Dans un Petit Village

Who is Gildore Parent? That was the question that I kept asking myself when I realized that Maurice Gauvin was not my father. Who is Gildore Parent? Fortunately, my newly found cousin, Leonard Parent, actually remembered something of Gildore. It was not a lot but at least it was something. Leonard is about ten years older than me so he would he would remember things that I would not even be aware of and he did meet my father many times when he was young. Leonard told me that my father was very friendly, he like to talk and he told Leonard stories about the war. He told me that my father stayed on in France after the war and was part of a clean up crew. I am not sure that entailed but I imagine that there was plenty of cleaning up to do after the war. My father told Leonard that the French were very happy that Canadian soldiers were helping them and because my father could speak French he got along quite well with the French. he also said that they had very good wine. Leonard told me

Imagine my surprise when I realized that I was not who I thought I was for most of my life. When I received that fateful email from Leonard Parent giving me information about myself that I never knew before, my reaction was visceral. For a moment, I was physically dizzy until I regained my composure. I had always suspected that there was something not quite right about my parentage. For one thing, There is ten years between the birth of my youngest sister and me, my youngest sister was already eight years old when I was born. The second thing is that I have absolutely no information or knowledge of my alleged father; Maurice Gauvin. I knew that was married to my mother, he was a RCAF pilot in WWII and he was supposed to be the father of my three older sisters and me. Whenever I asked about my father when I was young , I was often faced with either silence or the subject was quickly changed to something else and I would forget about the question until the next time. Even, before my

When I left off the last post, my first genealogy post, I stated that have my family tree dating back to the 17th century when my ancestors first came to "Nouvelle France" was good enough for me. And so that is where it remained for over 30 years. In the Fall of 2018, my oldest daughter sent my wife and I a copy of her DNA tests that she had analyzed by the company 23andme . She had the complete set of DNA tests done which not only shows who here DNA relatives where but gave a complete health + ancestry report based on her DNA profile. The DNA profile showed her ethnicity plus possible siblings and relatives. I proposed to my wife that we should buy DNA kits and see what it would tell us about our ancestry. We chose Ancestry .ca because it seemed to be more focused on genealogy. The kits arrived between Christmas and New Years. We decided to wait until after the holidays because we did not want the samples to be lost in the holiday mail rush. The first part of January 20