Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter

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Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter Summer, 2003 Readers’ Connection Florida Artist Provides Autobiography of Monsignor Arthur H. Durand Mary Herzig of Satellite Beach, Florida, whose last contribution to the Newsletter described her work with china painting, sent a long excerpt from an autobiography written by Monsignor Arthur Hilary Durand, a great uncle. He produced his autobiography in 1978 on the occasion of his 50th anniversary as a priest. Msgr. Durand, born in Faribault, Minnesota in 1898, was one of two children from the family of Joseph Cyrille and Olivine (Rousseau) who made the Catholic Church their vocation. His sister Antoinette joined the Dominican Minutes (Continued from page 17) The focus of the marketing would be people with the Durand surname in the Minnesota and Wisconsin areas. Other marketing activities discussed were: 1. Member surveys to learn their needs and feedback 2. Closeout sales of books and newsletters in inventory 3. Updated catalog detailing products on hand 4. Advertising 5. Educational articles on value of gifts to the Foundation 6. Email messages to members on a periodic basis Bulk Rate Mailing Mike Durand reported that future mailings of the Newsletter could be sent as bulk mail by using the permit for his business, which would lower the cost of mailing. Roger will pursue the paperwork for a Foundation permit after Mike has his company permit. Foundation Identity The need for a uniform visual “scheme” was discussed. Color, logos, font type and sizes, etc. could be used to establish a family or organizational identity. Nominating Committee for office of president It was noted that there is no standing nominating committee. Board members agreed that an ad hoc committee should be formed to search for a successor for the current president. Roger Durand offered to take the lead in the search. John Durand offered the names of Peter Durand, Robert Durand, Richard Durand, and Ellen Durand Olson as possible collaborators. Awards President Mike Durand announced the awards to be presented for 2002. [See Awards, p. 13] The Spring meeting adjourned at 3:30 pm. The Fall meeting will be on Sunday, October 6, 2003 at the home of Roger Durand, 76 Marcin Hill, Burnsville, MN. (Phone 952-898-2896) All Foundation members are invited to attend. Please call the host. Minutes provided by Roger E. Durand, Secretary 18 Sisters of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, as did Mary Herzig’s Aunt Mathida (Sister Ernestine). Msgr. Durand died in St. Paul in 1986 at age 88. In discussing Msgr. Durand’s autobiography, Mary pointed out that her cousin had sent it to her years ago. “I think she must have gotten tired of making copies as I know there is more.” The document that Mary sent consists of 17 pages and appears to be from an 8½ X 11 typeset monograph. The portion she sent ends with Msgr. Durand describing his first days at a seminary in Nantes, France. After growing up on the family farm near Faribault, Msgr. Durand writes that he decided to enter the priesthood only after giving long and serious consideration to getting married and continuing to farm. When he describes his efforts while still living at home to learn Latin from the local priest, he writes: “...I was not a bright student. I plugged hard but Latin came harder. Many a night as I drove back home with the horse and buggy, I, now 21 years old, cried unabashedly. Father Domestici was a good teacher, but he did not give me any encouragement or a bit a praise that I can remember. He was never impatient with me it is true, but I was not made to feel that I was making any progress and though my heart was very heavy, I would say, “Lord, I won’t quit. If they tell me that I am not able to make it or refuse me, then I will know that it’s not for me—but I won’t quit!” Msgr. Durand’s autobiography is organized into short chapters that describe various aspects of his early life— ”The Dawn of Memory,” “Country School Days,” “Our Parents,” etc. The title page reads: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MSGR. ARTHUR H. DURAND PASTOR ANNUNCIATION CHURCH- HAZELWOOD, MINN. ON THE OCCASION OF HIS FIFTIETH JUBILIEE YEAR AS A PRIEST, SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 1978 If anyone has a complete copy of this important family document please get in touch with a Foundation officer or board member, whose names are listed on “The back page.” One of the goals of the Foundation is to collect and preserve documents like Msgr. Durand’s autobiography and to make them more generally accessible to members. On a sad note, Mary also wrote that her son-in-law Michael Craft died of cancer on May 18 at age 47. Michael was married to Mary’s daughter Cindy, and they have one child, a 10year-old son named Benjamin. A picture of Mary and her three daughters appeared in the Summer, 2002 Newsletter. jcdurand3391@charter.net Send your letters to: John C Durand 624 East Market Street #103 Elkhorn, WI 53121
Summer, 2003 Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter I’ve been intrigued lately by a flicker of memory about something my father once said. In speaking of our French-Canadian ancestors he said that one of them had been given an island in the St. Lawrence River for fighting in a war. Like any kid I wondered if the island was still in the family and whether it might be named Durand Island and whether we might secretly be rich. But in the atlas at our high school library I could find no Durand Island and soon put the matter out of my mind. While looking at maps on the internet a year or so ago, however, I noticed a little island situated near the mouth of the Cap Rouge River, the area that I now know was where Jean Durand dit La Fortune acquired his first land. What got me looking, I think, was a passage I had read in Jean Durand et sa Posterité. Discussing the arrangement that Jean Durand made with a Charles Gautier (who was apparently Jean's boss for the three years he spent in military service) we read on page 20: "…Jean Durand receives on a three-year lease, from Charles Gautier called Boisverdun, a property situated at Cap-Rouge in the domain of Gaudarville, one part of which is farm land and the other is thickly wooded; a fishing location running in front of the land; and a small fort situated on an island." We can only speculate about why there was a small fort on what is a pretty small island, or how long the fort had been there. Perhaps it was built as a place of refuge design in case of Indian attack, or perhaps it mounted a cannon or two to protect the mouth of the Cap Rouge. Those speculations don't seem nearly as important to me as the speculation of how my father came to know of this island. Consider this: 1. Jean Durand et sa Posterité had not yet been published, and chances are that my father would not have known about such a work-in-progress anyway. 2. So far as I know, my father had never been to the Cap Rouge area or had any connection with our relatives there. 3. Having completed only a few grades of school, my father was not a reader. So the question has been nagging—how did he know about that island? The distance between Jean Durand dit La Fortune and my father was eight generations, and our family line has, so far as I am aware, no family history that someone wrote between then and now. So I keep coming back to the thought that the story of this island must have been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth—by storytelling. Along the way the story got a little garbled. The island was not a gift but a lease. And it was awarded to Jean Durand for his military service rather than his participation in a particular war. But if I'm right and the story of For What It’s Worth By John Durand 19 this little island was indeed passed down in the family for more than 300 years—well, my jaw kind of dropped when I had that realization. Although I couldn’t attend the first meeting of what has become the Durand Heritage Foundation, I sent Mike Durand some thoughts before the meeting on the idea that, if we want to preserve our family history, we really have to start writing things down—stories about our uncles and aunts and grandparents, who’s who in the pictures we have, how did such a thing come to pass, and so on. What I said must have resonated with the 12 people in attendance at that meeting, because they nominated me in absentia to be the vice-president of an asyet-undefined organization. Well, four years later we are a char- tered not-for-profit corporation with a certain amount of organization stability, but we are still trying to solve those same problems. • How do we preserve our family stories? • How do we preserve our family pictures? • How do we preserve our important family documents—birth certificates, marriage licenses, awards and achievements? I’m not talking about just the old-timey stuff—black and white studio portraits of stiff-looking, unsmiling strangers. I’m talking too about us and our kids and our grandkids. Let me give you an example of why I still think this idea is still important. Last summer I attended a family reunion in Saskatchewan, Canada of my mother’s family, the first reunion of that family in decades. A guy from Oklahoma shows up with a suitcase full of pictures passed down to him by his father. He had no idea who the people in the pictures were. Once again my jaw dropped. What he lugged up to Canada were beautifully preserved pictures of my parents and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins. Some of these pictures I had never seen. Once again the lesson to me was that we need a context for the things we preserve. If we don’t have a context an old-timey picture isn’t worth much. It’s the stories about people and things that gives a picture value. Here’s another example. When my mother was very old and I began to realize that she was going to die with a wealth of information about her family, I made an effort to learn a lot more than I knew about her childhood and growing up. One of the stories she told me was that her family had so many chimney fires in their house that her father nailed a ladder to the roof so that he could quickly climb up the steep slope with a bucket of water to pour down the chimney. And sure enough, on several pictures of their house we see an incongruous metal ladder on the steep roof pointed towards the chimney. If we didn’t know why, we could only wonder it was there.
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Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter

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