My email, 'guy1656' comes from the French-Canadian side of things. (My surname too, of course!)
Our oldest known ancestor grew up in a long-gone town in Gasconny called "Mûron," which meant a kind of berry (and it might be related to 'marionberry' or 'mulberry' in English. OK, so poe-dunk Gasconny.
He was a master miller and he emigrated from LaRochelle in 1654, arriving on the river-isle of the St. Lawrence River called "Île d'Orleans" in
1656. The stone house he built is still there today, now in the 11th generation by
primogeniture. I saw it once in my life in the 1980s.
How he got going was that the Monseignieur de Laval gave him lands to hold in fief so he could tell those landholders what to do so that there
would be a crop and
something to run in his mills (not to mention having bread and hard-tack to make it through the winter - also good for the settlers.) Some folks may also recognize Laval as a university in Quebec (my dad went there) and also a major
agro machinery company.
Our families intermarried with an extended family of Ouillettes. For those who remember how immigrants sometimes changed their last names to 'blend in' with the new country, being English or Scots wasn't always pleasant in New France - especially when the (British) Red Coats keep attacking you. So you may recognize 'Willette' in the name above, and we also had some Sutherlands, McGraw -> McGrew -> Grew ->
Groulx hanging out in the woodwork. And not a few Huron Indians.
So that's us from snow and huge-blueberry country...
EDIT: also one more point of weirdness: the -eau of my last name adds an 'x' for the plural, and not an 's' or an apostrophe 's.'
