I hesitate to shove too much history—especially since four countries are involved—down anyone’s throat, but if you grew up learning American History you basically think of Canada as this great northern wilderness, while the USA footprint is the only possible outcome of the inevitable march of Manifest Destiny from “sea to shining sea.” In fact, French explorers, missionaries, and fur traders of New France were in the mid-West long before the American colonists pushed westward. It is much easier to understand the movement and distribution of the Papin founding families in North America with the aid of this map:

Canada and the USA are close enough in geographical proximity that we have some history in common, but the culture, society, dual-language and economics are quite different.

The Canadian economy was for many years resource-based and did not require large numbers of manual or seasonal laborers from abroad. Internal migration of smaller numbers of people—many of them from related families—took place back and forth in a number of directions across the vast country to meet the demands of harvesting and extracting. There was much export demand for timber harvested by experienced teams of lumberjacks from the vast forests that covered the country.

In French Canada, especially, the “voyageurs”—of which there were many in several generations in the Papin family—were skilled, sometimes solitary, workers who learned from the First Nations traders how to hunt and transport valuable furs and other goods thousands of miles by canoe and barge.

Of those who stayed at home—and, in many instances, sheltered the more itinerant members of the family—most kept small farms and gardens at the same time as they engaged in trade, small businesses and craftsmanship. Despite its immense land mass, for many years fewer than 100 immigrants came from France per year.

In the opposite direction, many Canadian families sent their children for advanced education—especially as engineers and physicians—to France and, even, England. I was surprised to learn how much traffic there was across the Atlantic, even in early times when passages could be difficult and take months. Perhaps because so many of the colonial families were a part of the river economy, long ship journeys did not seem remarkable.

As but one example, the branches of the Papin family that went down to found or settle numerous French forts, Cahokia, St. Louis, Missouri, and other towns all the way to Louisiana in the 17th and 18th centuries included a number of European-trained merchants, engineers and physicians.

In contrast, American agriculture required large numbers of agricultural workers to provide food for a much bigger population spread over great distances, and for export goods from landholders. In truth, many of those workers were African slaves, beginning in 1619, and indentured laborers or prisoners from England. Canada would later serve as a terminus stop north on the Underground Railroad where slaves could finally be free and own property. The original Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Harriet Beecher Stowe is in Dresden, Ontario.

Much changed when Canada began to welcome waves of immigrants seeking refuge from violent upheavals in Eastern Europe and Russia at the end of the 19th century. Partly as a result of that influx, between the years 1896 and 1914 Canada had the world’s fastest growing economy.

Beyond the larger picture of where the family has remained—and spread—in the past 400 years, the fact of the matter is that many situations in our family stories are impossible to understand without some clues from historical and economic circumstances.

For instance, I remember being astounded by the number of graves of relatively young nuns in the St Laurent Cemetery in Montréal, all in long lines with small headstones dating to roughly the same time, until I remembered about the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Most of those nuns had given their lives to care for other victims.

We’ve forgotten that this pandemic flu—sometimes called Spanish flu or La Grippe—was the worst in recorded history: 50 million people died worldwide, far more than the number of casualties and injuries in World War I. Indeed, within months, it killed more people than any other illness in recorded history. Unusually, it was most deadly for persons in the prime of life—ages 20 to 40.

Once I remembered about the devastating pandemic from that time, I checked the family records and realized that our father had lost a little sister to influenza in 1918, when he was 7 years old and she was 1 year old—a wrenching experience, no doubt.

After World War I, the country quickly recovered from the post-war recession and the flu pandemic and was booming again by 1921, in part because there was no Prohibition as in the States across the border. Just around the corner, though, was the Great Depression and it would come north, too.

The Wall Street crash in 1929 and the subsequent depression in the US, of course, affected Canada and the latter had no Roosevelt or New Deal to advocate for broad-based government programs. By 1933, 30% of Canada was out of work and gross national expenditures declined by 42%. Plummeting economic activity was particularly difficult for young adults just starting out, many of whom headed for rural communities where, at least, they would not starve and might be able to trade their education and skills for basic food and shelter. This pattern of internal migration was especially true in the eastern and central parts of Canada—and was the opposite of the scenario out west that drove farmers into urban areas, rather than starving in the severe Dust Bowl conditions of the American and Canadian prairies.

For the longest time, I could not figure out why our father first established Enseignes Paul E. Pepin Signs in 1932 in Ferme Neuve, a small town settled in the 1890s, 185 miles north of  Montréal, when everything else he did—college, music, and work on St. Joseph’s Oratory—was in St Laurent. He was only 21 years old. The sign company would later operate in tandem with Pepin Auto Body and moved in 1935, to Rue St Louis in St Laurent. As late as 1939-1940, his hockey team jerseys carried the name of Enseignes Paul Signs.

Apparently there were strong connections on both sides of the family—Pepin and Labelle—to the Charbonneau and Bigras families in Ferme Neuve, and there must have been clear advantages for him to start a first business there—not least being that he would be at some distance away from his father, Albert, who was reportedly a hard taskmaster.

Albert may have had some hand in the business, though, because he is shown clearly in the forefront of at least one of the Ferme Neuve photos. With his stance and the pipe between his teeth, he could be our father 30 years on.

There would also have been benefits for the Montréal Papin/Pepin families in that the eldest son could bring back supplementary food and wood from the family farms in the north along routes 309, 15 and 117. (Indeed, our father continued to attend college in St Laurent during the winter months for most of his years in Ferme Neuve.) The tradition of one foot in the city and the other foot in the country was not unlike what our forbears in France have always done—retreat each summer, and in times of crisis, to the small villages and farms of their ancestral homes.

In contrast to our mother—who was only 5-15 years of age in the Great Depression years of 1929-1939 and mostly remembered having to move out from a Colonial home her parents had built in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania—our father never forgot the lessons of those years, when he was 18-28. Later, he never missed the chance to teach his children not to waste anything, and reuse everything. In particular—among many other economies he insisted on—I recall that washing dishes for a large family that always “cooked from scratch” was an excruciating exercise in minimizing soap and water. There is likely no one in our family that will ever forget the humiliating stops he made—some of them in front of the homes of people we knew from school or church—to rummage through and pick up all kinds of discarded items from trash piles in front of homes, especially in the prosperous neighborhoods of Coral Gables. Just like so many other things we thought we’d never do “when we were grown up and on our own,” I suspect that many of us have made our own scavenge hunts from well-furnished discard dumps.

The decade of the depression saw many premature deaths in the family. Paul Emile’s Uncle Edouard died at age 48 in 1937, and his father at age 51 in 1938—our father was 27 when he signed his father’s death certificate—so there were plenty of younger children for him to try to help support in those difficult years. Perhaps that was a major reason why he retained such strong connections with all of their extended families until the end of his life.

As a member of the British Commonwealth, Canada was a critical player in supporting the British in World War II beginning in 1939, three years before the Americans would join the war effort after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Based on a command economy, the war years were boom times for Canadians. For 25 years after the war, expansion of the economy was immense along with substantial growth in population. The wealth led to establishment of many social services such as the well-known publicly-funded health care program, education and pension plans. The port of Montréal became the largest inland port in the world, well-connected to a railway hub that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Recovering from a number of smaller economic  recessions in the 1980s and 1990s—and even the cultural shocks of calls for French separatism—Canada eventually became a model of fiscal stability.

Although our father was ruled unfit for military service during World War II, there is evidence he served in France in other ways, as did many French Canadians because of their fluency in French. He had studied Gregorian Chant with monks of the Abbey of Solesmes and at the same time he had brought over to Paris a number of talented music students to study in the famous school for blind organists there.

When they, and others, were caught in the German Occupation, he helped to get them out and brought them back to Canada. As a musician and a French Canadian citizen who knew the monks, he was in a unique position to be able to do that.

In the 1950s, a number of the musicians, who became successful professionals and prominent touring organists, visited him in Miami. Many years later, after his death, when I myself walked into the Abbey and heard the monks chanting, I was shocked into realizing that there was no question but that he had been there—the chant was distinctive and unmistakable.

I have found traces of his work in France, but Paul Emile never spoke of exactly what happened in the war except by the slightest of references. One of those occasions came about when I prepared to drive by myself for the first time up to North Carolina to visit the family in the mountains. He specifically warned me to have plenty of gas in my fuel tank so I would not have to stop in Georgia anywhere near the Okeefenokee Swamp. On a later trip, when I accompanied him in the old station wagon back up to North Carolina because our mother was worried about his driving by himself, we blew a tire and found ourselves on the shoulder of the Swamp with a full load of Florida tomatoes in the back, piled into the rickety drawers of an old dresser bureau that had fallen apart, all of them covering the spare tire and tools. I had never seen our father so distraught and he worked at a fever pitch—saying all the while that he hoped no one would come by. All of the drawers and most of the tomatoes he’d previously insisted we pick in a tomato field outside Miami wound up tossed hurriedly into the swamp. When we got up to North Carolina I tried to describe the scene to my mother in a humorous way, always the way our family eventually dealt with bad things that happened. “Can you imagine what someone seeing all those drawers and tomatoes would have thought? It looked as though someone had moved out of that forsaken swamp and left their furniture and food!” I got a good laugh out of her and my three younger sisters, but our father did not so much as crack a grin.

A couple of years afterward, when he learned I had done some work with the SNCC—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee—in the South while taking political science classes—something I tried to keep from him, actually—he seemed disturbed but didn’t tell me why. Eventually he said he’d tried to stay overnight when he was driving through Georgia just after the war.

French Canadians in Raleigh had cautioned him about the South but he didn’t take them seriously—he’d thought he’d been in far worse situations with the Germans and what could possibly be the problem in the US?

He wouldn’t speak any more about the wartime experience, but he did say that he’d apparently been considered either a German or a Communist on account of his French-accented English when he stopped in a small town near the Swamp, too sleepy to go on. He doesn’t know what could have happened to him if a black porter had not quietly sent him to stay with a black family nearby. He said he would never forget their kindness. The next day they had packed a lunch and left it in his car so he would not have to stop again. He was proud I was involved in the civil rights movement—I assured him I did little in comparison to most—but wanted me to be very, very careful.