A New Computer

Well, new to us anyway. Hi everyone. Sorry to be so quiet for the last couple of weeks. Holiday activities and some car problems (at one point, Toby and I were huddled together in the cold at Sullivan's garage, waiting for Paul's Mom to come give us a ride, because both of our vehicles were waiting to be repaired - funny to think about now, but not at the time) and the constant computer problems, kept me from sitting down to talk to you.
So, we now have a cast off computer that we are buying from Michelle's son Patrick, which brings us a quite a bit closer to being up-to-date. However, our old scanner is just too old to work with this computer, so still no pictures are forthcoming. I've found some great ones though, so when I can post them, you're going to love them :-)
While Paul was setting the computer up, I was filing some of the piles of genealogy stuff that had accumulated around the room. It was fun to revisit some old relatives that I haven't thought much about for awhile. I had printed a fan chart of Papa Sirois' family tree, which is a chart with boxes for each ancestor starting with the most recent in the center, Papa in this case, and getting wider as each larger number of parents are added until it resembles a fan. If you have it all filled in and find every ancestor, back 12 generations or so, it can be a big circle. This one went 8 generations, and was missing about 64 people from the outer edge, but it still was pretty impressive to look at. It made me realize how much work I've done. After getting all the odds and ends put away, while I was in the Franco American mood, I started reading the book that the libraries in Old Town, Orono, Bangor and Hampden are promoting this month as part of a joint community reads project. I'm going to be presenting a program on Franco American Genealogy in a week or so as part of the activities, so thought I should read the book before then. The book is "Papa Martel" by Gerard Robichaud and is about a Franco family living in Maine - probably L/A or Augusta - around the time of the depression. There are lots of kids with an uneducated, hard working but fun loving Papa and a convent-educated, stern but loving Maman, keeping them all in line. In one part, the children are all around the table doing homework, and Maman insists that the house, and Papa be quiet during this time. He has a hard time following this rule and gets shushed by her several times until finally, he gets one of the kids to insist he tell the story of how he met Maman and she loses control of the whole group. It made me think of stories Mom and Aunt Jeannette have told me of Grampy Dubay. He loved his children and loved to play with them, but was not much in the discipline department. That was Grammies job, and I understand she was very good at it. I can just picture their large family in that little house, with all those rambunctious boys, being brought to attention by their formidable Maman - of course in my mind she is always a little white haired woman, but I suspect she was a pretty imposing figure when she was younger. I've read other stories of Francos and French Canadians that portray a similar family dynamic. I wonder if it is typical of that cuture or of immigrant cultures in general, or maybe large families. Well, maybe I'll find out more if I attend one of the book discussions planned as part of the programming.
I hope everyone is enjoying a Happy New Year. I've got lots of things to get done today, including taking down the Christmas decorations, so I'd better get at it.
Hope to hear from you all soon.
Betsy