Choosing a Place - Update

Yesterday the elder Frenchling received her first acceptance letters from two universities in….

Canada.  Québec, to be precise.

Her choice is made.  French-speaking North America is her Third Place.

And this seemed the right moment to relate some family history. 

In the late 17^th (or early 18th) century, one of our ancestors left Normandy for La Nouvelle France.  His descendants settled in the region around Trois Rivières.

After some years in Québec, part of the family left Canada for Wisconsin in the United States.  My great-grandmother, Celestine, was born in Rice Lake to a French-speaking family. 

When Celestine married, she moved West with her husband to farm near the small village of  Naches in the state of Washington.  She had one child, a daughter named Rachel, who moved with her husband across the Cascade mountains to the city of Seattle where she had a daughter named Mary Lou. 

Then, sometime in the last century, Mary Lou had her own daughter (the author of this blog).   This daughter, when she grew up, married a man from France, moved back across the Atlantic and made her home in Paris.  

And now her Frenchling, this child of the 21^st century, will cross the ocean and walk in a place where one of her French ancestors once came looking for a new life in a new world.