Grand-Pré, UNESCO World Heritage site. Photo Credit Claire Campbell.

This is the second post in our blog series, “Ordinary Women,” which focuses on the individual histories of women in Canada in an attempt to better highlight women who seldom made history. You can find the first post here. Special thanks to Michelle Desveaux, Andrea Eidinger, Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Claire Campbell, and Dean Cain for their help with this post!

The summer before I started my PhD, there was a massive reunion of my grandmother’s side of the family in my hometown of Cheticamp. It’s the type of thing that used to happen on a fairly regular basis when I was a kid, but has started becoming a rare event now that my grandmother’s generation has largely passed. My cousin put together a family tree, dating back to the founding families of Cheticamp, and I didn’t really think much of it until a few years later when I was back in the village for a visit with my sister. One of our ancestors, Jeanne Dugas, was getting a lot of attention that year; a novel had been written about her, the federal government had recognized her as a “Person of Historical Significance”, and one of my dissertation advisors, Dr. Elizabeth Mancke, had recently brought home a sheaf of deportation-era documents from the UK that included Jeanne and her family. While juggling the demands of dissertation and digital history projects, I would sometimes find the time to dig into our Jeanne’s history. Although I had been largely unaware of her prior to that family reunion, other than as one of the names on the list of the “quatorze vieux” who had founded our village, I became more fascinated with her the more I learned about her.

This blog post is a direct development of my growing obsession with Jeanne – her life, her experience of a defining moment in Acadian history, and how an ordinary woman kept her family together through years of constant displacement and war.

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