Our ancestor, Pierre Papin, arrived in New France with what is called La Grande Recrue—The Great Recruitment—of 1653. It is thought that without this dramatic expeditionary force, the new French settlement of Ville Marie—what would become Montréal—would have failed.
We can’t be sure when they met, but it is likely that their first date was in 1947. Our mother recounts in her Grandmother’s Memories that it was on St. Patrick’s Day when our father astutely chose to take her to see My Wild Irish Rose, the story of the life of Irish tenor Chauncey Alcott. Most of their dates involved music in one way or another.