Adventures in Family Research

Been too long since I stopped to contemplate the family research biz. And trust me- it could be a business easily. Many folks would willing pay someone else to do the research I have been doing out of personal curiousity.

Don't ask we why I am obsessed with knowing where I came from back in the 1800s, 1700s.....These people were long gone before I was even a consideration in the world, much less a reality. I have a feeling that knowing where I come from might tell me where I am going. It is probably not true, but hey....

There is a story I feel the need to relate though. My grandmother had written down a story that she told me was relayed to her by her biological father, Herbert Hopkins. Someone in the family apparently felt the need to escape France in the Revolution days. A pregnant female was supposedly smuggled out of France to Cuba in an empty wine cask. Claim was that she was of minour royal blood, and that her husband was not so lucky. He ended up beheaded. Either this woman's child or her grandchild possibly was injured in a horse riding accident in Cuba which required a trip to the US for attention. That child/grandchild stayed in the US, marrying into a well-established French line here, and made a whole mess o' kids. The Guion line has been an obsession for years, partly so I could figure out the story. My uncle Marcy vehemently refutes the whole story as unprovable- family here say. If he had his way we would all end up nothing but names and lists of dates attached to those names. I hate that- absolutely hate it!
Ok we aren't all Cleopatra in a past life, but the idea that there might be even a smidgen of romance to the family story is not a sin. And now, uncle Marcy, I may have found the person who moved here and married into the extensive and well-researched Guion line. Her name was Clara, and she was mother to Josephine Beck Guion, who mothered Herbert. I know the Guion line is well documented because I have now run into several living Guions. They figured heavily in the shipping industry of this country, and the family is huge. They have a book that traces the family back further than we know the Dupre line, and the Guions too were Huguenots.

So...Josephine, and Herbert, forgotten as you may have seemed to your child/grand child Marie, and worse- her progeny- your story is slowly coming to light. Maybe someday I will be able to travel out to California and find a place to leave you some flowers.