a clean and well-lighted room. Inspired by the upwelling of national pride that swept Québec in the late 1960s, the PRDH was established with the modest aim of creating a registry of all the original European families of French Canada, including every person who arrived or was born there in the 1600s and 1700s. Anyone whose ancestors are included in this database is definitively Québécois de souche, an expression that means something like “Quebecer from the ground up.” In English, it might be “old stock” or “100 percent” or “dyed in the wool.” In Québec’s darkest moments, people who lack these deep roots are sometimes dismissed as outsiders, part of the “ethnic vote” on which indépendantiste Jacques Parizeau blamed his 1995 referendum defeat.
And sure enough, here in the PRDH is la famille Sureau dit Blondin, bedecked with fleurs-de-lys. Though really, I discover, that should read la famille Sureau. The rest of the family’s elegant handle turns out to be a kind of nickname that was all the rage in New France. “Dit Blondin” simply means “called Blondin.” (Ah, so it should have been First & Middle Name(s): “Napoléon.” Last Name: “Sureau dit Blondin.”) Just to keep things interesting, the “dit Blondin” tag was also attached to several other lineages, including people carrying the surnames Avon, Berneche, Lapierre, and Leclerc, among others. Thus, there are several lines of Blondins, all early settlers in New France but otherwise unrelated.
Blondin, from the Dictionnaire universel français et latin, 1743
Qui a les cheveux blonds, ou une perruque blonde; & figurément les gens qui font les beaux. Les coquettes aiment fort les blondins; ce sont de vrais séducteurs de femme.
Someone with blond hair or a blond wig; & figuratively people who strut their stuff. Flirtatious women really love blondins; they are real seducers of women.
From this it is tempting to conclude that the first member of the Sureau tribe to attract the “blondin” nickname may have been a charmer, perhaps even a bit of a ladies’ man. His name was Hilaire Sureau, and we know that he was born in the 1650s, near Poitiers, in west-central France, the fifth child and second son of a vintner. We also know that in 1683 he journeyed across the dark waters of the north Atlantic to live and work on the Island of Montréal, in the employ of a Roman Catholic missionary society called La Compagnie des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice, or the Sulpicians.
The Compagnie had established itself in the Saint Lawrence Valley for the sole purpose of evangelizing the Indigenous people of the region and leading them from error and sin. The arrogance of this intrusion, which was territorial, spiritual, and economic, did not sit well with the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the conflict that ensued between the French and the Five Nations was protracted and bloody. It didn’t help that each side allied itself with the other’s worst enemy: the French with the Hurons and the Iroquois with the English. In 1687, not long after Hilaire’s arrival, the French military descended on a number of Iroquois villages, leaving ruin in their wake. Two years later, the Iroquois set fire to the French settlement of Lachine.
Hilaire was no stranger to lethal risk. Although he had grown up in a time of relative tranquility, France had been ravaged for decades by a grotesque civil war, and the region around Poitiers had been a flash point for violence. Christians had taken up arms against Christians. On one side, in fierce defense of the status quo, stood the Roman Catholics; on the other, in armed resistance, were the Huguenots, Protestant followers of the fiery French theologian Jehan Cauvin, better known to many of us as John Calvin. Among the Huguenots burned at the stake as heretics was a woman named Radegonde Sureau (a relative perhaps), one of the millions who lost their lives in the uproar. An uneasy peace was finally achieved early in the seventeenth century when the king’s army crushed the Protestant rebels, and their inevitable English allies, in the Siege of La Rochelle.
Although the overt warfare had ended, the soft violence of repression continued for decades afterward through les dragonnades, a policy that forced Huguenots to billet government soldiers in their homes. That directive came into effect in 1681, and it was just two years later when our Hilaire stepped aboard a sailing ship heading for the Saint Lawrence. No sooner had he settled in than, in 1685, King Louis XIV issued the Code Noir, which, in addition to regulating slavery in French colonies and ordering the expulsion of Jews, outlawed the observance of any dissenting Christian practices. Thus, although we cannot know what beliefs Hilaire Sureau held in his heart, we know what he would have said. There was no legal option except Catholicism.
THESE WERE NOT the kind of stories I’d expected my house to tell. And yet I wasn’t entirely surprised by what I was learning, because the terror of the European Wars of Religion had caused convulsions for my own ancestors. In 1711, my paternal great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Ulrich and Barbara Schürch were packed onto a ship and deported from their home in Canton Bern for the crime of being Mennonites, too radical for the leaders of the Swiss Reformed Church. Eventually, they found refuge in Pennsylvania and established themselves on a large plot of land (acquired through the displacement of the Lenape, or Delaware, people) near a village they named Schoeneck, in memory of the homeland they had been forced to leave.
That was my grandpa Sherk’s side of the story. Although he and my grandma had met and married in northern Alberta, it turns out that she had Pennsylvania roots as well. Her foundational North American ancestors, William and Nancy Jack, are said to have been born in Ireland and to have arrived in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, around 1800. According to an annotation in an old family Bible, William hailed from County Cork. But there are unsubstantiated rumors, kept alive in the Google-sphere, that his people were originally French and had been among the tens of thousands of Huguenots who were harried into exile.
Scholars tell us that, yes, it is true that some French Calvinists found their way to County Cork and, yes, the surname “Jack,” from Jacques, does appear in their midst. But then the record goes blank. Did one of these Huguenot descendants emigrate to Mercer County? The ocean looms between A and B, and there is no way to know for sure.
For “Jack” is also a British name, and the family might just as likely have numbered among the thousands of Scottish Protestants who were transplanted to Ireland by the English government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in an attempt to outnumber and overrule the Irish Catholic majority. (The devices of power, it seems, are endless.) But whether French Huguenot or Scots Irish, there is no doubt which side the Jacks were on. That foundational ancestor, William Jack, was named for the Protestant standard-bearer King William of Orange, who famously defeated the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne.
THERE’S A CURIOUS sideline to this story of Jacks and Jacques. It involves a nineteenth-century con man who gloried in the Frenchified handle of Gustav or Gustave Anjou. (His birth name had been tarnished by certain unfortunate convictions for fraud in his native Sweden.) After immigrating to New York in the 1890s, he established himself as genealogist to the rich and famous and to anyone else who could afford his fees. Suitably fortified with greenbacks, Monsieur Anjou provided the Jacks of Pennsylvania with a line of descent that went back, with nary a question mark, through an unbroken chain of twenty-two generations. Since Huguenots had earned a reputation for skilled craftsmanship and stubborn integrity, they were considered an ornament to any pedigree. And so, ever eager to please his clients, Anjou fabricated a paper trail that wound through the “archives” of seventeenth-century Eure-et-Loir (a département of France that wouldn’t actually be created for another hundred years) and endowed the family with a bevy of bogus French Protestant ancestors. His inventions continue to haunt dusty, ill-lit corners of the internet, giving hope to Jack descendants who yearn for a touch of l’élégance française.
FROM WHAT I’VE said so far, you may have formed
