse factory town. Whenever I meet people and the conversation turns to hometowns, folks confuse Southbridge with Stockbridge, Mass., a town made famous by artist Norman Rockwell, or Sturbridge, Mass., the home of Old Sturbridge Village, the living-history museum. Southbridge's biggest claim to fame is that it once was one of the world's largest centers of optical manufacturing. Hence its description of itself on the town seal as the eye of the commonwealth. (Massachusetts is one of four states, along with Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia, that insist on the grandiose title of "commonwealth." But I digress.)

No, people don’t have much cause to know anything about Southbridge. Unless they grew up there. For those of us who did, it’s a special place simply because it’s our place, and an integral part of our lives, if only in memory.

That’s how it is with hometowns. We love them, not for what they are in any objective sense, but for what they represent to each of us, individually. Whether you hail from Paris, France, or Paris, Maine, a hometown is a hometown, and to the people who claim it as their own, each one is as special as the next.

Which brings me back to Augusta, Maine. After I trudge up our hill at 5 a.m. every day with our chocolate lab, Aquinnah, I turn around for the return trip down to the house. The appealing vista before me says that this is a good place, even if it isn't my place.

The lights of the city twinkle on the far side of the Kennebec River. Dominating the scene is the lighted dome of the Maine State House, a mile away. Although I can't see it from my vantage point, I know that Old Fort Western, the oldest wooden fort in America, is closer still, only about half a mile from where I stand.

Augusta is a fine place. I'm happy to call it home. But my hometown is far away.

Essay: "People are trapped in history .. . . ."

By Paul Carrier

I’m the kind of guy who can bury himself in a history book without complaint. But for many people, the mere mention of the word “history” produces the sleepy-eyed look that they mastered back in elementary school, when they had to memorize a string of dates. 

That isn’t studying history. It's rote learning to pass an exam. History, when well-taught, brings the past to life in all its marvelous, messy and magnificent glory. And that’s where a trip to a living-history museum or historic site comes into play. 

Here’s a case in point. 

One of my ancestors, Thankful Stebbins, was still a child when she was kidnapped with the rest of her Puritan family in a pre-dawn French and Indian raid on the small English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, on February 29, 1704. The Stebbins clan was forcibly marched to Canada. Some family members eventually returned home. Thankful, who married a French Canadian, did not. 

During the raid, Indians allied with New France, as French Canada was then known, used hatchets to attack the Deerfield home of John Sheldon Jr., Thankful’s half cousin. John and his eldest son were not harmed, but his wife, Hannah (Stebbins) Sheldon, and their daughter, Mercy, were killed. Other family members were captured and taken to Canada, from which they were later "redeemed."

The "Old Indian House," as Sheldon's home became known, is long gone. But its large wooden door - pocked, gouged, holed and fortified with nails - survives to this day. As far as I know, it remains on display at the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield. 

I saw that door many years ago, during a visit to the museum. It may sound like a cliché, but standing only inches away from such a remarkable artifact literally gave me goose bumps. It was almost as if those clearly visible hatchet marks transported me back to 1704, and to the raid itself. The mere thought of that door, and of what it signifies for my family, has a similar effect on me to this day. 

That’s what history is, or should be. Not some meaningless date grudgingly dredged up from the mists of memory, but a tangible and resonant reminder of who once lived, what once was and what still is. If we try hard enough to remember. As James Baldwin wrote: "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

The "Old Indian House" door, Deerfield, Mass.

Essay: A memento to remember Dad by

By Paul Carrier

Today is my father’s birthday. Leonide Carrière (that last "e" got dropped somewhere along the line) died, at 90, in January 2003, and although more than a decade has passed since then, I still think of him every morning.

That’s because a daily ritual always brings Dad to mind. It involves a memento of my father — a two-inch-long feather carved from moose bone. The feather is attached to a thin black cord, and every morning without fail, I pull it over my head and tuck it into my shirt.

My father didn’t give me this token, nor was he with me when I bought it. But I think of it as Dad’s feather. That's partly because I acquired it at a Maine crafts show only two months before he died, but primarily because it reminded me of my father and his heritage the very first time I spotted it.

Both of my parents were Franco-American; both traced their ancestry to the earliest settlers of New France (modern-day Québec). But Dad also had a bit of Indian ancestry. Perhaps that's why he always had a special place in his heart for native people.

My father was a direct descendant of Jean Nicolet, the 17th-century French explorer who is sometimes called the Father of Wisconsin because he was the first European to reach Lake Michigan and what is now Green Bay. Nicolet had an illegitimate daughter (“enfant naturel” in the French records) with a member of Canada’s Nipissing tribe. His partner’s name is lost to us, but he gave their child his surname.

It seems Nicolet brought his daughter, Madeleine dite Euphrosine Nicolet, with him when he returned to Québec. There, he married a Frenchwoman; Madeleine married a Frenchman. If you go back nine generations, Madeleine was Dad’s grandmother.

To me, that bone feather symbolizes not only my father, but his link to Madeleine and her mother’s people. A small black bead that came with Dad’s feather is long gone, and the cord has become frayed from daily wear. But I suspect the feather itself will outlast me, as it did my father.

If Madeleine dite Euphrosine Nicolet could peer into the 21st century from her perch back in the 17th, perhaps she would view that as a good thing.