My name is Paul Comeau and I am on my mother's side the son of Réginne, à Léandé, à Johnny à Christophe à Joseph à Joseph. Joseph was the first to return, the first Acadian to return to St. Mary's Bay back in 18…, in 1768. So I'm a direct descendant of this first inhabitant of Clare. While I was at university my friend and I discovered a poem by a judge which mentioned our great-great-grandfathers, Johnny Dugas and Charles Robichaud. Ironically, my great-great-grandfather had murdered my friend's, my best friend's great-great-grandfather so we found it amusing because we had never heard of this before so this is when this great secret of the Dugas family started to unravel at least for us. We went with the poem to meet my friend's grandmother so she would talk to us about this incident that happened in the community. She absolutely refused, that's past we do not talk about those things and that was it, she was almost angry that we had even asked so we said well we won't get anywhere there. The poem you know pretty well set out a whole voyage of this unfortunate act, apparently the dispute had started aboard a vessel that they were both aboard, Charles was, Robichaud was the captain and I suppose that Johnny was a deck hand. Apparently, they were unable to resolve their argument aboard and Johnny indicated that the argument would be settled on land once they returned to Grosses-Coques. Of course, this happened and Johnny was set on settling the score and on one evening after having sharpened his knife, he took off and went to pay a visit to Charles Robichaud. As Charles was coming out from lifting a pail of water out of the well, he refused to fight with Johnny and Johnny just attacked him and he suffered knife wounds and he died from his wounds a few days after. This was for us at that point the end of the story, nobody wanted to talk to us about it. Once I moved back to the area ten years ago in the house where the restaurant Chez Christophe is presently, I found a bundle of old letters dating from 1871 to 1878. These letters were letters that Johnny Dugas had written to his father Christophe and to his mother and siblings while he was in prison in Digby and in Halifax. He spoke to, whenever he wrote to his father he would write to him in English because he had certain things to discuss about what, what's happening. Apparently the freemason movement came to his defence and they organized a petition to ask the governor general of Canada to pardon him and to release him from prison. So he encouraged his father, Christophe, to get signatures from influential people in the community and even went to say preferably merchants and people of great influence. So eventually his wish came about but before, you know, in the letters I was reading, he described the conditions in jail which he found absolutely difficult, in one particular letter to his mother which he wrote in French he said oh what I wouldn't give to be home tonight to at least eat the scraps from the table and so it was a pretty clear indication as to the prison conditions at the time. Eventually he was pardoned, he was released from jail and he started his family here in Grosses-Coques. Him and his wife Monique had 11 children, three died when they were infants, nine survived and they've been in the community, they got involved and continued raising their family and that's pretty well, there are still a number of answered questions which I hope some day I'll be able to research and find all of the answers to the great Dugas secret.