Threads in the Acadian Fabric: Nine Generations of an Acadian Family, written by my friend and former English Department colleague Simone Poirier-Bures is a wonderful work and an absorbing read. She wrote the book from a deep desire to know more about her father, who had been a figure of mystery to her even while he was alive and who died when she was twenty. She had intriguing clues to work from: a greatcoat and helmet from WWI and a brief diary he kept during his service as a medic on the front in France; an intermittent journal he kept for years afterwards; a box of seventy-six letters, in French, between he and his wife-to-be. Building a coherent narrative from these and other clues required years of patient work, and led Poirier-Bures to the building of a genealogical record going back nine generations to the fifty or so families who first settled in what they knew as “Acadie” and we would recognize as Nova Scotia, in the mid-late 1600’s. This record is a fascinating and troubling story of a people whose husbands and fathers built livelihoods as farmers and seamen, and whose communities for two centuries were periodically disrupted by the conflict between European powers warring for power in the New World. Poirier-Bures’ careful reconstruction of this history concludes where it began: with a touching estimation of her father in Retrospective. He was, in her words, a “man who never found his vocation”; a fellow of fine sensibility and a love of opera, who matured in the mid-twentieth century, when historical upheavals broke up the long history of his forebears, casting him out to find what work he could, including as a peddler of children’s candies, which she had earlier chronicled in a novel, Candyman.
Threads in the Acadian Fabric: Nine Generations of an Acadian Family is a fine work, told with grace and skill, and likely to provoke the reader to a contemplation of mysteries in their own family tree.
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