Peace and Justice is a theme I’ve been passionate about my entire life, but particularly since September 2001. I began this blog in 2009. The intended focus of this site is Peace, Justice, Environment, Sustainability, Global Cooperation and related issues.
The intent of this site is to publish positive pieces with thoughts about building a better future for our world and everyone in it.
I believe in the value of dialogue. A lifelong mid-westerner, with deep roots in rural North Dakota, I have spent most of my adult life in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. dickDOTbernarddt1878ATicloudDOTcom
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Family Story
/1 Comment/in Uncategorized /by dickbernardPOSTNOTE April 1, 2026: The same day I published this, David shared an item from the Minnesota Star Tribune on March 26: Abdi Elmi March 26 2026. The setting is the coffee shop I frequent daily. I know all of the persons involved in the conversation, though until the article, I wasn’t aware that the conversation took place. It is very relevant to the times.
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Today [March 28] is the No Kings Day with major demonstrations country wide. In Minnesota’s Twin Cities is centerpiece. Bruce Springsteen and other celebrities will be front and center. We’ll be enroute to a family wedding in Missouri, so won’t be on site.
But before I go, I’d like to share Paul Krugman’s March 27 post on Immigrants. It is worth your time. https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/the-end-of-immigration?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.c
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The family wedding is my grandsons, now eight years a Marine on active duty. No rumblings about transfer to the Middle East, though as any member of the uniformed armed services knows, orders can change on very short notice. His spouse to be is daughter of a career Marine, so knows this reality by personal experience. We look forward to a good wedding.
I’ve been asked to propose a toast to the newlyweds, and I accepted. What to say in a couple of minutes to young people 60 years my junior, in front of a group primarily people I’ve never met, mostly from a state I’ve infrequently visited. Probably mostly young people.
I’ve decided on an immigrant story – one from my own family history, and one relating to Missouri. Dad, 100% French-Canadian, lived the last ten years of his life, 1987-97, in Belleville IL, suburban St. Louis. St. Louis is about 80 miles from where the wedding will be.
During Dad’s life in Illinois (Mom had died seven years before he moved to Belleville), he liked to see the local sights when company was in town, and this happened with me.
One particular day we went to the famous Arch in St. Louis. Nearby is a well known tourist area, LeClede’s Landing, where St. Louis began.
I visited a tourist information place, and noted a book: :”St. Louis A Concise History” by William Barnaby Faherty, S.J. I still have it.
Very early in the book a line jumped off the page: “…(1764). Mrs. Marguerite Blondeau Guion, presumably the first woman to come to St. Louis, crossed the river from Cahokia in late May to join her husband…she recalled many years later, the crew had erected only two or three huts….”
Of course, Marguerite was not the “first woman” west of the Mississippi in today’s Missouri. Back then history was written from the victors perspective. Native Americans were another matter indeed.
The name “Blondeau” jumped out at me. That was the maiden name of Grandma Bernard’s mother, my great grandmother, Clotilde (Blondeau) Collette.
Long story short, French-Canadians kept and keep good records. I’ve learned down the road that Clotilde and Marguerite were in the same ancestral line, albeit born over 100 years apart.
That short descriptor, buttressed by research by my cousin, Remi, in Montreal, leads to some very interesting observations.
Marguerite and her husband were in their 20s; unbeknownst to them they were boots on the ground building a great city. Being young was an asset, not a liability. The concept of being a foreigner, or owning a place, was probably foreign to them.
Marguerites husband apparently died at about 40 of some unknown cause. Young age didn’t inoculate from death. They had four children, three died as teenagers or less. Marguerite apparently lived to over 90, and died in St. Louis, by then a major city. Somebody thought she was notable, thus the portrait below.
Marguerite Blondeau Guion (undated but before 1832 in St. Louis MO)
They left Illinois in 1764, shortly after the British took control of eastern North America after defeating the French at Quebec. Across the Mississippi was then Spanish. The Declaration of Independence by the upstarts in the 13 colonies, 1775, was a dozen years in the future.
A quick check shows that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were young people, the youngest 26, and many in their 30s.
Of course, there are many additional questions. In those times and until relatively recent history, Marguerites last name would have been Guion; she would have scant legal rights regardless of the country. There was lots of work to be done, and doubtless Marguerite did some of the work in the same ways it is done now, one action at a time.
Then, as now, the future was in the hands of the young.
A young woman, probably younger than Margeurite, shared an insight with me recently that bears repeating. She had just had a birthday, and the place where she worked, my favorite coffee shop, had brief bio sheets of each worker, composed by the individual.
She asked me to look at hers, and I did. She pointed out one particular phrase on the sheet, one likely familiar to all of us: “Don’t Quit”. She had modified it by deleting four of the letters, which then made the advise “Do It”. Made sense to her, and to me.
I had earlier noted something else put on the community blackboard at the store by, it turned out, the manager, whose daughter is a freshman in college this. It, too, was simple: “You matter.”
“Do it. You matter.”
COMMENTS (more below):
from Jeff: Nice post….I wonder what our relatively young Founders (relative in the sense that avg life expectancy in 1776 America was about 30, though that was mainly due to child mortality, if you got past your teenage years likely lived into your 50s or 60s…still 30 somethings in 1776 are like 55+ somethings today) would like of our geriatric leadership now?
from SAK: What a varied & colourful family history you have there Mr Bernard. I hope someone will write the extended version! & you sent a link to Krugman’s piece on immigration.
As it happens a group decided to read American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (“Runaway bestseller”) & we had a chat about it.
It’s the story of a family decimated by gang violence in Mexico. The mother & son survive & are joined by a group of people from various Central American states who are also on the run or have been deported from the US. They all make their way to el norte. It’s no picnic. Some don’t make it.
Of course there are some bad apples but there is also the kindness of strangers. ICE features as well as immigration officers in Mexico & the US. Horrific. Even when some finally arrive they still have to worry about deportation though they have family in the US & violence awaits if deported.
While discussing the book a question came up: why do some people behave as badly as they do & is evil part of human nature? History seems to indicate that it is. Rousseau vs Hobbes etc.
A happy wedding, hope the newly weds will have a peaceful prosperous future ahead.
POSTNOTE April 1, 2026: The wedding was very nice, in a venue overlooking the Missouri River at the town of Hermann MO (map: Hermann MO), a very nice county seat – and tourist – town. I did my brief toast, imperfectly, about Marguerite, of one of my ancestral families, described as the first [non-native] woman to arrive at what was to become St. Louis in 1764. [here is cousin Remi’s genealogical detail: Blondeau Marguerite]
I was struck by the fact that Marguerite was in her mid-20s and a young mother when she crossed the Mississippi in 1764 – how similar to anyone who’s ever been in their 20s, regardless of generation – parents, grandparents on and on. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she was truly a pioneer – first woman in a later to be big city. The newlyweds we were celebrating are ‘in the club’!
This morning, in the real world, is the Supreme Court hearing on the issue of birthright citizenship. It is reported that the President of the United States was in the gallery for the hearing, first time this has happened. The news will be filled with details. [April 2, 2026: Heather Cox Richardson writes about the April 1, 2026, Supreme Court hearing on the issue of Birthright Citizenship.]
As it relates to Marguerite, she lived her entire life in what later became the United States. Before 1763, Illinois country and surrounding areas east of the Mississippi was part of French Canada (Quebec); in 1763, it became part of English Canada by virtue of the Treaty of Paris. In 1764, west of the Mississippi was Spanish; thence all of the subsequent changes as the United States was created. Marguerite died as a citizen of the United States, almost certainly never having formally become a citizen. Similar could be said about her children. [In the birthright context, whether native Americans were citizens or not was also a question ‘back in the day’.]
In the end analysis, she and her family didn’t change, nor did the ground on which they lived, only the political control of that ground changed. We’re all in this together, wherever we live or what our nationality might be.)
POSTNOTE April 3, 2026:
We all have our own life stories. Along with birth and death, most of us have relatively long life stories full of surprises, very often resulting in new arrivals in the human family – the next generation, and on and on.
I was at the doorstep of 60 years when Spencer was born (I’m soon 86). I married Barbara in 1963. I was 23 and she was 20.
Dick and Barbara 1963. Family photo. Spencer’s great-great grandparents, Rosa and Ferdinand Busch, are at left. His great-grandparents, Henry and Esther (Busch) Bernard, are next to me. My sisters Mary Ann and Florence, and my brother Frank are at right, along with Barbara’s mother and brother. My brother, John, then 15, and possibly the photographer, was there as well. Mary Ann, Frank and John were at the wedding on Sunday. Flo and her husband were unable to attend.
Grandma and Grandpa, at left in the picture, took virgin land in ND in 1905 as newlyweds age 25 and 21. They raised 9 children on the farm, where they lived their entire lives. Mom and Dad started their careers as school teachers, raising five children (four of whom were at the wedding on Sunday).
Behind all such photos there are stories. One of mine was in a family history I did 44 years ago: “We were to be married on June 8, 1963. All during May I was in Washington state on maneuvers with the Army, and Barb was worried. A letter I wrote her on May 21 recalls a phone call to her on the 20th: “You sounded very depressed last night for some reason – or perhaps worried, or tired. It worries me a little. I hope nothing is going wrong.”
She had good reason to be worried. I was a GI in the Army – I had volunteered for the Draft to get the military commitment out of the way – and had completed just over a year of my two years at the time. At the time of the phone call we were on over a month of military maneuvers in eastern Washington state. We were part of a reactivated Infantry Division being trained for later service in Vietnam (though I doubt any of us knew this at the time). At the same time, six months or so earlier, while I was in the same company, came the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962.
My history continues: “What was going wrong was that Barb was getting worried about lots of wedding arrangements, including the dire prospect that if I didn’t get home at least a week before the wedding we could not get married as we needed to have blood test, etc. beforehand. Everything ultimately turned out beautifully….”
Barbara and my time together was short and not easy given her health – she was awaiting a kidney transplant when she died. Our son, now 62, was 1 1/2. Life went on, and here we are.
All the rest is editorial! Have a great life. It’s your time.