Recollections: Jim

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I have an interesting, somewhat seminal story of my immigrant roots.  I had the foresight to gather assorted facts and information several decades ago when older relatives freely shared their stories. My father’s mother migrated from rural Norway and his father from Trelleborg the southern tip of Sweden near Copenhagen Denmark. I speak the languages and have visited their original neighborhoods, including historic cemeteries to gather a lot of interesting facts. Life was simple and yet some ways dreary.  Society was rigid with little mobility and few economic opportunities. The news of America was exciting and enticing for the adventurous young people.

My father’s mother Cecilia has a unique story. While very young she bore an out of wedlock child. Her future would be a predictable life with a poor farmer. She made a bold move to leave her baby in the care of her sister and seek passage to America. One way to have American sponsor pay her passage in return for 18 months of service as a domestic servant. My father’s father William had a different challenge. He was apprenticed as a steamfitter with little direct wage and found few opportunities to advance. I believe his family helped him pay for his long passage to Minnesota. He took a very low paying laborer job when he arrived in Minneapolis in 1906. My father’s parents met at a social gathering Dania Hall near the seven corners area in South Minneapolis. After a brief courtship they were married and continued to live in Minneapolis. As Minneapolis residences converted from coal to natural gas there was ample work and the family including my father and aunt thrived.

Later our family story had a heart-breaking challenge. My paternal grandfather, the breadwinner, developed a severe heart condition during the 1930’s and could not do heavy work. As a response, my father’s parents developed a novel solution. In the same South Minneapolis Scandinavian neighborhood, they found an empty underutilized building. They divided the building into 15 separate sleeping rooms and rented them to recent Scandinavian immigrants. Residents could obtain breakfast, a packed lunch and return at the end of the work day for a nutritious supper in a dining room with a radio and phonograph. My father and his lovely (accordion playing) sister grew up in the company of up to 15 adult males. Some of the most colorful family stories are remembered from this austere Boarding House era during the 1930’s.

My mother’s family name is Scanlon, almost pure Irish.   Immediately before living in Minneapolis, the Scanlon’s lived 40 miles south of Minneapolis in the small historic railroad towns Farmington and Elko where her father was Station Manager. Imagine my mother and her four siblings lived their childhood in a series of Railroad stations during my grandfather’s 50-year career for the Milwaukee Railroad.   My mother’s father Francis (nicknamed Pat) grew up in the small town of Adams, MN near Austin (famous for their Spam canned meat). James Scanlon, Francis’ father was born in Montreal Canada in August 1866. We know that James’s father was John Scanlon and his mother was named Jane. John was born County Wicklow and Jane in County Sligo in Ireland. They were married in 1848 in Ireland. The chief reason for the migration was The Great Potato Famine (a massive crop failure due to a fungal disease). While still a young man John migrated first to New York and served with the Union Army and fought in several Civil War battles including Gettysburg. After the war he migrated to southern Minnesota to participate in the rapidly expanding railroad industry and started a family of five children including my grandfather Francis.  My mother’s maternal grandmother Harriet was born in Vermont April 1865. I have names and relevant live dates of her grandparents’ parents that migrated there from England.

The eventful odyssey of   two families Nelson and Scanlon joined together in the late 1930’s.  The two families lived directly across the street from one another in South Minneapolis. My father was Walter Nelson and my mother Frances Scanlon, together was an old fashioned love story. They were married in 1940 and I was born in 1943.  My daughter, Kristin from my first marriage has Dutch ethnicity. Her grandparents immigrated to Minnesota in 1953. My current wife Nenita immigrated to Minnesota in 2012. Many of our social friends are immigrants from the Philippines, so we have an opportunity to explore and appreciate and preserve some of the beautiful and interesting details of each culture.

There are some common threads from my immigrant’s roots. The immigrant experience tends to highly value three human qualities. One is that all worthwhile achievements are the product of hard work. Second, our strong healthy family relationship are vital to our well-being. Third we should always be willing to lend a helping hand to those in need.

French Canada and the American Revolution

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Please see note at end of post.

Today, July 1, is Dominion Day in Canada.  The link is to the Canadian Government descriptor of the day.

My father’s ancestry is 100% French-Canadian (mom was 100% German).

Remi Roy, one of my numerous French-Canadian cousins, and valued friend, recently provided a very interesting summary of the Quebec Act of 1774 which relates to the near-miss of Quebec becoming the 14th colony of the infant United States.  The map below, as well as the text of Remi’s summary of the history, follow.

Following Remi’s summary is another provided by my long-time friend Dr. Virgil Benoit, in November, 2010.

I have known both Remi and Virgil for many years,  and they are very well informed.  I’m privileged to know them.  Remi lives in Montreal and Virgil in Red Lake Falls MN area.  They are both retired professors.

Quebec and the to-be United States in 1774

Remi Roy’s summary:

Under the Quebec Act of 1774, the boundaries of the Province of Quebec were massively expanded—stretching south to the Ohio River and west all the way to the Mississippi River.

For a brief nine-year window until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Quebec encompassed the entire “Old Northwest,” including modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota.

The Demographic Reality

If you had travelled through this newly expanded wilderness in 1774 and crossed paths with a non-Indigenous person, you could confidently assume they spoke French.

While the British map claimed this territory on paper, the ground reality was entirely different:

• Indigenous Nations: The Dakota, Ojibwe, Miami, Shawnee, and Potawatomi held the vast majority of the physical landscape, trade paths, and hunting grounds.
• French-Canadian Settlers: The small, permanent European population consisted almost entirely of French-Canadian habitants (farmers) and voyageurs (fur traders). They were concentrated in hubs like Detroit (1,400 residents), Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Green Bay.
• The British: The English language was largely confined to a few isolated military barracks.

Why Britain Kept it French

The British Parliament enacted this massive expansion out of pure pragmatism. They knew a few hundred British redcoats couldn’t possibly control millions of acres of wilderness if the local populations revolted.

By passing the Quebec Act, Britain achieved two major strategic goals:

1. Appease the French Majority: By guaranteeing the free practice of the Catholic faith and restoring traditional French civil law, Britain secured the loyalty of French fur traders and influential merchants.
2. Box in the Thirteen Colonies: It used a legally French-administered zone as a massive buffer to block rebellious Anglo-American colonists from expanding westward over the Appalachian Mountains.

This move absolutely infuriated the American colonists out east—who labeled it one of the “Intolerable Acts”—and helped spark the American Revolution just a year later.

The Modern Footprint

Because the western border of Quebec was anchored to the upper Mississippi River, the expansion traveled right through the modern St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan area, cutting off at St. Anthony Falls.

If you live in the Twin Cities metro today, this means that everything east of the Mississippi River was briefly part of Quebec. If you are standing in any of these modern counties, you are standing on what was technically French-administered, British-owned Canadian soil in 1774:

• Ramsey County (including St. Paul)
• Washington County (including Woodbury and Stillwater)
• Anoka County
• Sherburne County
• St. Croix & Pierce Counties (just across the river in Wisconsin)

Here is Virgil Benoit’s summary written November, 2010, and used in my family French-Canadian family history in 2010: Quebec Act of 1774 per Virgil Benoit 2010 (2). 


Remi added some additional commentary on June 30 2026 after I sent him Virgils commentary: “as you know, some of our ancestors in Bellechase [QC] were sympathetic to the American English colonists and even participated in the Revolutionary War against the British. Attached is something that I previously wrote about this.” 

THE ROLE OF FRENCH CANADIANS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Most Canadiens remained neutral during the American Revolution. They saw it as a fratricidal fight between two English camps. In general, they wished for a pox on both houses of the English factions. Most saw the English colonists as liars. However, some Canadiens sided with the revolutionaries and participated in the Revolutionary War.

Recruited initially in Québec and later among Canadien refugees in the northern New York colony, the Second Canadian Regiment (also known as “Congress’s Own”) fought alongside English-speaking Americans against the British. Organized on a French-style four-battalion structure, these soldiers earned a reputation for exceptional discipline and combat performance at Staten Island, Brandywine, and Germantown. They called themselves les patriotes, sharing a deep-seated grievance against the British Crown with their English-speaking American allies. The patriotes hoped that, with French intervention, a revolutionary victory might eventually lead to France returning to govern Canada.

Most significantly, the Canadian Regiment played a vital role in the Siege of Yorktown. On September 24, 1781, Colonel Moses Hazen was given command of the Second Brigade in the Marquis de Lafayette’s Light Division—placing his Canadien soldiers directly under Lafayette’s command. They took part in the critical siege operations that ultimately forced the British surrender.

At Yorktown, where French forces outnumbered the revolutionaries, a fascinating linguistic dynamic existed. While the regular French Army arriving from Europe was composed of men from various provinces who spoke distinct regional dialects, the Canadien soldiers spoke a remarkably unified colonial French. Generationally removed from Europe, the Canadiens had developed a standardized speech that stood out even alongside their metropolitan French allies.

Because they had taken up arms against the British Crown, these men and their families became the United States’ earliest refugees, forced to flee French Canada during the Continental Army’s retreat from Canada in 1776. Unable to return home after the war, many eventually settled in the Refugee Tract of upstate New York, which was officially organized as Clinton County, with the Town of Champlain among its first settlements. It became the first “Little Canada” in the United States and served as a starting point for early French-Canadian migration into the American Midwest.

In the decades that followed, most French Canadians—who considered themselves American simply by virtue of the continent they shared, just as American as the residents of the United States—viewed the Americans of the young republic with a mix of wariness and admiration. This admiration for the republican values and democracy of their southern neighbours ran deep. In 1837, it even culminated in an armed rebellion in Lower Canada, where patriotes fought to overthrow British colonial rule and establish an independent, French-speaking republic explicitly modelled on the United States. In the decades following the failed rebellion, driven by both economic desperation and this enduring admiration, close to one million French Canadians— almost half the population of Quebec—immigrated to the United States and became proud US citizens.

In stark contrast to this affinity for the United States, French Canadians often looked down upon English Canadians—many of whom were descendants of the tens of thousands of United States Loyalists who had fled north—viewing them as Américains manqués: failed, second-class Americans who preferred the monarchy to democracy. In fact, by 1800, roughly 80% of English speakers in Canada were loyalist refugees from the new American Republic. This massive influx explains why the standard English-Canadian accent developed in ways virtually identical to that of many in the United States.

The language of the French Canadians was Canadian, American, and profoundly North American. It was the lingua franca of the Great Plains for 200 years. Although their ancestral roots lay on different shores, first the French and later the English-speaking pioneers were bound together by the shared physical reality of the wilderness. They endured the same climates, navigated the same landscapes, and experienced the same natural world. This lived experience forged a shared North American worldview and a sense of belonging that transcended linguistic divides. The demands of the frontier shaped both North American English and North American French, distancing them from their European origins. In this way, these two languages became more similar to one another in feeling and spirit than to the dialects of the Old World.

POSTNOTE: July 3 I’ll have some observations as an ordinary person about the first 250 years of our country.  I will be including a half dozen or so other comments from others.  I will likely post in early morning.

COMMENTS (more at end of post)

from Fred: I always enjoy looking at maps showing the spurious/dubious French claims re their “Province of Quebec.” Those “lands” were under control of Jolly King George III and his loyal minions in the nearly-created US of A.  As you will recall, Colonials invaded the so-called Canada several times and made legal claims to the land. Then the aptly named French and Indian War (we were fighting both the French and Indians, of course) and cleared things up.

response from Dick: The English settlement of what became the U.S. far exceeded the number of French who came to what is now Quebec.  These two, along with Spain, “sliced and diced” North America over the years.  We live with the results – even with all the present day chaos, North American generally is quite the place.

US History maps NatGeo

from SAK in England:

This is fascinating!

As pre-high school students we studied history & geography of course. Usually teachers “simplified” matters for us. Thus the European religious wars were Catholic vs Protestants (or reformation vs counter-reformation). One teacher however, may she rest in eternal peace, refused to simplify & respected our capacity for complexity & nuance. In fact she encouraged us to investigate & research beyond the prescribed academic syllabus. Thus we learnt that Catholic France sided with Protestant parts of Europe sometimes etc. However wars often have little to do with religion. During those school days I got a book called The Age of Progress (1789-1870) by Irene Collins because I was fascinated by the French revolution, Napoleon etc. Well the revolution was certainly not very religious at all – you will find articles etc on the dechristianisation of France in that period. Tens of thousands of priests were exiled, hundreds executed. Yet a paragraph in the book starts as follows:

“In the early days of the Revolution, Frenchmen imagined that wars were the sport of kings and that in the new era of popular sovereignty France would live in peace and brotherly love with her neighbours. In May 1790 the Constituent Assembly formally renounced all wars of conquest and declared that the French nation would never use its forces against the liberty of any people [remember how Trump railed against foreign wars!?]. By the winter of 1791, however, war had begun to appear necessary in defence of the Revolution. . . .  More agreed with Vergniaud when he argued, in January 1792, that France should attack the Emperor before he attacked her. . . . Brissot himself confidently believed that French armies would be welcomed by oppressed peoples of Europe. . . . he was attacked by Robespierre in a great debate in January 1792. French armies would receive no welcome in Europe, Robespierre said, for ‘no-one loves armed missionaries‘. Nor would liberty triumph at home, for war would strengthen the hands of the king and his ministers. “

Robespierre lost the argument & Europe went to war for more than 20 years . . .

These were post enlightenment times and in many places there was a quick rush to liberalise and an equally hasty dash to supress the liberal trend and revert to tradition & conservatism. I really enjoyed a book by a Swedish author Per Olov Enquist: The Visit of the Royal Physician which brings to life the events in the Danish court of Christian VII – that bubbly 1770s period. An “enlightened” German physician becomes the court’s doctor. The King is mentally challenged & the physician seizes the opportunity to dramatically change & liberalise Denmark in 16 months using what we now call “executive orders”! British King George III, mentioned by Fred’s comment on your piece, sends his very young daughter Caroline to become Christian VIII’s wife only the King is not “interested”. She has a liaison with the German physician. The counter reformist traditionalist faction composed of the King’s mother, some religious elements & other conservative politicians react violently quashing the reforms & executing the physician. Interestingly the author, although on the liberal side, does not deprive the conservatives of redeeming features, thus a priest actually cares for the physician & his soul etc. I think one of the points Enquist is making is that the very speed of reform made the violent reaction inevitable & total. The pendulum swings. Another point is the use of the body & sexual issues (the liaison) as political weapon. A third might be the unelected technocrats pushing change & the ensuing reaction. Finally the King is mentally weak & unstable. The question of who is in control then becomes who is whispering in the King’s ear. The executive then becomes more of a symbol around which factions manoeuvre. Do you think all this has resonance somewhere today!? Hmmm

Your piece also explains why the Quebecois speak French somewhat “differently” 😊. I am told that it harks back to an older spoken French just as the Spanish of Latin America bears resemblance to an older Spanish. I wonder if that is true.

Another thing I noticed is how fast things change in the US/North America. In 250 years so much has happened. And even now the technological advances & political developments are again scary! Celebrations are in order but so is the examination of history & the learning therefrom.

Many thanks & kind regards.