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My "Rose" name can be traced all the way back to Paris France and the church of St. Etienne Du Mont in the Latin Quarter. The "Rose" name might be from Brittany, but it's very possible that it had Jewish roots. The church mentioned above has many references in the stained glass and various statues, to the Merovingian Dynasty, which claimed to be ascendants of Jewish royalty. My ancestor, Charles Rose, came to Quebec in 1661 and married in 1666. He was a farmer and a shoe maker. His card can be found in an index of original settlers of Quebec City. There are many branches to this family, but one ancestor named Hermen Rose moved his family to Ile du Grand Calument in the 1860's, where my family lived until the 1930's. My Great Grandfather Georges Rose was a lumberjack. My father's name is George, and his Great Grandfather's name was Georges as well!
Other very important surnames to my family tree include "Lafrance", "Evraire", "Bates", "Lafleur" and "Tremblay".
My "Evraire" name (on my mother's side) can be traced to Flanders and Belgium. Joseph Evraire's family (1821) was in St. Eustache during the Rebellion of 1837. Though my Evraire family is now in Ottawa Ontario, there are still Evraire families in St. Eustache.
My roots to the name "Tremblay" (on my father's side) are rather interesting. The story passed down to me involved two children - a boy and a girl - who came to Canada from Scotland. Apparently their family name was Grant. Their boat hit rock during a storm on the St. Lawrence River. The children were sent on lifeboats to the shore where French families awaited. These two children were taken in my a family in St. Eustache named Tremblay. So the story goes that the girl died from a broken heart because she could not adapt to life in Quebec and missed Scotland too much.
A story passed down to me talks about one on my Tremblay ancestors, maybe Olive Tremblay, who was a little boy during the Battle for St. Eustache. So the story goes he was hiding in the balconly when the British General John Colborne entered the church while still on horseback. He approached the baptismal font and had his horse drink water from it. The British later destroyed the church, having left the front facade where remnants of the battle can still be seen potmarked in the stone. The British torched St. Eustache which is probably why my Tremblay ancestors moved to Pontiac County and Ile du Grand Calumet.
My "Lafleur" family can be traced to a mysterious man named Eustache Lafleur - an Algonquin native from Otter Lake. Not much is known about this man, other than he carried an alias. His daughter (born in Ontario) married my Great Great Grandfather Alexandre Tremblay (1861), who lived till the age of 106 - from Calumet Island. Eustache himself lived a very long life and can be found in the 1881 census records of Calumet Island.
Another interesting story is that of my "Bates" name (mother's side). My Great Grandfather James Henry Bates was born in Middlesex England in 1891. His mother's name was Catherine Hughes (taken from his death certificate) but the name of his father is still a mystery (though on the death certificate it said James Bates). ames was born an 'illegitimate' child, his father apparently being a British aristocrat or "blue blood". He had an affair with one of his hired maids and got her pregnant. Not wanting this bastard child to have any affiliation with the father, they were sent to a workhouse, where it's possible my great grandfather lived his entire childhood up to the age of 13, when he was sent to Canada in 1906 to work on the farms. There are no records as to which workhouse he was in. On the passenger list for the S.S Tunisian it says "workhouse" next to his name is one of the last names on the list. He survived the typhoid epidemic of 1912. He was also a private during the Great War where he was wounded 3 times.
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