Acadian Ancestral Home

I want to thank the many of you who have been reading my blogs and writing to me through private messages. You may also post your comments by clicking on the link that follows the daily blogs if you would like to share your message with others. It is quite easy to do and you do not have to register.

Well it seems like Fall has arrived in Massachusetts. Temperatures were in the 40's overnight - for more than two weeks now I have been saying "fall is in the air". The weather people have finally begun saying "fall is here". I hope that a short summer and early fall won't mean an early and longer winter!

After the Fall cleanup is done out-of-doors, I spend the cold weather months doing research and updating my web site Acadian Ancestral Home. I still have a whole lot of items to post. Last Fall/Winter I posted many articles that I had found in early colonial newspapers pertaining to the Acadian Deportation. It was amazing how much had been written about the exile of the "French Neutrals" - of course most articles were very brief but in some instances provided information not yet known. Then there were articles that were quite lengthy and we found details not yet known. It is amazing to see just how much information was printed in those 18th century newspapers.

The first time I became of aware of this is when I was visiting our daughter and son-in-law who then lived in a suburb of Philadelphia. I contacted the American Philosophical Society [Benjamin Franklin was the founder] notifying them that I would like to do research while in Philadelphia. I was very well received and escorted into the research room. It was unbelieve what I found at that first visit.

Items had been published in the Pennsylvania Gazette and there were also the letters of Benjamin Franklin. I will need to peruse through more of those some day. One of the letters was to Mr. Franklin from France and gave evidence that an Acadian family by the name of Tandau had made their way from Philadelphia where they had been in exile to Santo Domingo.

I later found an article in the Pennsylvania Gazette that was actually a posted reward asking people to be on the lookout for an Acadian that had escaped. It turned out to be the son of the Tandau family. He had obviously been left behind or forced to remain behind since he was an "apprentice" - a nice way to put that he was owned by the man posting the reward. He had obviously been indentured and had now escaped. By this time his parents had died in Santo Domingo as had so many Acadians from inadequate accomodations and lack of nourishement while living in extremley hot temperatures yet unknown to them.

As you see there is still lots of interesting history to be found regarding our ancestors who were in exile from 1755-1763 and thereafter.

Many of those articles mentioned can be found on my web site under "18th Century Newspapers" and under "Pennsylvania Gazette".

I hope you have a nice day and that you will come back often!

Lucie