New French

The most important breakthrough I’ve made in my genealogical research was one I made in the last 5 years. One of the dead-ends I still had in my grandmother’s research was Marie Antoinette (Dorlaque) Grote who was born in Missouri in 1819. The decidedly French name and the fact she was so far west for the time had piqued my interest for years. I’d tried previously to find info on her but hadn’t had any luck.

Well, thanks to Geni open source family trees, I was able to get passed Marie Antoinette and the first interesting thing I found was a family history of French colonists who had arrived in Quebec in 1620s/30s and then generation to generation had moved south and west. They moved on from Quebec, following Cadillac as he founded Detroit. One generation was born there but as Detroit struggled, they moved on to the Kaskaskia village in what would become southern Illinois. From there they would move on the help found St. Louis.

This village of Kaskaskia, situated on the Mississippi, was founded around a Jesuit mission. French colonists lived side by side and even inter-married native Americans. Later in my research, I would find the first documented slave ownership in my family. That was a sobering moment in an account of life in this frontier village that was more akin to life in New Orleans than New York. As one should really expect as they were connected by culture and by the big river. People worked hard, played hard, and they weren’t afraid to dance. After my direct ancestors left Kaskaskia would grow to a city of 6000 and was the first capital of the Illinois Territory of the United States

During Covid, a work trip took me to southern Illinois within tens of miles of the old village of Kaskaskia. The village had been relocated nearly 150 years earlier as the Mississippi changed course, crossing and destroying the village in the process. What remains in a state park with nearly 2 centuries’ worth of graves relocated to higher ground and a view of a tributary of the Mississippi. In the muddy waters and the ground on the other side was where this “Irish-American’s” french speaking, 3rd and 4th generation residents of New France lived in an untamed country.

That was just the beginning of this particular rabbit hole.