Happy Bastille Day!

Image courtesy of 3D Flags

Happy Bastille Day to any of my readers that also have French ancestry! My children and I don't have a lot of French in us, but I did some looking through my family tree database and came up with the following:

One of my children's father s maternal 2nd-great-grandfathers was François Joseph MARTIN (c. 1828 - 1897), born in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, son of François MARTIN and Anna Eve ROUECHE. He emigrated to America before 1848, marrying Rachel HUBBY, of Scots and English ancestry, that year in Illinois. This line is probably the most recent and heaviest French line of all our children's ancestors.

In another maternal line, my children have DeVERRE ancestry that came out of Louisiana into Kentucky by the early 1800s. It's probable that this is another French line.

A 9th-great-grandfather on my father's side was Jacques CAUDEBEC who, according to family history, was born c. 1666 in Caudebec, Normandy, France. The village was likely Caudebec-en-Caux. Jacques emigrated to New York City, where he married a Dutch woman, Margaretta PROVOOST. If my family history is correct, both died at advanced ages in what is now Orange County, New York.

On my mother's side, one of her lines that came out of the Province of Friesland, the Netherlands, was the RENEMA family. It is very likely that this surname is a French derivative (it literally means "of René"--not a Dutch name!) and may be a reference to a French Huguenot (Protestant) patriarch who may have left France for religiously tolerant Holland after the Edict of Fontainebleau.

None of these lines produce much more than a drop in the bucket of our children's combined ancestry, which is mainly German, English, Dutch and Frisian, Norwegian and Scots. However, it is interesting to review, and perhaps someday I will do some active research on these families.