The Written Word Remains

THE WRITTEN WORD REMAINS

Allow me today to depart from the usual plan of the « Fragment Historique » [Historical Fragment] column. Recounting our past history does not excuse us from setting down the present one, does it. Tomorrow will come, and everything will tumble together into a complex magma, a sort of three-headed hydra: yesterday, today, tomorrow!.

I pictured your attics filled with keepsakes, with photographs in cardboard mounts or as postcards, with little squares of zinc set into tiny albums whose subjects you know absolutely nothing about; or else with those genealogical treasures piled up in old tin boxes! So what about your own genealogy? Why not concentrate on drawing up a proper list of your uncles, aunts and cousins, even if it means turning to the "old-timers," who will be delighted to guide you. There are also many family associations in America (at least more than two hundred of them) that supply tips and written material, and do so entirely as volunteers and… enthusiastically.

Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets is an old parish whose archives can be examined, and many researchers have come from all over to travel through our history and to perpetuate it in their works: Mr. Raymond Douville, well known locally, uncovered a great many aspects of it.

The first parish priest to have left any writing (in a black notebook!) was Father Charles Z. Garceau. He carried out his ministry for some thirty years (1866–1898). Recorded in that notebook is a census of the parishioners of 1873, with their children… In it he tells a rather allegorical story of the building of our church (white horse and black horse included). Father Garceau was a native of Pointe-du-Lac and had studied at Nicolet, where Abbé Ferland, of illustrious memory as a historian, had been able in those days to fascinate the young student Garceau.

It was by consulting a good many parish monographs written by masters of the craft that I learned to be wary of hearsay, and to check carefully, cross-referencing with other authorities, certain assertions judged or accepted a little too readily. One discovers that many churches were built in a quarrelsome atmosphere that produced outraged, biased language and cock-and-bull stories.

There was also Father Albert Chassé, another parish priest at Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets (from 1940 to 1955), who explored our history and traced in the fabrique records a great many relevant details that he published in the newspapers of the day: La Parole of Drummondville as well as La Presse. Every occasion was a pretext for him to tell a story…

Likewise Father J. Thibodeau, in 1967, is said to have called on the skills of an archivist from Nicolet, Abbé J. Antoine Legendre, to put our presbytery archives in order: that inventory exists as a catalogue that is easy to consult at the archives of the Musée des Religions in Nicolet.

There were also Mr. and Mrs. J. Olivier Archambault, who put all our registers on index cards and then collated the whole into a thick volume. That was in 1987, I believe. There is a most useful tool for our parish priest, who has to answer many requests…

THE WRITTEN WORD REMAINS, as the saying goes. Could those unremarkable writings that become "archives" not serve you in tracing your own family or social history back through time? And just what is an "archive"? It is any manuscript, printed item, newspaper, contract or notarial document relating some action that concerns you. It is therefore a tangible piece of the past, a sequence, a privileged moment of life. That is why they are an irrefutable witness! And if you arrange them in chronological order, if you scrutinize every sign appearing on these fragments — the signatures, the places, and so on — that is the work of a first-rate sleuth!

All these pieces become the structure, the perfectly articulated framework of your own history, the skeleton onto which will be grafted a flesh just as alive, animated by decades — centuries, I should say — of intertwined lives. The vigorous "DNA" of your own ancestors, of your genes. An inexhaustible source that will continue on its course through you, long after….

Yolande Allaire-Roux