Description

“The First French settlers in Canada were not people like us,” says Denis Ledoux. “They were different in so many ways that I depicted in Here to Stay / Lives in 17th Century Canada.”

In this ambitious and articulate book, Denis Ledoux reconstructs what life must have been like for the first French pioneers in Canada. Focusing on four settlers, he presents a story that is truly an Everyman and Everywoman tale of crossing an ocean and making a home in a wilderness which they were ill prepared to inhabit.

Nevertheless, the colonists succeeded in making homes as they confronted glacial winters, warfare and indescribable hardships. Over the seventeenth century that is the focus of this book, a civil society was established on the shores of the St. Lawrence and the Great Peace of Montréal was created with the signing by 38 Indigenous nations and the French in 1701.

“To understand who these people were,” says Denis Ledoux, ”I needed to get beyond the facts and the dates that genealogy provided me.”

The result of this research is a book that offers a plethora of relationships and descriptions of what daily life in seventeenth-century Canada must have been like.

What Canadian history scholars have said of Here to Stay.  

“Ledoux comes down from the 10,000-foot view offered by history books to uncover the daily lives of ordinary men and women. If you are ready to trade names and dates for history that comes to life, that immersive experience awaits you in Here to Stay.”

• Dr. Patrick Lacroix, Director, Acadian Archives, University of Maine at Fort Kent.

“Ledoux has done a prodigious amount of historical research… to reconstruct his ancestors’ lives and to convey the precarious nature of life in New France.”

• Dr. Leslie Choquette. Director, the French Institute, Assumption University

“Anyone interested in learning more about what life was like for early settlers in French North America would do well to read Here to Stay/Lives in Seventeenth-Century Canada.”

• Dr. Susan Pinette, Director of Franco-American Programs/University of Maine

Scroll to the top of this page and select the “buy” button. The financial investment is small, and the reading pleasure is great.

Other books in the Franco series

We Were Not Spoiled / A Franco-American Memoir depicts the life of Lucille Verreault Ledoux and documents the Franco-American community in the early and mid part of the twentieth century.
French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood is a memoir that offers a plethora of views into the Franco-American community in mid twentieth century.
A Priest in the Family is a short fiction that portrays the insularity of the Franco community in the late 1930s.