Family History
Blood of a Breton
A migration on the shoulders of my ancestors
Imagine you are driven out of the place you’ve lived for as long as you have existed. You decide to leave your hometown, country, even family in search of new opportunity in a place you’ve only read about in the papers. My great grandmother (Anna Daniel) was put in this situation in 1914, when she blindly traveled from Gourin, Western France, across the Atlantic to the land of opportunity. Was she scared? Did she want to leave everything she knew behind her? What pushed her to keep going? Frankly, the answers to these questions are the reasons I’m here today.
In all languages “Home” is a word that isn’t used lightly, meaning the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or also defined as an institution for people in need of care. Wherever we find ourselves, we tend to make the place we end up a “Home.” But, it takes a leap of faith to leave the place you’re used to and comfortable in.
My great-grandmother took a leap into a new life that wasn’t promised, a mysterious world. I try and put myself in her shoes but I don’t think I would ever be able to fill them. I have grown up taught to be proud I’m related to her. But I didn’t even know the half of it until about a year ago. Anna Daniel became a name known in New York and not just for her immigration but for much more than that. In fact, the French president would have agreed with me.
I’ve always known that my family is characterized by hard work and loyalty but it wasn’t until learning about my French ancestors that I understood and respected it. My dad would always tell me stories about the ancestors that I hadn’t gotten the chance to meet. One of these relatives always stood out in my father’s family history lessons, Anna Daniel, my great-grandmother. He would describe the role she had in his life as more important than any of my other family members. The reason we have this sense of pride and responsibility for preserving our family’s history is thanks to my great grandmother’s perseverance. Her story is not unlike other French immigrants in the early 1900s. Anna left her hometown, Gourin, and immigrated to America in 1914 to pursue a new life in the land of opportunity. She just nearly missed the surge of Fascism but her friends and family weren’t as lucky as her. After it became obvious that Brittany, France, was being infiltrated by Nazis, many Breton families decided to flee somewhere they weren’t caught in the middle of a soon-to-be war zone.
Anna had been in New York long enough to feel comfortable in calling it her home when it was targeted by European refugees affected by the brewing war. She contacted family, friends of family, friends of friends of family, and so on and promised to get them a home, career, and a new start in America. She would have a hot meal waiting for them at her house. She was selfless and nurturing to her comrades in their time of need. But this was a time to come together as one and she took advantage of that.
While America stayed untouched, millions of Frenchmen and women packed their valuables and a few favorite items of clothes and “got the hell out of Dodge.” Immigrants crammed themselves into ocean liners and sailed across the Atlantic in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. This period was mostly pre-WWII when things were heating up with Fascism and Hitler’s rise to power. Innocent small French towns were infiltrated with Nazis who would carry out executions in the street. Residents were horrified at their senseless cruelty. One of these unlucky towns was Gourin (My grandmother’s hometown). Gourin is a small town that’s a few clicks east of Brittany’s west coast in France. My great grandmother would introduce my father to former French Resistance members when he was invited to a Breton group dinner in New York. There were many different resistance groups in France but one that was well known was the “Maquis.” They were a rural guerrilla fighters composed of men and women who escaped into the Brittany mountains during Nazi-occupied France.
It’s fascinating that my great grandmother made her way across the Atlantic to seek out a new and better life, but she ended up helping her fellow countrymen carve out a new home in New York City as well. Anna had no idea that the preservation of her Breton culture would rest on her shoulders. As her sisters arrived from her homeland to Ellis Island, she would be there to comfort and escort them to their new lives. Anna’s hard work and sacrifices for her people did not go unnoticed.
Initially, Anna was a typical French immigrant. She was constantly trying to find success in a new world. She went to work for a lawyer on Park Avenue and ended up marrying a private club chef. Anna’s next and most important job was as a head housekeeper of a complex of apartments owned by a wealthy family known as the Hesses, Mortimer and Marian Hess. She was also given her own quarters with this new job where later on she would end up serving new coming French immigrants their first meal in the United States. She had two daughters whom she sent back to France to be raised by her sisters, (this was a traditional practice among French immigrants).
Over time, she weathered changes in immigration policies that would impact not only her but also friends and neighbors. Through it all, she defied the odds by making a successful life for herself and her daughters. Then she made it possible for her extended family and friends to make a new life with her. My great grandmother’s actions when her home country was in need of help is a reminder that there is no telling what is in store for one another. The President of France later on gave Anna Daniel a medal for her brave assistance to her home country. If she hadn’t survived the transition my family tree would be very different and so would a lot of other descendants of French immigrants.
Robert Antoine Brodeur (My father) was born in New York City on December 27, 1955. He grew up with two rich French heritages. His mother’s side was French European and his father’s side was French Canadian. His Father, Robert Brodeur, came from a very wealthy family who had lots of success in the Canadian government. His mother, Marion Daniel, emigrated from France to New York City in the footsteps of her mother who had already established herself in the Big Apple. All his life he has been influenced by strong women like his mother who carried on her rich Breton traditions. He talks to me sometimes about how he struggled with his father who remained distant for most of his life due to his work that kept him away from home for extended periods of time. He always tells me he wants to be the father he never had for me. The fact that he was the only son and the older brother of two sisters must have made him feel closer to his strong female ancestors. He has taught me everything I know about my heritage and my French ancestors.
To help memorialize my great grandmother I decided to conduct an interview with my father, Robert Brodeur. He knew my great grandmother better than most and would visit her weekly. When I spoke with my father he welcomed my questions and the opportunity to revisit the impact his mother and grandmother had on his life. He’s a strong man, and he is not afraid to acknowledge the importance of powerful women.
“A Separate Breed of People”
A Conversation with Robert Brodeur
Max: Could you please tell me your full name and date?
Dad: My name is Robert Antoine Brodeur and my date of birth is December 27th, 1955.
Max: Where were you born?
Dad: I was born in New York city on the upper East side at Lenox Hill hospital.
Max: Where did you grow up?
Dad: My parents were living in New York at the time of my birth, and then they moved to Newark, New Jersey for one year, and then they were able to buy a house in Park Ridge, New Jersey. I lived in Park Ridge, New Jersey until I was 18. We did change homes to a bigger home, then we moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and I started college at Drexel university.
Max: What do you know about your family name?
Dad: Well, Brodeur is a French name. My father’s family migrated from the Quebec area of Canada and moved to Massachusetts. But the Brodeur name is kind of taken from the French version of embroidering and Western France and Brittany, they make a lot of lace for dining and also for the head dresses. In Brittany, they have many, let’s say… tribes. And my mother’s family comes from the bougaDan tribe and they wear these head dresses that are very tall, cylindrical things that sit on women’s heads, but, embroidering is a part of the family, I think root the root of the name. That’s pretty cool.
Max: Are there any stories about its history and origins?
Dad: I don’t recall, um, I don’t recall. Nothing like that. That’s just our name.
Max: Are there any naming traditions? What are they?
Dad: Well, your great grandfather was called Antoine Daniel, and he was a cook in New York. He died relatively young. He died in his forties.
Max: My middle name is Antoine. And your middle name is Antoine, so that is something that carries through. I’m assuming that when you have your own kids, one of them might have Antoine in their name. Yeah.
Max: Has the family name gone through any changes? What are they?
Dad: Family name has not gone through any changes.
Max: For a while it was, it was Daniel right?
Dad: Well that’s on one side. It’s interesting because your cousin, Danielle Lindsey, was named after my grandmother’s married name or Antoine Brodeur’s name, which is Daniel. Her name was Anna Daniel. And Oh, Susie named her daughter Danielle, so I guess that’s back to the other question. You know, naming traditions, things changing your great, great grandmother, their name and your grandfather, their name was Lann.
Dad: That was back in the old country in Brittany and their, their town was called Coray. Your grandmother was born in another city called Gourin, and you’ve been there. We had a really good trip a few years ago where we drove through Brittany and got to see your cousins.
Max: That was a good trip. So what was it like growing up, especially in that time period that you were in New York city? I’d like to hear some stories about that.
Dad: Oh, well growing up was mostly done in Park Ridge, New Jersey, which is in Northern New Jersey. Park Ridge, just two words. It’s basically a small town USA. We lived in a small cottage until we were able to get into a larger cottage. My parents had two more children after me, two daughters, and we needed more room. So we moved from a cottage to a, what’s called, a split level, but still in Park Ridge. It was a small town with a train depot in the center. It was very safe. I spent a lot of time in the woods. We, we had what we called down the Glen, which is, trails behind our house and we’d follow those trails down. And there was a waterfall that led into a creek. And there was, I remember there was a cave, they called it dead man’s cave. Wasn’t very deep, but it was a cave nonetheless. And I remember spending a lot of time when I wasn’t in school, um, going down in the glen and, you know, just stomping around in the water and, and, uh, exploring the outdoors. I spent all day away. And that was the time when parents never worried about the safety of the children as they do today. That is a big thing on it is, it is, it is. Um, and, uh, you know, I’d go away all day and, and just, you know, do my thing.
Dad: It was really, it was a really nice time back then and that was in the 60s, you know.
Max: It was probably like really easy to be like, just walk over to this next street and say, Hey, you want to hang out?
Dad: Yeah, we lived on a block, a small block of homes and lots of kids running around and basically, when dinner was ready, the parents would step out of the front door and called their children’s names and children would come back and have dinner and then they run out again until it got dark and then they’d come home. And you know, there was, you know, games that the kids would do. We would play ball in the street.
Dad: At Halloween we’d have mischief night, which was the day before Halloween, and we had to toilet paper homes and throw eggs and, and just do mischief. And sometimes there were homeowners who are waiting, waiting for us to come to catch us.
Max: That’s pretty funny.
Dad: We were pretty wild back then, it wasn’t bad. Wild. It was just wild. So there was really no bad stuff going on. I went to Catholic school, called Our Lady Of Mercy school up until fourth grade. I was not a very good student. My eyesight is very bad by first, first grade. So I needed to get glasses. We had to wear uniforms. We had nuns teaching us. Some of them were rather vicious, if we did things wrong, we’d get hit with a yardstick.
Max: Really?
Max: Yes.
Max: Imagine that happening today.
Dad: No, no. They’d be in jail if that happened today. But, corporal punishment was rampant back in those days. It’s not like we were beaten every day, but you know, if our fingernails were dirty, they say, put your hands on the table and like, hit your hand with a yardstick.
Max: It’s kind of crazy.
Dad: It’s insane.
Max: It’s insane.
Max: I can’t even imagine.
Dad: So for some reason, my parents decided that Our Lady Of Mercy school, which went all the way to 12th grade, was not a good place for me. And so they put me into public school and that’s when I started getting bullied and I stayed in public school until eighth grade.
Dad: It wasn’t a really great experience. We started at a small elementary school and then we transferred down to, uh, the high school annex. I was just not a very focused individual.
Dad: Well not a good student because I probably had ADD I know I had ADD, which you have and are medicated for it, but there was no diagnosis of ADHD or medication for it, so I just stayed basically squeaking by and getting into the next grade and the next grade. Then I went to a high school, st Joseph’s regional high school in Montvale, New Jersey. And, it was all boys Catholic school and I was still just basically a C student, but you know, I made it through and I graduated after I graduated. The family moved to South Jersey to Cherry Hill and I had been accepted at Drexel university, which is a huge institution now. And again, I squeaked through and managed to get a degree in business there and stayed in Philadelphia and began working.
Dad: So that was, that was my childhood.
Max: Do you know any stories about how your family first came to the United States?
Dad: I don’t know about my father’s family. They were very powerful family in Quebec. My father’s grandfather was apparently an Admiral in the Canadian Navy and he apparently had control over the Pacific fleet of Canada.
Max: Wow.
Dad: Another was a Lieutenant Governor and I still have to go through all that, all that stuff. There are albums in the safe that I need to review and scan for everyone, but, we do need to go to Quebec and see if we can find some of our roots up there. My grandmother, Anna Daniel and her husband Antoine came to the United States before world war II, in the 30s. And the tradition was to leave your children behind until they were probably six. So my grandmother, Anna Daniel, had four sisters and one brother. And she left my mother with her sisters. While, she went to New York.
Dad: She took an ocean liner. I forget the name of it, but I have the whole passenger manifest. So she took an ocean liner to New York and went through Ellis Island, probably with her husband. I’m not sure. They, they seem to travel separately quite a bit. And, He was a cook, a chef, and she found employment as a home, a housekeeper with a very wealthy, affluent family called the Hesses, Mortimer and Marian Hess. And, I think my mother may have been named after Marian Hess, but they owned a whole floor of an apartment on Park Avenue on the upper East side of New York. And she was the housekeeper. She took care of all their needs and did the cooking and that kind of thing and Anna Daniel, you know, your great grandmother started to become a conduit for Breton people, Bretons are in the Western part of France.
Dad: It’s kind of a separate breed of people. Bretons tend to be very responsible and they work hard and they are dependable. And so that was a characteristic that was very attractive to affluent American families who could hire them. And restaurant owners. So my grandmother formed alliances with other Bretons who had started at restaurants and French restaurants in New York. And so people were given Anna Daniel’s name and address and when they came off the plane or off the boat, they would look her up and she would bring them up in the, in the service elevator and sit them down in the kitchen and give them a hot meal. And she would have found them employment as well as places to live. Many of these people started as waiters and dishwashers and ended up opening their own restaurants. There came a time when my, my grandmother could not buy a meal in New York because people would not allow her to pay because she had done so much work for the French people. And this culminated my grandmother being awarded French medal of honor for work in bringing people successfully to the United States.
Max: Wow. That’s…
Dad: And we have a picture of that, which I think I sent you.
Max: That is quite a journey. So why did they first settle, uh, why do you think Mae Mae (Anna Daniel) first settled in New York do you think?
Dad: Land of opportunity.
Dad: Everybody wanted to be in New York. Everybody wanted to be in America. Things were not going well in Europe. That was pre-war. And I think a lot of people were trying to escape the war and many did not.
Max: Yeah. Sadly. You said that your grandmother made a living by being a housemaid right?
Dad: She wasn’t a housemaid. She was basically, she kept the house. She was a housekeeper. She made sure that all the laundry got done, all the meals were served, all the cleaning was done. She had a staff under her.
Dad: It was a huge apartment. And she lived there at the apartment. She had her own room and bathroom and she had a staff of people that she supervised.
Max: Did your family stay in one place or move around a lot?
Dad: My family, like…
Max: Well I guess we’ve already answered this question, but, so you know there was a lot of transition between Quebec and Brittany and New York, right?
Dad: Oh, well my grandmother, when she moved to New York, she stayed in New York. Anna Daniel stayed in New York. And she died in New York and I believe it was 1979, August of 1979 she died of a massive heart attack, but she had had some people over for lunch and they left except for one. And then she started having chest pains and uh, and called the ambulance and she died on the way to the hospital.
Dad: And her friend went back to the apartment just to serve dinner. Guests were showing up, so she was very social.
Max: Yeah.
Dad: So she died in between engagements. So that was good.
Max: Uh, I’m sorry.
Dad: Well, she had a good life. Um, so, um, we didn’t do a lot of moving. Uh, she didn’t move a lot. Uh, I believe the family was centered around the New York metropolitan area and we lived in Jersey, in New Jersey at Park Ridge for many years, 17 years. We stayed in Park Ridge and then we moved to Cherry Hill and South New Jersey. And my parents held on to that house until they both died. So, let’s see, uh, I was born in New York city, spent a year apparently in Newark when I was in my first year of life. We moved to Park Ridge and then we moved to another house in Park Ridge. And then we moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey and South Jersey. Outside of Philadelphia.
Max: But your family stayed upstate mostly, right?
Dad: Yeah. We’re what we call the Yankees. We lived in the Northeast and I stay after college. I stayed in Philadelphia for quite a few years and then I spent about five or six years in Fort worth, Texas where I had a house. And then moved back to Philadelphia and then moved to New York for about a year to study massage therapy and then left Philadelphia. I left New York for Philadelphia again and spent quite a few years there. So yeah, generally upstate and then met your mother. And two years later, three years later, we moved to Western North Carolina.
Max: All right. So what does it mean to you to be from Brittany?
Dad: I’m very proud of my French heritage and that’s, that has something to do with when we were kids, we lived outside of New York and in the suburbs of New Jersey, but we would go into New York very frequently to visit with my grandmother, who was living… They actually had two places in New York, that Hesses had a place on 78th street. I’m not sure exactly where, but then they moved to Park Avenue, but that was where my parents were when I was born on 78th street. And when we were kids, we would go into the city to visit my grandmother and in many cases there were dinner parties that took place in restaurants in New York and we were invited. There were three children and we were very well behaved and we were never denied access to these parties. We were very polite and we were very quiet and we got to sit in on some of these dinners that included all breton immigrants,
Max: Really.
Dad: Old people and they’d, there was a lot of wine, there was a lot of really good food. We got to eat frogs legs and cookie san-jacque and amazing food at these restaurants. And, some of these older immigrants would stand up and sing traditional French songs. And it was just really amazing to, to hear that and to be around that culture. So us three kids, gained a great deal of affection for our heritage. It was really focused on, on Bretons and Brittany.
Max: So do you think that’s when you gained a sense of respect for it?
Dad: Oh yeah. It became a part of me.
Max: Yeah.
Max: All right. Well How did my great grandmother impact you as a person?
Dad: Well, she would come to our home in New Jersey, the Hesses had a limousine.
Max: Really.
Dad: And a driver and when my grandmother came for, let’s say every Wednesday, she would come in the morning and she would be dropped off with the limousine and she would bring cakes and things.
Dad: She would, uh, she would give me money. She always gave me money to walk around with.
Max: How much money did she actually give you?
Dad: Like five bucks.
Max: Five bucks?
Dad: Yeah.
Dad: What, say your question again.
Max: Oh, sorry. Um, and how did she impact you?
Dad: Oh, so she was always there and we also always had these excursions to New York and it was either a party or just to visit.
Dad: She would also go to… The Hesses had a farm in Stanford, Connecticut, and she would go for a couple of months in the summer and she would invite us to come to the farm. And it was basically a mansion on many, many acres of land.
Max: Oh, wow.
Dad: And there was a pool and a pool house across the road. There was a pond with fishing and a boat and we would go to the pool and we could walk around the farm. They had a garden, flowers, lots of beautiful flowers. And they had that because the Hesses liked to have flowers, fresh flowers all the time. So they had a grounds crew there and, you know, they had animals and a big barn and all kinds of stuff.
Max: But you know, she really impacted you?
Dad: Well, yeah, she was a figurehea. She was a very powerful influence on me.
Max: She pushed you in the right directions?
Dad: Yes. And when I was in college, I took a job, a cooperative education job in New York. I worked for a Japanese trading company called Hanwa American corporation. And we imported steel and seafood into the United States. And I was an assistant traffic manager, which meant I just coordinated bills of lading, the paperwork that was required for bringing these products, importing these products into the United States. And this was the time when my grandmother had basically retired. She lived on the upper West side of New York on West end Avenue. And she and I would get together every Wednesday after I finished my work. And, I would go to her apartment and she would have a meal or we would have a meal and we would have drinks. And, this was when I was in college and it was a time for us to really bond very much strongly. So.
Max: So you visited her pretty, very regularly?
Dad: Every week.
Max: Every week. Wow. Did my great grandmother ever tell you any stories about immigrating to America?
Dad: She told me what was happening in France about the, the Nazis really. And, the French underground, the resistance, the French resistance. She talked about how the Nazi’s executed people in her town. And so that’s what caused her to, to immigrate.
Dad: Say the question again.
Max: Did she tell you any stories about immigrating to America?
Dad: Just that she came over on a large cruise ship.
Max: Yeah.
Max: I mean, it’s kind of like, “yeah, we just kinda got on a boat and went over, it’s not a big deal.”
Dad: Well, it wasn’t a boat. It was a big ship.
Max: Or an ocean liner.
Dad: Like the Titanic size. And they went back and forth a couple of times. But, you know, eventually my grandmother, she brought my mother over and they all lived together. My mother didn’t speak any English. And ultimately my mother spoke like an American. She didn’t have a French accent. Her mother, my grandmother, Mae Mae, Anna Daniel had two daughters. The first daughter was Helen, and the second was marion and, so they became Americanized.
Dad: Helen died in the 70s. She had a problem with alcohol and she ended up drinking herself to death.
Dad: And I remember her funeral. She had a husband named Tyan Kurvesik. He was a, an airplane… He worked for air France as a flight engineer. He just made a living flying over the Atlantic ocean back and forth. They divorced because Helen was a little bit crazy.
Max: And, he also had problems. He just didn’t seem to make the connection of, you know, being considerate.
Dad: Kind of liked me.
Max: Yeah. So what do you know about your families breton history in detail?
Dad: Well, all I know is that they came from very modest beginnings. There are pictures of your great, great grandmother holding… Your grandmother as a child, as an infant, and there’s a picture of your great-great-grandfather with your great-great-grandfather. These were pictures taken in Coray. You know, they were simple peasant attire. Usually wore a black hat, looked very Amish.
Dad: But that’s really all I know from my mother’s side. My father’s side the Brodeurs were relatively affluent and very accomplished. One having been an Admiral, another having been a Lieutenant governor of the Providence in Quebec.
Dad: I don’t know really why they immigrated to America. They moved from Canada to Massachusetts. And then my father moved down to New Jersey and well met my mother at Syracuse university. My grandfather is his father. My father’s father was a barkeep. He had a couple of different bars. Cafe one was called Roy’s cafe. The other one was called the blinker cafe. And they basically were tap rooms and he did okay for himself. They lived in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. They had a triplex, um, three story building, three apartments. And so they were very smart with money. And, my father was able to go to college and he did spend a year in prep school because he was a little bit challenged academically.
Max: Right. Have you been to Brittany and if so, what do you remember from the trip?
Dad: The first time we went to Brittany was in 1965 or 66.
Dad: I was 10 years old. Suzy, my youngest younger sister was eight and Nicole was four or five, something like that. And we went to France with my mother for two months and we lived at my grandmother’s house in Coray and we met all the relatives and we’d go into town and go to the crepori, and we basically lived with my grandmother’s sisters. One was called tanmalgoh. There was another one, tontule, and a couple more. We got to meet all the relatives, all the cousins. We took some trips to the ocean, which was not far. It was a really good time. That was my first trip to Brittany. Then we went, the whole family went to Brittany again in 2000 and we stayed with, we all got a house. This was with my sister and her husband and then her and her daughter, Danielle and Susie and Nicole and me and mom and dad. And we had quite a few adventures with our cousins.
Max: Yeah.
Max: The Ollu’s, Ollu’s, the Ollu’s.
Max: Who are the Ollu’s?
Dad: Our cousins O L L U, So that’s, if you remember on our last trip together, we stayed with Patrick and Pascal and Francois and their name is Ollu. And their family was based in breast, which is a port city used to be a place where the U boats were housed really, and Patrick’s father, Andre, was part of the, resistance. So he was a teenager and he did sabotage against the Nazis.
Max: That’s pretty, that’s pretty interesting.
Max: Would you say you’re proud of your, your heritage?
Dad: Absolutely yeah. I’m a Breton and your a Breton.
Max: I’m proud too. There’s so much history. And there’s so much. Yeah.
Dad: It’s a rich culture. It’s a very rich culture. Exactly.
Max: What was your experience connecting with your French relatives?
Dad: It’s been mixed. Lately I try to communicate with them and they do not respond. But, when you and I went to France, they were very receptive to us. We went out for dinners and they, they entertained us and we walked around Paris and you remember that very well, I’m sure.
Max: Yeah, I do.
Max: Like whenever you were kind of trying, like first connecting, what was your experience? Kind of?
Dad: I was part of the family. We were the American cousins. And they embraced us.
Max: Did you ever like, Oh yeah. You would, send them albums?
Dad: Yeah. LPs, vinyl to Patrick. Yeah. I’ve sent him quite a few.
Max: Did you learn any new things about yourself in the process?
Dad: I learned to speak a little bit more French than I had, it was a missed opportunity for me not to have become bilingual. My mother, Marian or Danny, she was called, stopped speaking French when we, came into the world and it would have been useful if she had spoken French to us in the house and we would have learned to be fluent in French, but she did not. And that was one of her biggest regrets.
Max: Really.
Dad: That we were not indoctrinated into our French culture earlier. She feels responsible for that.
Max: I’m sure that she meant well, but I mean, she didn’t mean to, she probably regrets it, but at the time it didn’t, it doesn’t really occur to you until it’s in the past. We all have regrets.
Dad: Yeah.
Max: Does your family have any special sayings or expressions? No. No, not really.
Max: What family heirlooms or keepsakes and mementos? Do you possess?
Dad: I have many pictures. In France, they have a special kind of pottery and we have quite a few pieces of French pottery. Just basically traditional plates and bowls, pictures, photos, things like that. That’s pretty much all the momentos that I have. These are things I inherited from my parents, and you will inherit it from me.
Max: Yeah. But, you keep them safe and you treasure them a lot?
Dad: Oh, Hey, they’re on display.
Max: Yeah. Does your family hold reunions? So you talked about the three main reunions, or maybe not, yeah, probably the three trips that we had or that you had, which was with me.
Dad: Well we had, we had our long visit to France and in 1966.
Max: Yeah.
Dad: And then we had our reunion in 2000 in Brittany. And then we had a, you and I visiting the cousins.
Max: Yeah. How are holidays traditionally celebrated art in your family? Would it be like all, at least from what I remember as a kid, it was like we all go to, we all went up to Cherry Hill.
Dad: We’d have like Christmas or Christmas, Thanksgiving or both. The family traditions are pretty much gone since my father and my mother passed on. I no longer talk to my youngest sister, Nicole. And occasionally speak to my other sister. But the family fabric has been torn and there are really no traditional get togethers anymore.
Max: How do you feel overall about your family’s immigration, the United States and how it has affected you?
Dad: I’m just here, you know, they came and you know, they prospered and they, they were educated and they just kept working hard and I’m grateful that, you know. They did what they did and, you know, I’ve always had a roof over my head and food in my stomach and money in the bank. And, I’m hoping the same thing happens for you.
Max: Yeah. Why does your European background interest you more than your American background?
Dad: It was just part of my growing up when I was a child, you know, we were exposed to our French culture or French heritage or retaught and culture. And that was, you know, a big deal for us kids. And these are things that most other kids did not experience.
Max: Yeah. And there’s so much more history.
Dad: Well, we were in, we made these trips into New York and when we were there, we were steeped in and, my grandmother’s friends and you know, they were certainly immigrant, family, our group. And again, and you know, there are many Breton celebrations, I can remember us taking a trip somewhere, probably Connecticut to basically, a big event facility. And it was all Breton’s there and a pool and food. And, you know, it was a one day thing, but I can, I just vaguely remember, just a lot of different French and breton on emphasized events that we were part of.
Max: Well said. Well, thank you so much for this interview and I’ve learned a lot in the process.
Dad: You’re welcome.
“There are many Breton celebrations”
Interview Reflection
I didn’t really understand the importance of where my bloodline has been and what it has been through. My respect for my family has grown even though I’ve already had a lot of respect for it. There’s something about asking someone more familiar with a certain topic that impacts you in a whole new way.
This project showed me how if I put even a little effort into researching and asking questions about my oral history, it can be life changing and frankly, pretty satisfying. Even just typing my own name into a “Google Search” can change the perception I have on my family entirely.
I was nervous that I wouldn’t have any interesting material for this project which proved to be wrong in my case. Another challenge is finding credible information and sources about a given topic. Putting good work into a project can prove to be rewarding despite the challenges you may face along the way.
If I were in the position of the tradition bearer I would tell stories about my memories of the adventures I’ve had with my dad. My family and I have had reunions and traditions that I will never forget. It’s gonna be my job to pass on the stories and memories of my ancestors to a younger generation. I would tell them about my great grandmother’s journey to America and where my family originated. Knowing your roots can be more important than it seems.
Sources
“NY Times Focus on Breton Immigration.” BREIZH AMERIKA, https://www.breizh-amerika.com/blog/ny-times-focus-on-breton-immigration.
Breton, Mireille Le. “Rewriting the Memory of Immigration.” Reimagining North African Immigration, Aug. 2018, doi:10.7765/9781526107657.00017.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Brittany.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.,
