Hi, there.

I'm Tom Bergeron, or Bergeron.

Now, I say it that way because we're here to celebrate Franco-American culture and its importance in building New England.

Family really is at the center of the Franco-American culture, and so is faith and hard work.

And that's what this story is all about.

There is an old saying that if you want to find Franco-Americans, you should follow the rivers of New England.

That's where you'll see the mills, where, starting in the mid 1880s, many found work.

By the turn of the century, over half a million had come here from Quebec.

Mainly they were looking for a better quality of life for their families, but in the process they helped build the New England economy.

It was hard work, but they were used to it in Quebec.

They had farmed under the most difficult conditions until they couldn't do it any longer.

This is their story told by the people who lived it.

Your friends and neighbors.

They came by train, horse and buggy, and one man, according to legend, even snowshoe across the White Mountains to get here by the turn of the century.

Over half a million French Canadians would make the journey from Quebec to New England.

Julian, Olivier's grandfather, made the trip in 1908.

We were economic immigrants.

We were looking for a better life.

We were doing, like many people came to this country that my my grandparents came here because there was nothing for them in Canada.

Franco-American Claire Quintal is professor emerita at Assumption College in Worcester.

When you're doing subsistence farming in Canada and New England, soil isn't that great.

Well, the Canadian isn't any better, and the climate is even worse in the sense that the growing season is even shorter.

So subsistence was about the name of the game.

A game many were losing.

Here in New England, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

Huge mills lined the rivers.

Mills desperate for workers, recently completed railroad lines connecting Quebec to New England made the province a natural choice for recruiters from the mills.

Novelist Ernie Hiebert is a descendent of one of those early immigrants.

My grandfather, he and his brother were orphaned when they were young.

And somebody we don't know who put them on a train.

And they ended up in New Hampshire.

He was 11 years old.

His brother was nine.

It's something I tried to write about, actually, about what it would be like to, you know, show up in a, you know, be put this put on a train, and show up and have people you don't know, speaking a language you didn't understand.

You know, deal with it.

But I, I feel I can't, I can't write that, I don't know, I don't I can't feel that.

It cost just $10 and was about a day's journey to travel by rail from Quebec to New England in the late 1800s.

Railroad agents often worked as recruiters for mills, telling the French Canadians what mills were hiring and where.

Business owner Bill Aubuchon recalls his grandmother's emigration to Massachusetts in the early 1900s.

And my grandmother had sold the farm in Yamaska.

And I don't know where she got the ability to get on that train who never spoke English, even when she died.

Get on the train, come all the way down to Fitchburg.

And that person who was invited to had a little apartment for her down in lower (inaudible).

And she went in there and that's where she lived.

And she brought in my father, my uncle Arther tand my aunt (inaudible) were living in a small apartment with her.

It became urban overnight.

You know, these are farmers in Canada.

They are.

They live in small villages at best.

But very often in isolated farms.

Overnight.

You have a night train ride there in cities now, a second level or, you know, cities.

Very few of them go to Boston, for example.

Some do.

But, you know, they go to Manchester, they go to Lewiston, Maine, they come to Worcester, they go to Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

By 1910, about a third of the workforce of the mills was Franco-American.

They spent their days making cotton, wool and shoes.

It would not be an easy job.

(MUSIC) My father would tell me, you know, Billy, when I worked at the cotton mills, there was a big sign in the front door.

Always sunup to sundown, six days a week, and the pay was $3 a week.

Oh, when the sun was a little delayed, you worked a little less.

But that was the schedule.

And it was $3 a week.

New Hampshire photographer Gary Sampson's family came here from Quebec when he was seven years old.

I feel like my own personal roots are entrenched in the very basic work ethic of of New England working in the mills, but I think of the great success throughout New England, not only in New Hampshire or in Manchester, but that the great success that the textile mills had in the 19th and early 20th century.

And if you look at, say, a community like Manchester, where 40% of the mills workforce was French-Canadian.

On my first day of work at a shoe factory, this was the International Shoe Factory here in Manchester.

At that, I was a tack puller, just pulling tacks out of the last of the shoes that when I came home after my first day of work, I went to bed exhausted at 5:30, and I skipped my first supper as as a work, as a working young man.

And you know, from that day on, I was convinced of the hard work that our people do and did to earn a living with your hands.

And that day I've had the greatest respect, admiration, affection, and even partisanship for the person who does this kind of work.

They do it for us in this case so that we might wear shoes.

My father worked 55 hours a week.

One week days, one week nights in a, you know, a room.

That was just an incredible racket of, you know, these power looms.

And, you know, it was just it was really incredibly hard work.

It was very loud.

It was very hot.

And it was dangerous as all hell.

And there were many things that they didn't complain about that they just took for granted, like the inhaling of dust all the time.

You just accepted that.

And thus people died of consumption and they died of tuberculosis.

It's a story repeated time and time again in the Franco-American community.

Hard work, long hours.

Low pay.

But always there was a sense of pride.

My grandfather was very proud of his roots.

He was very proud of the fact that he could do it.

And he always tried to impress upon us the fact that we had the wherewithal, God given gifts to help ourselves, support ourselves and our families.

And though most Franco-American who immigrated here had little formal education, they knew they must provide for their children so they could move ahead to accomplish that.

They built entire school systems.

I went to high school here starting in 1948.

I'm a graduate of the class of 1952, and this was sort of a regional high school for all of the Catholic students in West Manchester.

They had great pride in themselves and great pride in their families, and they saw education as being the key to taking the next step, and would do almost anything that they had to do to provide you with that education, even if it meant going without a lot of the things that they would like to have.

And they kind of relived their lives through the success of their children, just as we're attempting to do now.

At the height of the depression in 1933.

Storyteller B Russo was just finishing his high school education.

I was offered by my teacher in bookkeeping at Berlin High School that I had.

A door was wide open for me for Bentley School of Accounting and Finance, and the cost was $385 per semester.

I came home and spoke to my dad and my family on the Sunday.

I had one brother and my dad looked at me and he said, we'd love to send you to school.

But he said, I'm a foreman on the Brown.

Company of Dillon Mills railway section.

My take home pay back in 1933 was $18.65 a week.

That was for six days at $0.50 an hour.

He said, we haven't got the money to send you to school.

But he said, I don't want you to feel bad, but I'm going to tell you how I feel about schooling.

I got out of school in the fourth grade in the rural country school, where they taught me how to read and write and count.

Now, he said, you're graduating from high school.

That's a big step in education.

He said, you no doubt will get married.

It'll be up to you to see that your children go to college and get degrees, which I can't give you.

And that's just the way it worked out.

All my three children had their degrees.

I think eventually people of Franco-American heritage decided, yes, we will move forward.

The establishment of this college here.

And Notre Dame.

College was established because Franco-American families after the war, when the mills were closed, came and approached our congregation and said, well, we're thinking of educating our daughters now.

And so this college was actually founded at the beginning for the express purpose of educating Franco-American women.

I'm always moved by the work ethic of the Franco-American, the hard physical labor that the Franco-American especially seemed to be subject to, to working in the lumbering camps, the textile mills, the shoe factories of of New England.

And, and I don't think that New England would be the place that it is in terms of its success during that period, without the contributions of the French Americans.

That ability, along with the reputation for hard work, helped make Franco-American the cornerstone of the New England workforce.

They are tough.

They're characters.

There are a lot of fun.

I find them very entertaining and interesting.

I have a client, for example, who sat me out because, he recognized I had a real French name.

Knew my of my family, my father, my grandfather, he's 87 years old.

He comes in here, he says, I'm a tough Frenchman.

And I said, I know you are.

He said, that's I'm related to people like you.

He says, well, that's why I came here, because you don't understand.

I said, well, I do understand and I like that about you, but you've got to try to, you know, if we're in court, wherever we are going to try to behave yourself a little bit.

Well, maybe so, but that's a tough, strong willed, crusty, personality that, that, is very endearing in a lot of ways.

But it's, it's endearing because it's the result of a lot of hard work.

Well, you know, French Canadians have a reputation, even in history, for having been very hard working and not only working hard, but not complaining about the hard work they were doing.

Part of my cultural heritage is this work ethic, the work ethic being, well, we can outwork any damn Irishman or Yankee around and that'll be our edge.

It was an edge that would propel many Franco Americans to move beyond the mills.

My grandfather was a, real special guy.

He had a trade.

He was a trade.

He wasn't just your ordinary immigrant working in the mill like my mother's people.

He was a tradesman.

He was a cigar maker.

And my father tells the story of my grandfather wearing gloves to go to work.

White gloves.

He was like, you know, what this country needs is a good $0.05 cigar.

My grandfather invented the (Inaudible) Cigar of me and my grandmother.

She sold the farm for $2,000.

She never wanted to touch a penny of it when she got the check.

We came to (Inaudible) She went to the, Fitchburg Savings Bank, and she put the $2,000 in the bank.

And she had made up her mind that each one of her four children would get at their age, and then $500 apiece.

The amount of net value each of us got from the $500, the multiplier is mind boggling.

And you can just look at this building and, we got 146 stores.

I think there was an attitude or a thought, you know, for many years that most French Canadians, just came and worked in the mills.

And I'm discovering through, my own research that, you know, we had outstanding photographers and writers and businesspeople and politicians who quietly went about their business.

You know, there's some really good Franco-American, writers, who made their mark.

The Grace Metalious of course, was a Franco-American, Jack Kerouac, whose French was a Franco American.

Annie Proulx who maybe the best writer writing today, was Franco-American, on a father's side.

I think that among those of us who writers who have this Franco-American background, there's this, feeling of it all is not quite well that we're not quite home here in the United States.

There is some something else out there for photographer Gary Sampson, discovering his Franco-American roots as a child has given him artistic inspiration.

As we look at the Franco-American community in New England and we look at some of our heroes or some of our accomplished writers and artists, people like Jack Kerouac, for instance.

I think I have I have a hero in terms of photography.

He was a photographer who was born in Quebec, named Ulric Bourgeois, born in 1874, came to Manchester at the turn of the century and established himself as really the finest commercial photographer in the city at that time, and went on to make, great photographs.

On a personal level that I think are outstanding.

And I look at this, this is superb work.

I mean, this stands above the average work done at that time.

So he became a hero to me of someone who, we need to celebrate because I think that Franco-American as a group are pretty modest people.

That it maybe it takes another generation, the young, a younger generation, to start to look at this work and bring it to the public's attention and say, look, we we have amongst us writers and thinkers and intellectuals and artists, people creating photography or artwork, and that really enriches the culture.

It is also a culture enriched by the hard work and passion of the Franco-American.

They saw this as a great land of opportunity, and they took advantage of it to the extent that they could.

But they wanted us to be in a different place.

For well over 100 years, Franco Americans have been making their mark in New England, from business to politics to the arts and education.

They've established themselves as an essential part of the New England landscape.

It is the story of the work that they did and the sacrifices that they made without ever saying, you know, you're so lucky that we did this for you.

It's really quite a classic American success story.

When the French Canadians came to New England, they brought with them a doctrine.

It wasn't anything on paper.

It was a deeply held belief.

The doctrine was called le servants or survival.

And it held that the survival of the French-Canadian culture depended on the survival of the language.

To that end, the early immigrants developed a number of French-Canadian institutions, newspapers, fraternal organizations, schools, and the church.

The church was the very center of the community.

It's like a shrine.

It's a shrine.

It's a little bit, you know, like the mentality what made the Egyptians build the pyramids?

This was just transporting the French-Canadian desire for a beautiful church from the province of Quebec to the United States.

This is for the glory of God.

And people got to know that that's an important part of what they do.

Most of these people would have made any type of sacrifice to build a beautiful church.

This was the centerpiece, the very core of their lives.

The desire for a beautiful church was transported from Canada by the early immigrants, but so was a great fear.

A fear of losing their faith.

Church officials had warned that the United States, a huge Protestant land, could swallow them up.

This country here was perceived as basically English, which is true Anglophile, basically Protestant.

So very Wasp and anyone coming from a Catholic and French.

And there's a very messianic feeling among the French for the (inaudible) in Canada, for coming from this godly land to an ungodly land.

Then they couldn't help but be absorbed by the corruption of the United States.

Yeah, those are harsh words.

But I think in the in the mentality that was there.

There was this mandate and it ended up a mandate.

The slogan (perds ta langue perds ta foi) if you if you lose your language, lose your faith, you lose your faith, you lose your soul.

You lose your soul, you go to hell.

And that's pretty scary stuff, right?

I mean, an eternity in hell, that's pretty bad.

So why cling to your to to French?

Well, you might be damned otherwise.

And we heard it a lot growing up, mostly from the pulpit, but also from our teachers.

Again, there was a sense that the two were so inextricably linked language and religion, religion and language that if you stopped speaking French, you would, you know, you would just let go of your religion.

You would no longer be a practicing Catholic.

My own mother is 95.

She was convinced that she couldn't pray to God in English.

She just didn't understand.

I mean, you know, it was a deep, deeply felt sensation and they didn't know how to speak to God in English.

Near the churches, Franco Americans built their own parish schools.

They, too, would help maintain the French language.

The parishes were built with the nickels and dimes of these laborers in the mills.

And they built entire school systems.

Absolutely incredible.

I think that idea of (perds ta langue perds ta foi) You lose your faith, you lose.

They came here.

I think it was really implanted.

They said, we will not we will maintain our religion, will maintain our language.

So they built these institutions where both French and English were taught, and the faith was passed on.

In the morning, for example, if it was English, we were tuned into English, and we did math and history and science and those things.

And we knew that after lunch we would come back and there would be a different set of teachers, and it was French, but we didn't ever see that as being something that was not proper or not natural.

It's just the way it was wasn't written down.

But there was pretty strong sensation that the oldest boy was going to be a priest, and the second was going to be a physician, and probably the third was going to be a dentist.

And, I mean, they had kind of figured that out in their minds.

At the highest calling, obviously, would be a calling to the church.

So anyone brought up in a French-Canadian background like I was at that time in the 1930s, and the very early 1940s, was attracted or was much impressed by the religious life.

It was all around you.

The church was not only at the place where you want to worship.

You went to the parish school.

The your activities were revolved a great deal around the church, the social, your social life, your recreational life.

So in other words, the the whole atmosphere was such that you were rather attracted to the church and one of the ideals of every mother, almost every mother, anyway, was for their son to become a priest.

So it was kind of natural for me as I was growing up, I had the influence of my parents, who were very devoted to the church.

We were so close to priests in our parish.

There's one priest, especially, who came when I was in the about the fourth grade, and I looked up to him as if he were a god.

You know, I, and I liked what he did.

And we became altar boys.

And he would he used to play ball with us and organize our teams and, take us on trips.

And, so I just like the ministry he was a happy man, a very happy priest.

And I said way back in the fourth grade, I want to be like him.

And I know that my parents will support that.

And I think the people in the parish will be happy.

So this was all part of the Franco-American feeling of being close to the church.

There was sister, who was a sister of Holy Cross.

Was reached the age of 101, and her name was Sister St. Ovide.

Now, I don't know whether or not there was a saint Ovide but she took that name on and and God bless her and build character, I'm sure for her, as a as it has for me to carry a name like that.

It was asked in our confirmation how many of us would be nuns when we grew up.

And I remember all of them standing up except me.

And then how many of them would mary and I still sat, and a lot of others stood up as well.

That doesn't mean anything.

I guess it's, I guess it was life.

It's life experience.

And what you what you had seen and what you wanted and what you didn't want.

La Sentinel, it was a newspaper in Rhode Island.

It was also a symbol of a bitter battle in the 1920s that would leave its mark on the church and the community at the heart of the battle.

Rivalry with the Irish, especially for control of the church.

The French Canadians felt that the Irish were dominating and running the Catholic Church in the United States.

They felt that they were being dominated by an Irish hierarchy, and that they also felt, to a degree, it was true that the Irish hierarchy or hierarchy was trying to limit the number of French Canadians who would study for the priesthood, and once they were ordained, that they were not appointing them to the top Administrative posts.

And I think with each wave of immigrants, there has always been that kind of isolationism where we're going to stick to ourselves and, and kind of fight the fight that has to be fought to have our rights and our respect that is due to us.

You know, they brought the bishop to court.

Another Irish bishop because they felt he but what he wanted to do, which was perfectly legitimate, by the way, was to build regional high schools, Catholic regional high schools.

What the French was saying was, it's a good idea, Bishop, but we know that these regional high schools will be English speaking of necessity.

And we have our own high schools.

You know, we've we've done that.

See, they had worked hard to build up that whole infrastructure to protect that whole frenchness.

It got so terrible that Rome, excommunicated 60 members of parishes in Rhode Island and, put La Fortuna, the paper of which I spoke on the index.

So we French Canadians have the honor of having one of our newspapers put on the index and forbidden books to read in the Catholic Church.

It caused quite a commotion, and unfortunately, it had the effect, you know, whether you were for them or against them, of splitting the Franco-American movement and and contributed to, to a certain loss of, cohesion in a group.

And that really hurt.

I mean, it split families and their families split right down the middle, where some believed in the rightfulness of the cause of opposing the bishop.

And others said, well, no, you know, you can't go against a bishop.

And that was a that was a difficult time.

By 1936, those who were excommunicated made their peace with the church.

But the bitterness would linger for many years to come.

When I was named here, I was the first non Irish bishop in Rhode Island.

And, there were many French people who were, over here.

And kind of a comical thing happened.

The people who heard my name on the radio, Gelineau, and they thought, sure, it was Italian.

They thought it ended in an O.

And then when they saw it printed and the EAU at the end, they realized that I was French.

So they said they had been dancing on that Federal Hill, which is an Italian area here in, Providence at the time that they heard it on the radio.

And then when they saw it, they stopped dancing there, and they started dancing up in.

Woonsocket, which is a little Canada.

The Franco Americans had at every turn fought to preserve their language.

But events far from the secluded enclaves in Manchester, Saint Johnsbury and Lewiston would narrowly defeat them.

Our battle cry is remember Pearl Harbor.

The president's signature speeds is our total defense energies and resources to all out victory.

The greatest factor was World War Two.

As I see it.

With World War Two, it was, this dislocation of hundreds of thousands and millions of Americans and, of course, involved in this, dislocation.

Were these, French-Canadian or Franco-American young men, tens of thousands of them, throughout all of New England and of course, many thousands upon thousands, including myself here in New Hampshire and the war brought these people all over the United States to serve in different military camps.

And then the, the Navy and then the Marines and life was never just the same because many of them did not come back.

They were exposed to other parts of the country, other cultures, other ethnic groups, and dispersed the community.

And that was the beginning of the end.

Some will tell you, someone told me one time of a family of 11 children, and we all gathered on a Sunday afternoon like so many other families.

And they spoke French, of course.

But then one of the brothers brought home, I think she was from Georgia, was so polite.

So everyone begins to speak English.

And that was slowly but surely the erosion.

In the presence of senators, congressmen and the heads of veterans organizations, President Roosevelt signs G.I.

Joe's Bill of rights.

The G.I.

Bill gives you a chance, to go to college and become a member of the middle class.

Do you want to live in a little Canada in a three decker?

That is, you know, a little rundown, perhaps?

No.

You buy yourself a ranch in the suburbs or house in the suburbs.

So the cohesiveness of the Little Canada, you know, the enclave, the ethnic enclave somehow then loosens up, you know, and if you live in the suburbs, your children are likely to have those neighbors.

What?

Irish, Italians, whatever.

And then where are you going to send your children to school?

In the old days, the parish was in walking just within walking distance.

So we went to the parish school.

Now you're in the suburbs and if you don't send your child, you stay Catholic though in many instances.

So schools and churches grew up in the suburbs.

But these, you know, they catered everyone.

So you're not going to have a bilingual half day French anymore.

The closing of the mills added to the loss of language.

With so many Franco Americans working in the mills, it had been easy to speak French in the new economy.

It would not be.

Add to all this the Catholic reform movement known as Vatican Two.

In Rome, it was decided the church services would be said in the vernacular.

In this country that meant English.

Even in Franco-American communities.

And I still distinctly recall, first of all, how opposed my grandparents were to having the mass being celebrated in the vernacular and in the vernacular, for our parish was French.

It wasn't English.

And even and yet my my grandparents were upset about that, that it was that all of a sudden we'd be celebrating mass, in French, and that because it was French, because it was the vernacular and not Latin.

And you could imagine the rebellion that, at least in many parishes, experiences an experience when when the parish priest started deciding that some masses should be celebrated in English, it's only with Vatican two that the doors opened up.

And by then the whole of the French Catholic parish on its parishioners had loosened, in the sense that it was no longer, that ethnic in the language driven, you know, it had become a church and it is now a church pretty much like every other.

Catholic church.

And certainly much has changed since these children posed for their confirmation pictures some 60 years ago.

But the faith is not lost.

It is still very much a centerpiece of the Franco-American community.

I'm here in the corporations.

This was housing originally owned by the mill, and it was here and in the triple deckers that Franco-American lived and raised their families, which were everything to them.

And where do those strong family ties come from?

Well, one probable answer is from their life in Quebec, where they learned to depend on each other for their very survival.

I'm driving through, southern Quebec, and I look at the farmland and I think just, you know, I'm, you know, first generation born here and thinking that for 300 years, my mother, who came from Sherbrooke, that her family and her, you know, and, and her ancestors all farmed that land.

I just feel connected to the land, to the people, to the spirit.

There's a certain way, I think, that people think that it makes sense to me that I understand.

So much did the early immigrants want to not forget their life in Quebec, they essentially recreated it here in New England.

The communities that grew up near the mills, called.

Little Canadas, were tight knit and very self-sufficient.

Stores, banks, insurance companies, hospitals, social clubs all were set up to accommodate the newcomers, but most of their support came from their family.

The goal, of the Franco-American, who had come from French Canada into the New England states.

One of their great goals was to own a three decker as a place to live, and if they did buy one, or they did have one built, they would always live on a third floor and then collect rents from the first and second floors to help them pay off the mortgage.

And they say about three deckers you were never lonely and you never lacked for, a babysitter.

There was always someone there.

There was a great deal of comfort with, with, large families.

And you get a lot of support.

Hopefully this is something that we can impart to our children.

I was the oldest of eight, and I think that, I don't think this is unique again, to the, to the French Canadian immigrant population, but certainly, is is was part of our experience.

And that is the big families were cherished, encouraged.

It wasn't a problem at all.

It was something that we were we look forward to, people who could have a lot of children were very much, celebrated in the community.

It was a wonderful gift for God to have a lot of children.

But it seems politics played a part to the French, had lost out to the British in North America, and there were far fewer French than British.

The church and the government decided, oh, we have it.

We have an answer.

We'll have that.

Women have lots of kids.

It's called, the French expression is (la revanche des berceaux) the revenge of the cradles will get you.

We'll do it our way.

But we will maintain population parity with the British by.

By having our own children.

By the time the latter part of the 19th century came around, we're talking about people by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.

The estimates are 1 million to 1 million and a half people came here.

And on the other side, the estimate is that one half of Quebec was emptied out.

Well, the mathematics mean that there had to be 2 to 3 million people in Quebec now to go in a span of 125 years or so.

That's a lot of increasing and multiplying.

I'm named after, a priest.

His name was, father, Joseph Ernest Vackers.

And my actual complete name is Joseph Ernest Vackers Hebert.

It was traditional among them, among a lot of the French, French Canadians to name the oldest son, Joseph.

Well, if all the all the sons are named Joseph, there's a lot of Joe's around.

So they give you another name too.

And usually you went by that name even though you had officially you were a Joseph.

In reality, you were an Ernie when I was born in 1951, or my mother was anticipating my birth, because she, she also both my parents came to New England only speaking French, and my mother had a very negative experience.

She was put back a grade, because of her lack of knowledge of English, that she felt that she wanted to make sure her children didn't go through, the prejudice, some of the prejudice that was directed towards French Canadians or Franco-Americans.

So she wanted to name, name the children, very Anglo kinds of names.

And she told me that she was driving around with my father.

They saw Gary Cooper's name up in a marquee, and she thought Gary would be a good American kind of name to give me.

I read somewhere that in Lowell they said, the best cop, in Lowell is the matriarch is the mother of these children, these Franco-American children.

She can bring everybody into line, including the husband.

My mother.

Outstanding woman.

She only went, maybe did a 6 or 7 grade, but she she's going to raise all of her children.

And that second floor of the house.

You never saw her in pajamas.

You never saw her.

No.

And it was all done in the in her bedroom.

She went in the bedroom clothed.

She came out of the bedroom clothed.

She was so distinguished.

She understood English a little bit, but she couldn't speak it.

And she was very proud.

I think women are sort of the linchpin of Franco-American society.

They're the point at which everything turns.

The mother of the family.

(Piano Playing and Singing) One lesson Franco-American parents would teach their children.

Don't complain about hardship.

My mother would say my cousins, which would mean back there somewhere, lived in the woods.

Their father worked in the woods during the winter time, which is what all men did in the wintertime.

And their mother died and the oldest child took care of the other children, and they had no running water.

And during the winter time he would go down and he would chop a hole in the ice, and he'd dunk his brothers and sisters in to wash them off.

Now these are the stories.

So I mean, as a child, this is awful.

So nothing was ever as bad for us as it would have been there.

My mother described, you know, having, you know, going to the grocery store and having to buy six bananas.

That was the limit.

Get six bananas.

And mom said, oh, they were so treasured, you know, that she would eat one on the way.

She'd actually buy seven and just get one all to herself.

We were not a wealthy family, and people used to often, donate clothing to us.

And my dignity and pride would not allow me to walk down the aisle at church with somebody else's dress on.

And I was very skilled in sewing and creative.

So I would remake all the clothes so that I was using their fabric, but I would redesign all the dresses.

And I think that first time I ever got a store bought suit was when I graduated from high school, and my mom would take my dad's clothing and remake them and make white shirts and do all of the things.

So store bought clothes or something that we didn't know much about.

If you go into a Franco-American or a French-Canadian home, it's always clean.

It's and the ladies are well dressed and they probably made their own dress and their hair as well done.

And they speak very well, and they will use ru to you in French, which means, it's a courteous way of addressing you.

They will not say hi when you walk through the door.

They won't say, salu.

They will say Bonjour, and they will address you, Madame or Monsieur.

There is, there is a an inbred, kind of, courteousness and politeness.

And the word is, I think, dignity.

At Christmas and New Year's, Franco-American celebrated just as their ancestors had.

Christmas was a revered day.

But around the holiday, particularly afterwards, in the 12 days of Christmas, leading up to the epiphany every night, people would go to someone else's home and they'd have a big dinner and a lot of entertainment singing, and they would do that for that 12 day period, go to someone else's home.

And so they'd rotate, the home.

And, and from that tradition started, what we call réveillée means really staying up, staying awake, welcoming the birth of Christ at around the time when you would go to midnight mass and you would go to midnight mass and you'd try to be as solemn as possible, but you'd really look forward to afterwards, because then you were able to have fun.

A big part of the tradition of réveillée is the food.

Well, let's stir it up here and see how we're doing.

Don't want it to stick to the bottom.

That looks pretty good.

Yeah, consistency is good.

I think we can turn that right off and, bring it over here, move it over to the side.

So what we've got is the stuffing.

This is meat and potatoes, and it's, pretty heavy stuff.

And you have to keep that.

You have to have a consistency that's got a hold together somehow.

And people use breadcrumbs.

They use cracker crumbs.

I use it because my mother used because my father's mother used, potatoes.

The spices depend on again how you were raised.

And at home it was the, poultry seasoning.

So what we want to do now is fill up the pie crust.

I'm an adult celebrating with my wife's family and my family, my son.

Certain traditions, the food traditions carry on.

It's just it's reassuring.

It makes me feel like I belong.

And that the world is still a safe place to be in.

Mother in law would make this pie.

It was an open crust pie.

And it was maple.

Maple sugar and a bottom.

But it.

And then she would top it with slices of pineapple and whipped cream.

And then you cut it and it's like sugar fudge.

It's very good, very sweet, very good food is very important to Franco-American family and cooking good food.

And of course, using maybe a little too much butter and desserts and so forth.

I think we still had a tendency to cook the way that cooked in Canada when we were getting up at 5 in the morning, you could have major portions and still not put on weight, but we really had a tradition of not skimping on food.

There's a tradition we have in our family, but I think a lot of French kids have, and that is that, every New Year's Day, the, the head of the family, which is usually the grandfather, gathers all the family together, and we all kneel down.

And the father, the grandfather blesses the entire family.

And then in each of the families, the father in the household blesses the children and the spouse.

My father on New Year's Day would get up at 4:00 in the morning, and he'd walk up to my grandfather's house to be blessed after the blessing they'd always have a drink.

And with the blessing said the celebration would begin and last throughout the night.

It's a certain joie de vivre to survive through hardship, you know, and I think, that joy of living with that, they call it, has always been there.

You know, they they wanted to keep their music alive.

There are saying that say, you know, you learn the music and culture never dies.

You know, your your your family never dies.

And because these songs are part of your, your get togethers, times were cold in Canada.

You know, you found ways that you weren't going to go out to too many places, but, they would go to different homes and have soirees.

And these French parties.

And when we visited my grandmother in the Eastern.

Townships on a Saturday night, it was always, what neighbor do we go to?

Because there were lots of living rooms open to us.

And, you know, they would push the furniture against the wall, roll up the rugs and spread some cornstarch on the floor so you could slip when you danced.

Much of the Franco-American music came from the logging camps of Quebec.

It was a way to make it through the long winters.

Far from home.

And as you might expect, the songs they sang were a bit bothered.

Their songs about, you know, a little daring, the guy, you know, or, or the wife.

There are a lot of traditional songs about the wife or hiding the lover inside a trunk, but the husband decided we should sell the trunk because, I lost my job today.

So what can we sell?

And she says, no, sell my gowns, sell my gowns, sell my dresses.

But leave the trunk.

Lots of those because they didn't make it in the good book.

So for some reason, the good book, which used to be found in almost every Franco-American home, contained the songs that were church approved.

(Guitar Playing and Singing) And the way we sing our songs in French.

You sing one verse and everybody repeats it.

Like for instance, (Singing).

Everybody repeats, (Singing) And all the songs are that way that everybody participates.

We all have a good time together.

That spirit, that joie de vivre has endured despite great hardship, with pride and passion.

Franco Americans have not only survived, they've prevailed in the dust and noise of the mills.

They began to build a life here that would keep family and faith at its center.

In the process, Franco, Americans have enriched us all.

They've become a bright thread in the tapestry of New England.

Don't look at me the way you see yourself.

Take the time to listen to me.

To understand me.

Don't forget.

(Guitar Playing and Singing) (Piano Playing and Singing)