• Common culture connects Plaquemine, Canada village 
• France-to-Louisiana migration of Cajuns traced 
• Guidry, Robichaux families to close area Congrès reunions 
• Genealogical database allows descendants far away 
        to be part of FrancoFete celebration
• Speaker takes mystery out of Cajun x-factor Cajun surnames
• Congres arrives sans Canadian influx
• Acadian image often distorted

Dr. Carl Brasseaux, assistant director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at USL, talks about a
genealogical database that he has created during CMA events in St. Martinville Wednesday.

Genealogical database allows descendants far away to be part of FrancoFete celebration
 
 

ST. MARTINVILLE -- Even the computer-unfriendly observers of the Acadian experience should gasp at
the thought of the effect that modern technology would have had on history of it had been available in the middle of the 18th century. Almost certainly, the ''Great Upheaval" (in French "le Grand Derangement") that began in 1755 would never have occurred. Consequently, there would be no Cajun culture in Louisiana to celebrate with the ongoing CongrŽs Mondial Acadien Louisiane -- 1999. 

Last week on the first day of the Broussard family reunion, Warren Perrin, president of the Council for the
Development of French in Louisiana, said Europeans were outraged, Englishmen were embarrassed when
they learned of the expulsions of thousands of Acadians from what are now the Maritime Provinces of
Canada and which he considers were illegal under British law then and now. 

In those days, it took at least a month for a letter to cross the Atlantic. 

E-mail takes far less time than 30 years of wandering for the majority of Acadians (now called Cajuns in
Louisiana) to find another homeland. 

Many descendants of refugee Acadians who couldn't make it to Louisiana with the estimated 300,000 to
500,000 of their cousins for the grand celebration are, in the words of one respondent to the CMA Web
site, who e-mailed to say that she was ''enjoying it through your eyes." 

Now, through computers, she and others can unearth the past while enjoying the present and anticipating
the future through a database laboriously established over two decades principally by Dr. Carl Brasseaux,
assistant director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in
Lafayette at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville through funding mostly from the Louisiana
Endowment for the Humanities. The Web site address is www.acadianmemorial.org/ 

He and his researchers encountered many difficulties in gathering and interpreting the data for
downloading, he said at a presentation of the weeklong lecture series at the Acadian Memorial on
Wednesday. 

Included are University of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, historian and genealogist Stephen White's
work, Roman Catholic diocesan records from Lafayette, Baton Rouge and New Orleans; and -- most
importantly -- records from the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, he said. 

Tragically, a great amount of colonial period information was lost when the French ceded the vast
Louisiana Territory to Spain, he said. Much was simply destroyed, he said. 

''The excuse was that they (the records) were rat-eaten," he said. In fact, however, many commandants
took records with them to prepare legal defenses for lawsuits against them. The Spanish, however, were
meticulous and scrupulous in preserving the records now resting in Seville and available to Louisiana
scholars like Brasseaux. 

Brasseaux and his researchers encountered many unexpected problems in their probing into Louisiana's
past. 

One was the multiple spellings of surnames, particularly those of French names ending in the vowel sound ''O." 

One historian in the 1750s in the Illinois country, for instance, in a single document spelled the name of one individual ''seven to nine times and never spelled it the same way twice." 

Other record-keepers on the scene at the time kept such sterling historical accounts that perusing them is ''like reading an historical novel in vast scale," he said. 

''You find out whose cow jumped what fence and whose wife was sleeping with whom," he said. The
research continues. The database will continue to grow, he said. ''This is not a fossilized artifact," he said. ''It continues to evolve.