January 24 2020 Close To Home

Memorial at the site of St. Antoine sur la Riviere-auxRaisins, Monroe Co. MI

My ancestors were not ones to move around a lot.  The earliest ancestors to come to North America were the French.  Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne was born in 1624 in Anjou France.  He was one of the 70 Frenchmen who established a post in New France in 1641.  He was a sawyer, soldier, carpenter, farmer and Indian fighter.  He married 12 year old Marie Archambault in 1648.  He received a land grant in Montreal in 1648.  The family stayed in the area until great grandson Pierre Tessier dit Lavigne (born 1747) traveled south west along the St Lawrence to cross the straits into Michigan.  He was well established in the St Antoine area when he married in 1790.  The family stayed in what came to be known as Frenchtown, and later as Monroe.  Other ancestors of the Chauvin and Leduc lines were in Detroit as early as 1701.  The Tessier and Leduc lines lead to my grandmother, Eliza Pauline (Lena) Rivard.  All generations in between stayed put in Monroe County, mostly in Newport, Berlin Township. 

After years of the French marrying French, my grandmother broke the mold and married a German first generation American.  August John (Gus) Wickenheiser was the son of an immigrant who traveled to Michigan from Baden Germany with his parents at age 12 in 1875.  The family settled in Ash Township MI.  After their marriage in 1915 Lena and Gus moved to Carleton MI and remained there the rest of their lives. The tombstones of my first German ancestors are still in the church cemetery where many of the descendants still attend Mass.   (*Note, Berlin and Ash Townships are side by side.)

These were my mother's people.  

My fathers people came from Poland.  My great grandparents came from Posen in 1873, and my grandfather Frank Joblinski was born in Detroit, and while still a child his father bought a farm in Romulus.  My father was born in that house.  His mother came from Posen in 1901 and married Frank in 1903.  They lived on the farm for the rest of their lives.  After my cousin inherited the land, it was sold, after 100 years in the family.  My parents met and married in 1945, and after a few years in Romulus,  (Which was in Wayne Co, on the north border of Monroe Co.) they moved to Carleton, just a few doors down from my grandmother Lena. 

These were my father's people.

I have lived my entire life in Monroe Co., as have most of my siblings.  One sister lives in Wayne Co.  We have always stayed close to home.