by Rich De Shon

Created on: June 15, 2010

I really regret hearing some people say that history is just about “dead people”. Yes, people have lived and people have died, but the real story is in what they did with their lives. We, all of us, are the living monuments to the stories of their hopes, tragedies, trials and triumphs. Were it not for the, sometimes, monumental ordeals that these people went through, we wouldn’t even rate a mention in the ongoing human saga.

Take the story of the people in my family.

Sometime around the year of 1730, a twenty year old young man from Ile de Re, off the coast of La Rochelle, France, landed in what is now Nova Scotia along with a number of French settlers who came to start a new life.

Farming in the cold climate was not easy and those who stayed were just able to coax a subsistence living from the rocky soil. Still, it was their home and they loved it. Acadia, however, soon passed into English hands and life for French Catholics was becoming more and more of a challenge under the rule of the new English governor, Cornwallis. From Halifax, he reached out to demand that the Acadians of Nova Scotia take an unconditional oath of allegiance to the English King. To escape taking this oath Nicolas Joseph Des Champs’ family, and many other Acadian families, migrated to Ile St. Jean, which was then French territory.

By 1755, the new governor, Charles Lawrence was so insistent upon the Acadian’s declaring their unconditional loyalty that a major conflict was in the offing. Upon their refusal to do so, perhaps fearing that the English would outlaw their Catholic faith, all nine thousand Acadians were ordered out of the colony, some to be returned to France, most were dispersed among England’s American colonies. More than 500 were sent to North Carolina. Perhaps it was felt that their religious ardor would be cooled by association with the Protestant Scots-Irish settlers there.

Among those sent to North Carolina were Nicolas Des Champs, his wife Judith and their seven children. No one seems to know why but, upon arrival in Albemarle Sound, only Nicolas and Judith’s second son, Augustin, came ashore at Chowan River. The rest of the family sailed off into the mists of time.

Perhaps the young fifteen year old fell in love at first sight with the English girl he later married, Elizabeth White. In any case, Augustin and Elizabeth were married three years later. Augustin was only eighteen years old at the time.

Augustin and Elizabeth built

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