In October, 1998, I accepted an invitation to participate in a consensus conference on tobacco control and the treatment of smoking in France. While I was pleased to have the opportunity to serve as an expert witness before a jury charged with making recommendations to the French Ministry of Health, I was also eager to get a chance to explore the local origins of my 17th century ancestor, Paul Vachon.

The consensus conference took place from October 7 to 9, and on Saturday the 10th, my wife Cindy and I took some time off to explore Paris. The first snapshot, taken from Place Trocadéro, shows a mime playing Charlie Chaplin, with the Eiffel Tower in the background; note the lighted sign on the tower that signifies that October 10 is exactly 448 days before the millenium! The second snapshot, taken nearby, shows me standing in front of a statue of Benjamin Franklin, who was the first United States ambassador to France; among his great accomplishments, he persuaded King Louis XVI to send the French navy and army to aid the American colonists, an act that lead to the defeat of the British at Yorktown and ended the American Revolutionary War.

After spending a few days touring the castles of the Loire in our rental car, I carried out my plan to visit the ancestral village of the founder of the Pomerleau line. Here are the clues that I had to guide me:

Before his death in 1974, my father, Ovide Sr., had traced the Pomerleau family name back to France in the 1600’s.

• Paul Vachon, royal notary, son of Vincent Vachon and Sapience Rabeau, was born in 1630 at Copechagnière (Vendée), France. Records indicated that Paul Vachon emigrated to New France in 1650 from the Port of Marseille and married Margeurite Langlois (baptised in 1639), daugher of Noël Langlois and Françoise Garnier, in 1653 in Quebec City. Paul Vachon died at Beauport, Quebec, in 1703; Margeurite Langlois died in 1697.

Using the internet, Cindy had located a 1997 Pomerleau website (source unknown) that corroborated my father’s brief history and yielded some additional information.

• All Pomerleaus are direct descendents of Paul Vachon, who was born in the village of La Copechagnière in the parish of La Roche-sur-Yon in Poitou (now Vendée) France in 1630. He was a Mason or Brick Layer who became a Notaire Royale probably as a result of his partial literacy (though his script is practically illegible). At age 20, he sailed to New France (Canada), and on October 22, 1653, at age 23, he married Marguerite Langlois, aged 14, in the Basilica of Notre Dame de Quebec. They had 12 children (5 boys and 7 girls). One son became a priest and another also did not marry. The other three sons, as was the custom of the time, took a second last name thus creating new branches. The three sons became known as Vachon, dit Desfourchette, dit Laminée, dit Pomerleau.
• Paul Vachon was the first Seigneur de Beauce, a county in Quebec located across the river from the city of Quebec; this county remains a family center. The Vachon coat of arms (!) is a golden cow with three spigots on a black field. Paul Vachon’s second son was Noël Vachon, dit Pomerleau, from whom all of us are descended. Nous sommes tous Beaucerons.
• Canadian members of the extended family have kept excellent records and some of the information cited here comes from snippets of internet correspondence. Major geographical areas where the family name can be found are Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto. In the United States, the family name can be found in Vermont, Maine, and Minnesota.

The reference to the parish of La Roche-sur-Yon was a big help because, until then, I had been unable to locate La Copechagnière on the map of France. Armed with this new information, we were able to determine that La Copechagnière was near the western coast of France, half way between Nantes and La Rochelle. Using a regional road atlas, Cindy and I traced the way to the village. As can be seen, La Copechagnière is a crossroads settlement at the intersection of routes D18 and D86 and consists of a few dozen houses or so. It took us just a few hours to go from the town of Saumur in Department of Maine et Loire to our destination in La Vendée. It was Tuesday, October13, a warm fall day with broken sunshine and high overcast. The route led us down gently winding roads along large green pastures with soft rolling hills—mostly cow country with small farms punctuated by small market towns and tiny villages.

We arrived around 4 pm. The place sign left no doubt that we had found our destination. I drove past a sports stadium (see masonry wall in background behind the sign for La Copechagnière) and a small cemetery along the way to the village center. There, I parked the car next to a church. I had noticed some older women chatting on an enclosed porch in the back of what seemed to be a rectory when I turned the car around, so I decided to see if I could learn something useful. They smiled when I approached and, encouraged, I told them I was searching for an ancestor. The leader of the group looked at me and immediately said "Paul Vachon?" When I recovered from my surprise, I said "Yes, how did you know that?" She said "You’re at least the third this year!" I asked her what she knew about Paul Vachon and she said she didn’t know very much except that he had lived in this village in the 16th century and had emigrated to Canada. "His family’s house is still here, across the street" she said. "Also, when you came into town, you passed a commemorative stone that bears his name, just in front of the stadium on Rue Paul Vachon." She had no idea who had put up memorials to Paul Vachon.

Armed with these tidbits, we started to explore the birthplace of Paul Vachon. The family house is right in the center of the village and looks remarkably intact for housing dating from the 1500’s; note the sign for Complexe Sportif in the photo. The view from the back of the house revealed an attached barn and neighboring houses with big gardens. The church was interesting and had some unusual features, like a barn-like steeple. While the church seemed rather old, the women told me it had been erected "only 112 years ago," replacing an ancient priory that went back to Paul Vachon’s time; the house that I thought was the rectory was where the monks had lived. The inside of the church revealed some handsome stained glass windows, one of which depicted events in the life its namesake, Saint Nicolas. Behind the church, next to the old priory, was the town common, a small park for playing the game of boules (like lawn bowling without the grass).

We headed back to the stadium to find the Complexe Sportif on Rue Paul Vachon. Directly in front of the stadium was a big stone listing the people responsible for the new sports facility. On the other side was the original marker, on which the following could still be deciphered: STADE PAUL VACHON 1630. The stadium consisted of an inside arena and an elaborate soccer field. Just beyond were the ubiquitous cow pastures. Directly across the street from the soccer field was the cemetery; note St. Nicolas Church in the distant background and the World War I memorial at the back). By regional standards, the cemetery is not very old; I suspect that many of the graves were relocated from a site next to the priory when the "new" church was built. What was impressed me, though, was that more than half the names in the cemetery ended in "eau" (i.e. "Payraudeau" and "Rocheteau"); thus, even though the name "Pomerleau" exists only in North America, the cemetery headstones suggest that, when Paul Vachon came to chose a new family name for his second son, Noël, he remembered the Vendée.

I was particularly struck by the monument in the last picture. It spoke powerfully about the terrible price that World War I exacted on villages like this one, with only a few hundred people. Below the column listing some major killing fields in this war—Argonne, Meuse, Champagne, Verdun—are plaques with the names of several dozen young men who never returned. Seeing this brought back something my maternal grandmother, Pauline Beaudet, had said to me when I was a very small child living in her home in the middle of the Second World War: "We came to the New World to escape the killing folly that seems to take place every generation." Her mother’s family, the Bernards, originated in the Moselle Valley on the border between France and Germany and from Rouen in Normandy—both scenes of bloody battles in the World Wars.

We have no information about what made Paul Vachon leave the Old World at the middle of the 17th century. To be allowed to emigrate, however, he would most likely have been healthy and strong, of good moral character, and a practicing Catholic. His ability to read and write was unusual for the time—since those who went to New France were mostly laborers, farmers, and fishermen led by a few priests and a handful of administrators. He must have used his skills to advantage, however, to become Seigneural Notary for the region of Beauce. Finally, it seems he sailed for Canada from the port of Marseille in the Mediterranean rather than the usual ports of departure on the Atlantic coast, La Rochelle and Nantes. How he ended up in the south of France at the age of 20 and what prompted him to embark on a one-way journey to the New World is lost in the mists of time.