An Update!

The missing marriage at long last! The comment written in another hand states that the marriage was mixed (Protestant/Catholic) and required a special dispensation; my grandmother never did convert to Catholicism although both my aunt and my mother were baptized Catholic.

Merci beaucoup à mon oncle Jacques et ma tante Danielle pour trouver cela pour moi!

Une Histoire

My grandfather Jean Claude Hébert was just 51 when he passed away forty one years ago today. Weaken by TB which he contracted while fighting in the trenches in WWII, he suffered a number of heart attacks before he finally succumbed to heart disease on February 5, 1971. Claude was born in 1919 in Brownsburg Quebec, the second of seventeen children born to Emile Hébert and Marie-Rose Drouin. Two sisters died at birth but the remaining 15 all grew up to have families of their own- my mother has 52 first cousins on the Hébert side alone!


Keeping track of such a large family must have had its challenges but if there's one thing the Héberts were good at, it was family. In the 1930's, Emil bought land on Lac Louisa in the Laurentian Mountains and built a large log cabin that became the camp where the family gathered as often as possible. As the siblings grew up and married, each got to have the camp for a week in the summer but on Sundays, everyone was welcome. As families grew even larger and more dispersed the 'shares' were sold off one by one until the camp is now owned only by one of the siblings, the youngest brother. However the family as a whole is still very close and to this day there's at family reunion every summer, and every five years a 'big" reunion is held, including other Hébert descendants of Emile's siblings.


To keep the multiple generations abreast of each other, there's even a numbering system that goes back 4 generations from mine, and books listing all the family members are updated every few years. My number as the first child (1) of the second child, my mom (2), of the second child, my grandpa Claude(2) of the third child Emile,(3) of Augustin Hébert and Rose-Anna Meyer . Numbers are listed in descending order so my number is 3.2.2.1. I also have 'no de filiation' - I am the 129th descendent of Augustin and Rose-Anna and I have a certificate to prove it!


Compiling this side of the family won't be much of a challenge for me - my great uncle Yvon Hébert has already traced the families back ten generations, to the 1600's in what was then called New France! That is one of the many blessing of being part of a large French Canadian family- the Catholics sure know how to keep good records!

A Secret

It's taken me while to come back to this blog, not because of a lack of things to write about, but rather that there are so many I'm not sure where to begin. And because I am a tad ADD, I tend to deal with genealogy as I deal with everything else- sporadically and prone to jumping around a lot.  I fear that there will be no cohesiveness to these stories if I just post them at random, so in the interest of continuity I decided I should start at the end of the line so to speak and work my way back. And to clarify things even further I'm trying to come up with some kind of label to indicate which side of the family the key characters belong to, paternal (Kilner/Lawrance) or maternal (Hébert/Anderson).

I've been hesitant to tell my my maternal grandmother's story for several reasons. She kept her secrets well and though in my eyes she lived an exemplary life, she obviously wasn't comfortable with certain details of it being known.  Some parts of her life were only revealed after she died and things like exact dates and places remain a mystery. I've been questioning various family members but most know only some of the details which is why it's been difficult to pin down.

   I believe it's time to tell her story: today is the twelfth anniversary of her death and I hope she will forgive me for breaking her silence. The discoveries we made after her death revealed a side of her that I believe actually show her in a positive light but times are different today than when she made her decisions and some things that are accepted and even commonplace today weren't always so.

 Grandma was born Muriel Ruth Anderson on July 31 1918 in Brownsburg, Quebec. She was the second child and only daughter of Thomas Anderson and Jessie McCluskey (youngest child of John and Lizzie). The Andersons, like their families and neighbours were staunch Protestants and tea-totallers to boot. My grandma always claimed that never a drop of liquor had touched her lips, a stance my mother also maintains to this day. My grandpa Jean Claude Hébert on the other hand was from a large rollicking French Catholic family who never met a party they didn't like. In that time and place, the Anglos and the French were like oil and water; properly brought up girls from Brownsburg did not date French boys, let alone get pregnant and subsequently give birth to a child out of wedlock while that French boy was off  fighting in World War II. My aunt was born in Nov of 1940 but the shame of this must have been so great, it was never talked of as long as my grandma was alive. (So well kept was this secret that neither my aunt nor my mother knew anything about it until after my grandma's death in 1998.) Sometime in 1941 when my grandpa was home on leave, a quiet wedding was held, reportedly in the nave of the Catholic church, possibly in either Brownsburg or Lachute.  The date is uncertain as well but one thing is known for sure - my great grandmother Jessie did not attend the wedding. Sadly the marriage didn't seem to improve relations with my grandma and her family, at least not right away. My mother was born in May of 1942 and apparently my great-grandmother was furious; my grandpa was again overseas with the war and didn't return for several years. During that time my grandma and her daughters lived with Ruth's parents but things remained strained. When Claude returned from the war Ruth and my mother moved to a tiny flat in downtown Montreal, far from both sides of the family so Claude could be close to work. Sadly he was home only briefly before being sent to the sanitorium to be treated for TB. Ruth took in boarders to help pay the rent. My aunt meanwhile was being raised by her grandparents back in Brownsburg. It can't have been an easy life and the lack of emotional support from her parents must have made it even more lonely for Ruth.  By the time the family was finally united, Claude was a stranger to both of his daughters and the adjustment must have been a difficult one. Ruth and Claude however were better suited to each other than anyone would have predicted; another child, my uncle, was born in 1952, and their marriage was a wonderful one, cut short only by Claude's death in 1971 at the age of 51. I was not yet 7 when he died so my memories of him are few but he had a love of life and a creative mind that was the perfect balance for my somewhat staid grandma. Ruth never remarried and kept the details of her marriage a secret, leaving a few scraps of paper to start me off on this search.

Finding their actual marriage has proved difficult without an exact date or location. (There's even another possible storyline that had them eloping to Ottawa!) And this the main reason for finally breaking the silence: there are only a few members of my family who are still alive that might still remember the details and I want to get the facts right before there's no one to help me find the truth.  I really believe the whole story deserves to told because even though my grandma went to her grave believing that her past was something to be ashamed of, in the end it was truly a love story with a happy ending and that's the best legacy I could ask for.