French Acadian Ancestry!

 Knowing that Steve has a strong French ancestry from Canada, I decided to dig a little deeper and see if I could find out where they came from and if on this trip we would be in the vicinity of where they might have lived.  Well, I hit the jackpot, because many of them were from Nova Scotia in the area of Antigonish which we drove right past today.  I was able to find the burial place of Steve’s 4th great grandparents… a small graveyard located at St. Peter’s Catholic Church… so we detoured from our tour route today to see if we could find it.  We were a little skeptical when the directions took us down a dirt road.  We were of course in the RV and towing our truck.  We can’t exactly turn around easily if we get stuck somewhere! 

To our surprise, just around the corner was the church!  We found it!  I was a little confused though because there was a graveyard across the street, and the picture I had seen online showed it to be right next to the church.  We got out and walked around a bit, and sure enough, on the side of the church, tucked next to a grove of trees that had taken over much of it, was the cemetery!  It was clearly much older than the one across the street. The people we were looking for lived during the 1700’s.

St. Peter’s church on Old Trunk Rd.  

It was very overgrown, so we went back to the RV and doused ourselves in bug spray before venturing into the grass.  The mosquitoes here are no joke and I figured there were probably ticks, too.  

We wandered around for about half an hour looking for the tombstones for Casimir Benoit and Euphrosine Pettipas Benoit.  We knew they were there somewhere, but we weren’t able to find them.  There were many stones that had fallen over or were inaccessible due to the trees and bushes around the perimeter.  Some were tucked back in those trees pretty far.  We did find many of the Pettipas family though.  That was his 4th great grandmother’s maiden name.  Here is a picture of me walking around in the weeds…

I was surprised that the cemetery was so unkempt.  The church is still in use, but the yard around it needed a good mowing, too.  I would love to clean this place up again.  There is a lot of history here.  The one across the street was in much better shape. 

I found out through Ancestry that Eurphrosine’s grandfather, Steve’s 6th great grandfather, was a schooner captain and interpreter for the Mi’kmac people.  These are the native people that lived in the area.  His name was Claude Pettipas, and even though he was French, he worked on behalf of the British.  He also married a Mi’kmac woman and had seven children with her.  When she died, he remarried and had four more kids.  With each wife, he had a son named Joseph!  Turns out Joseph (one of them) was Steve’s 5th great grandfather.  I haven’t been able to figure out which one yet as records aren’t always clear.  Steve thinks it is pretty cool that he might be related to the Mi’kmac people.  I’ll keep working on it!  On a side note, I learned that Claude Pettipas was one of the Acadians who was forced to leave Nova Scotia when the British took over the area.  He was well into his 80s by then.  It looks like much of his family went with him.  They were all settled in Braintree, Massachusetts and that is where Claude is buried.  

We did go into the church just to see if there was any information there.  I was kind of hoping the priest or someone would have been there to talk to, but we never saw anyone.  

Several hours later…

Whew!  What a cluster of an evening!  Tonight our wagon masters prepared dinner for us.  They grilled pork chops (!).  A bit strange, but they are too, so oh well.  There was definitely some passive aggressiveness going on between them and our tail gunners.  I won’t go into it all here, but suffice it to say the combo has not been a match made in heaven.  Our dinner was followed by our last - THANK GOODNESS! - trip log meeting.  This is where things really went sideways.  We are on a time schedule tomorrow because we will be visiting the Bay of Fundy again, a different location, and we all need to be there at a certain time to get on the ocean floor during low tide.  All of that is fine.  I guess part of our route includes a closed off ramp that we are supposed to take.  We were told it was closed, so they weren’t sure about a detour or where we’d end up!!  I asked if, since they will be driving ahead of us all, if they could text us the correct route after they get through it themselves.  He informed me in front of the group that since they will be driving separately that they will not be doing that since they won’t text and drive.  Steve then said, could someone pull over and let us know?  Steve was ignored.  So, we are on our own I guess.  I’m sure the Waze app will get us through without incident, but I sure thought that was rude.  Anyway, he and Penny were kind of jumping around with what was going on, since again they did several days worth of travel, that people started getting confused and there were lots of questions.  Because of that, there was lots of talking and it was hard to hear.  There was some kind of drama at the table next to us, and all of a sudden a table top got slammed, someone yelled, and silverware went flying.  A woman got up and stormed out of the building.  Neither of our wagonmasters went after her and continued the meeting as if nothing had just happened.  There was also a kerfluffle with Penny about silverware… honestly, are there any adults in this group? 

Anyway, I think Steve and I are going to leave the caravan a day early.  We have loved the locations we’ve visited, and we’ve really enjoyed our time with our friends, but our wagon masters really have no business leading large tours like this.  They’ve made it almost untenable.