A Son and His Father Married Two Sisters

Memere Poulin took a trip to Kamouraska when she was eighteen years old, approximately 1912.  She took along her best friend Anna Marie Roy who had been a witness to her marriage.  She wanted to meet her grandmothers.  Memere's grandmother, a step-grandmother named Delia Caron, ran a sewing school for girls in Kamouraska.  She played the fiddle.  She married her husband when he was a widower with at least five children.  Her other grandmother Monique Saint-Pierre-Dessaint, wife of Michel Caron, smoked a corn-cob pipe.

Michel Caron, Monique St-Pierre's husband and Delia's and Rose's Father

An interesting fact about Monique is that she was also Delia's mother.  The way my grandmother tells it, a son and his father married two sisters.

Napoleon Belanger, Lydia's father and Rose Caron's husband

Napoleon/Paul Belanger and his father Michel Belanger married, respectively, Rose Caron and her sister Delia Caron.

Rose Caron, Lydia's Mother, Paul Belanger's wife and Delia Caron's sister

That makes Memere's step-grandmother Delia also her aunt!  That's how Memere's two grandmothers were mother and daughter. I hope you are not thoroughly confused.

In a later trip to Kamouraska with her husband Albert Poulin, they brought Lydia's nephew, Ralph Hurley.  He was very excited to make the trip until he found his role was to replace the water in the old car's radiator.

I once saw a photograph of the elder grandmother Monique Saint-Pierre-Dessaint, wife of Michel Caron, and she was very wrinkled!  I heard from her living granddaughters that her daughter Delia, Memere's aunt and step-grandmother, lived to be 103.  Delia's granddaughter, Laura Bosse of Lewiston, Maine, lived to be 102.  My grandmother Lydia Poulin lived to be 99 and 9 months and both of her sisters Mary Belanger Desjardins of Rumford, Maine, and Mathilda "Tillie" Belanger Hurley of Lewiston, Maine, also lived into their late nineties.

Monique had been a mid-wife, like her daughter Rose Caron was.  Rose was also a physician's assistant.  Her grandson and great-grandson became medical doctors.
Monique's paternal grandmother, Marie Anne Cloutier, descends from Francoise Hebert, one of the first midwives in New France.  Francoise Hebert was a granddaughter of the apothecary Louis Hebert who explored the eastern seaboard with Samuel D. Champlain.  She was elected to this position by the majority of the women in the town according to Rene Jette's Dictionnaire Genealogique des Familles du Quebec which is available in French-Canadian genealogical societies.  If you are interested in Louis Hebert, much information can be found on him through an internet search.  This is a tiny biography:  LOUIS HÉBERT, APOTHECARY TO NEW FRANCE (CANADA)

Monique's great-grandmother was Marie-Francoise Caron, whose sister Marie Louise Caron who married Antoine Dionne Sansoucy together are direct ancestors of the Dionne quintuplets.   And her Canadian brother Ignace Caron/Carron was captured with Acadians as a prisoner of war by the English during the French and Indian War.  The plight of the Acadians in exile is a tragic one with many ships overcrowded and some lost at sea, many families torn apart as Acadians were loaded upon ships to ports in many parts of the world.Ignace was taken to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a where he married Acadian Marie Anne Thibodeau on 2 June 1762 at Philadelphia (St-Joseph), Pennsylvania, English Colonies). .  Ignace Caron and his wife Marie-Anne Thibodeau survived to return to Canada.  Monique also has another Caron line of ascent.  All of these Carons descend from the original ancestors Robert Caron of La Rochelle, Aunis, (Charente-Maritime) France and Marie Crevet of Beneauville (Calvados: 140060) France who married at Notre Dame in Quebec on 25 October 1637.

A note to new genealogists:  Research becomes really fun when you find out of the ordinary information.  Finding the history around those events will help place your ancestors and their families in historical events that shaped their lives. 

If your interest is piqued, check out these sites or others:
Film reenactments of the deportation of Acadians.
The Acadians in Pennsylvania.
The ships of the expulsion