What's in a Name

 

     A ship probably similar to the one bringing my ancestor to Canada.

"It's all right, you're in a hospital. My name's Dr. Boudreau."                                           Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind.

I stopped reading. Boudreau was my maiden name, with which I had a hate-love relationship. 

My mother, a devoted WASP told me my French Canadian relatives were ignorant foreigners. 

Only in my 20s, did I meet them and discover a wonderful group of loving, sharing people. I missed out on lots of cousin fun and stories of their lives from a lighthouse in Nova Scotia to moving to the States and building a normal middle class life starting in the 1920s.

My mother wasn't a white supremacist. When we lived in the south, she paid our black staff, white wages and earned the contempt of our neighbors by sitting down at meals with the staff. She thought all negros should be treated equally. 

She was a WASP supremacist. She didn't want to mix on the same level with people from different countries, especially the "inferior" ones.

Her belittling of the name and my ancestry,  left me feeling inferior. I was glad to shed the Boudreau for Nelson when I married. 

Attitudes aside, Donna-Lane Nelson sounds  better with the l and n sounds. I chose to keep it after my divorce. Part of me just didn't want to face the Massachusetts Registry of Vehicles and the rest of the paperwork to change. And life was easier if my daughter and I had the same last name.

However, moving to Switzerland and France and living in a francophone environment makes Nelson a foreign name. If the name didn't identify me as a foreigner, my accent would. 

I've received some prejudicial reactions. When Brexit was voted in, one person told me "good riddance." I replied I wasn't English, but Swiss without mentioning only since 2006. She told me that was worse.

Over the years, in researching my father's family, I discovered my ancestor Michel Boudrot (the spelling morphed into Boudreau over the years) first went to Nova Scotia in 1620 and made a permanent move in 1640. That was earlier than my mother's WASP ancestors in 1636 on the Blessing.

My ancestor became a general and fathered 11 children. Boudreaus people the area even today. There's even a Boudreauville.

I visited La Rochelle, where Michel Boudrot had been born. I saw the parish church where he'd been baptized and married. In the harbor was a reproduction of the type of ship he would have sailed on.

It has been a life lesson. I have no reason to be ashamed of not being 100% WASP. That side of the family served in the American Revolution and led normal lives as far as I can establish. They are no better or worse than the French Canadian side.

I just received my Canadian passport thru my father James Boudreau. My mother would have been horrified.

There is another lesson which I wish others would learn. One is not superior or inferior because of their name, nationality, skin color or religion.The value of a person is determined on how s/he lives his or her life and how they treat others.