Saturday, April 24, 2010

Connecting Canada to France

If you want to know where in France the Alberts came from, then this is the post for you.
The Albert Family Book is a genealogy on Wilfrid Albert, but it also contains information on the area of France where the first Alberts came from. The book was written by Gabriel Drouin and delivered to Wilfrid Albert in March 1948. Gabriel Drouin was the son of Joseph Drouin, who founded the Drouin Genealogical Insitute (Institut genealogique Drouin) in 1899. The institute was for a while the most important company performing genealogical researches in Quebec.
The book is now in the possession of Roland Albert and safely kept at his home in Westbrook, Maine. I took digital images of all the pages last summer. Then I traveled to Lincoln, Maine to the home of my friend, Margo Kelly, who kindly translated the book orally. Margo is a French teacher at Lee Academy. Many thanks go to Margo for taking the time to translate this material during her vacation.

The genealogy of Wilfrid Albert is represented in the hand-written marriage records of the Albert ancestors. The above record shows the marriage of Ferdinand Albert and Georgiana Hebert, the parents of Auguste and Wilfrid Albert. Each marriage record in the book also shows the names of the bridegroom's parents and the bride's parents.
 
As you can see from page 29 of the book (shown below), the genealogy has been traced back to Pierre Albert with his marriage to Louise Grondin in 1702.  If you notice, the name Lucon has been underlined by Mr. Drouin because it represents the dioceses in France where Pierre comes from.

Upon a google search, I found numerous genealogical references to Pierre Albert including one that calls him the founder of the Albert family in New France. The Roy and Boucher Genealogy site gives his birth year as 1672 and his birth place as Poitou, an area in western France. Lucon is the parish and Poitou is the region. In my few years of genealogy research, this ancester is one of the earliest I have found - Pierre was born 132 years before Napolean became Emperor of France!
A map from the Albert book is shown above pointing out the exact location of Poitou in France. The family tree mentioned above tells about an even earlier ancestor, Rene Albert, born in the same town as Pierre in the year 1650.