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The Cyr family
I have a family name that's québécois but in my ancestors, we find Cyr, the name Cyr. On my wife's side, her grandmother was a Cyr. On my side, my great-grandmother was a Cyr. We know these Cyrs, back in 1785 when the Acadians had came here, there were nine brothers and these nine Cyr brothers, as young men at the time of the Deportation, had managed to escape the Deportation and they had fled to Québec. Therefore, three of those nine brothers had married Ayotte sisters from Kamouraska. Then, after the Treaty of Paris, having lived in Québec for a few years, they migrated back to what they considered Acadie. Not the original Acadie of Nova Scotia but Acadie, New Brunswick, so to speak, and they established themselves at Sainte-Anne du Pays-Bas, which is now Fredericton, New Brunswick. As the Acadians of Sainte-Anne du Pays-Bas are moving away, those who had acquired Québec in-laws tended to migrate to Madawaska. You know, I tend to say that when the Acadians came here in 1785, the in-laws moved in from Québec a year later and that the Ayotte sisters are followed by their brother Alexander, who's married to a Saucier, and the Sauciers were related to the Pelletiers, and the Pelletiers to the Ouellettes, and the Ouellettes to Sirois and so on, so forth. So you have this constant influx from Québec but not a repeated influx from Acadie. The Acadians grew by attrition, family attrition among the nine Cyr brothers where you have an average of ten a piece, ten children a piece, then by 1810 you've got 90 little Cyrs running in the woods here, but the Acadians had an advantage of being here first, they took the better places. For example, they picked the land site near the brook, near the brook where you could build a grist mill, or and they took the farm on the flats, the Saint-David flats, absolutely flat lands for about half a mile, and so you don't need to chase the oxen up to the top of the hill, you've got all these flats. So the Acadians developed sort of a leader situation. You know when this constant migration continued from Québec, young men coming from Québec had two choices. If he was lucky enough, he could marry an Acadian and perhaps be an in-law that might inherit that beautiful farm on the flats in Saint-David. If not, well his choice was to go into the second tier of lots, we say in French "aux concessions", in the background, and we sometimes talk, we use the word "colons", which is sort of colonists, you know, not in the form of the English colony but in the form of pioneer, "colons" and so by the 1840s, when the Acadians are sending their kids to school, the Québec children are still children of pioneers out there and they're still grubbing it.
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Title: The Cyr family
Description: Guy Dubay talks about the genealogy of the Cyr family and of the origins of the settlement of the Madawaska region.
Subjects: families; genealogy
Source: Connections Productions
Language: English
Date: 2007-03-06
Creator: Connections Productions
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