Jean Reid 1689

[cessna152towser]

Fascinating story. Sailing to Canada would be a dangerous voyage in the small ships of three hundred years ago. I have Canadian relations, of Scots ancestry, who married into French Canadian families in the province of Quebec and the French families can trace their ancestry back to arriving in Canada from France, and emigrants did cross the Atlantic from France in those days so no reason why they could not also have sailed from Scotland to Canada. One of the lines goes back to a Jean Charles Vacher, born in Canada in 1686 to Jean Guillaume Vacher who was born in Angers, Anjou, France and his wife Marie Anne Barillet who was born in Paris, France.

[Ruanaidh]

An ancestor of mine was Abraham Martin dit L'Écossais (the Scotsman) who was born in France in 1589. There is an unsubstantiated family story that his father was a Scottish nobleman and a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. When Elizabeth I executed Mary in 1587, the family was forced to flee to France. Abraham arrived in New France about 1620 with his wife and was one of the first colonialists of Nouvelle France. He was also one of the first navigators of the St. Lawrence River and drew up the first navigational charts of the river.

The land owned by Abraham Martin at the top of Cap-Diamants was called the "Plains of Abraham", a name later extended to the adjacent plateau, on which was fought the famous battle between Wolf and Montcalm for the possession of Québec in 1759.