Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter

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.