Family Story

Today is the No Kings Day with major demonstrations country wide.  In Minnesota’s Twin Cities is centerpiece.  Bruce Springsteen and other celebrities will be front and center.  We’ll be enroute to a family wedding in Missouri, so won’t be on site.

But before I go, I’d like to share Paul Krugman’s March 27 post on Immigrants.  It is worth your time.  https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/the-end-of-immigration?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.

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The family wedding is my grandsons, now eight years a Marine on active duty.  No rumblings about transfer to the Middle East, though as any member of the uniformed armed services knows, orders can change on very short notice.  His spouse to be is daughter of a career Marine, so knows this reality by personal experience.  We look forward to a good wedding.

I’ve been asked to propose a toast to the newlyweds, and I accepted.  What to say in a couple of minutes to young people 60 years my junior, in front of a group primarily people I’ve never met, mostly from a state I’ve infrequently visited.  Probably mostly young people.

I’ve decided on an immigrant story – one from my own family history, and one relating to Missouri.  Dad, 100% French-Canadian, lived the last ten years of his life, 1987-97,  in Belleville IL, suburban St. Louis.  St. Louis is about 80 miles from where the wedding will be.

During Dad’s life in Illinois  (Mom had died seven years before he moved to Belleville), he liked to see the local sights when company was in town, and this happened with me.

One particular day we went to the famous Arch in St. Louis.  Nearby is a well known tourist area, LeClede’s Landing, where St. Louis began.

I visited a tourist information place, and noted a book: :”St. Louis A Concise History” by William Barnaby Faherty, S.J.  I still have it.

Very early in the book a line jumped off the page:  “…(1764).  Mrs. Marguerite Blondeau Guion, presumably the first woman to come to St. Louis, crossed the river from Cahokia in late May to join her husband…she recalled many years later, the crew had erected only two or three huts….”

The name “Blondeau” jumped out at me.  That was the maiden name of Grandma Bernard’s mother, my great grandmother, Clotilde (Blondeau) Collette.

Long story short, French-Canadians kept and keep good records.  I’ve learned down the road that Clotilde and Marguerite were in the same ancestral line, albeit born about 140 years apart.

That short descriptor, buttressed by research by my cousin, Remi, in Montreal, leads to some observations:

Marguerite and her husband were in their 20s; unbeknownst to them they were boots on the ground building a great city.  Being young was an asset, not a liability.  The concept of being a foreigner, or owning a place, was probably foreign to them.

Marguerites husband apparently died at about 40 of some unknown cause.  Young age didn’t inoculate from death.  They had four children, three died as teenagers or less.  Marguerite apparently lived to over 90, and died in St. Louis, by then a major city.  Somebody thought she was notable, thus the portrait below.

Marguerite Blondeau Guion (undated but before 1832 in St. Louis MO)

They left Illinois in 1764, shortly after the British took control of eastern North America after defeating the French at Quebec.  Across the Mississippi was then Spanish.  The Declaration of Independence by the upstarts in the 13 colonies, 1775,  was a dozen years in the future.

A quick check shows that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were young people, the youngest 26, and many in their 30s. 

Of course, there are many additional questions.  In those times and until relatively recent history, Marguerites last name would have been Guion; she would have scant legal rights regardless of the country.  There was lots of work to be done, and doubtless Marguerite did some of the work in the same ways it is done now, one action at a time.

Then, as now, the future was in the hands of the young.

A young woman, probably younger than Margeurite, shared an insight with me recently that bears repeating.  She had just had a birthday, and the place where she worked, my favorite coffee shop, had brief bio sheets of each worker, composed by the individual.

She asked me to look at hers, and I did.  She pointed out one particular phrase on the sheet, one likely familiar to all of us:  “Don’t Quit”.  She had modified it by deleting four of the letters, which then made the advise “Do It”.  Made sense to her, and to me.

I had earlier noted something else put on the community blackboard at the store by, it turned out, the manager, whose daughter is a freshman in college this.  It, too, was simple: “You matter.”

“Do it.  You matter.”