Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

3Banished from Acadia,Exiled in Plymouth Colony

63 3 banished from acadia, exiled in Plymouth colony The quest for origins bedevils the family historian. Lured by the connectivity of blood and the persistence of name, the historian in quest of a golden lineage succumbs to the futile process of ceaseless regression. As the search for cousins can dissipate the historian’s efforts in a crablike, sideways movement in time, so the quest for first ancestors impels the historian deeper and deeper into the vanishing and ultimately unknowable past. In the end, no child of Adam can trace his lineage to our first father. Nevertheless, the search for origin cannot be entirely forsaken, as long as we need starting points to tell a family story. The discovery of the Acadian origins of the Boodry (Boudrot) family, Frances’s ancestors, gave birth to this book, joining my family to one of the earliest settlements of North America and identifying Frances’s homelessness with a poor people, long in exile and deep in exodus. Pierre Boudrot numbered among those tragic Acadians who, in 1755, were uprooted en masse from their homeland in Nova Scotia. The subjects of Longfellow’s Evangeline, the Acadians were taken captive by guile, then cruelly dispersed to the seas, and in the case of Pierre’s family , delivered to inland Massachusetts where they were held as wards of the state until the American Revolution. The Boudrot history in North America was more than a century older than the United States. My people were French and Catholic, and—further thwarting the colonial designs of London and Boston—they were allied to the Mi’kmaq (Micmac) Indians. They were victims of the great French-English rivalry for North America and they began their great journey in America in bondage in colonial Massachusetts. They are the beginning of the story of my American family. Genealogy holds wonderful surprises. Defying those who seek pure racial, ethnic, and moral identities as rulers or victims, it makes us a wonderfully mixed breed. A search for roots delights those who like surprise and Jacob’s Well 64 enjoy irony. The obscure occasionally discover that they are the descendants of the great and famous, while those who pride themselves on aesthetics commonly find their ancestors to have been coarse or principally skilled at counting money. The pacifist, in turn, may find he was the great-grandson of a murderous general, the anti-Semite discovers that his mother was half Jewish, the American Indian that he has an educated Norman lineage. The delightful incongruities of past make us all, as Rabelais long ago knew, the children of kings and bastards, princesses and prostitutes, tycoons and martyr saints, zealots and cynics, and surely people of many places and groups rather than single races, ethnicities, and nations. Indeed, the past is filled with individual surprises that force one to rethink his family’s history. This happened to me when I discovered, with the help of a professional genealogist , that my grandmother Frances’s family was Acadian. This single fact placed my poor, local, and largely obscure family at the heart of North American history and made it inseparable from one of its most tragic events: the Grand Dérangement, that singular and great uprooting and disbursement of an entire North American people. With a single bold and cruel stroke in the fall of 1755, Britain, in concert with the town of Halifax and the colony of Massachusetts, banished approximately seven thousand Acadians to the colonies and Europe. Occurring on the threshold of the Seven Years War (1756–1763)—known in North America as the French and Indian War—the Grand Dérangement initiated the history of my family in the United States. They, like so many North American Indian peoples, were victims of what we now define as ethnic cleansing: violent, forced removal from their land.1 Indisputably the Boodrys entered North American colonial history as an uprooted and captive people before the Revolutionary War, and they made their search for a lost home and land a dominant theme of the first Boudrot in the United States. If the individual descendant’s mind somehow carries within itself the defining traces of ancestor experiences, November 1755 profoundly entered the roots of my grandmother Frances’s consciousness. In that month and year, when the aftershock of the Lisbon earthquake was recorded as far as along the eastern seaboard of North America, Frances’s ancestors were Banished from...