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Artifacts hidden in wall turns up local woman's 366-year family history

Non-fiction writer Candace Savage was fascinated with original homeowner's name. Who names their kid Napoleon?, Faye Blondin says

Newmarket's Faye Blondin took a trip down memory lane to 1650s France, thanks to some artifacts found in a wall during a kitchen renovation by an author curious to know more.

The 1930s-era “treasures” that non-fiction writer Candace Savage found inside her Saskatoon home, which included a plasticine box, a photograph, and some notes written by a child named Ralph Blondin, led to deep research and the discovery of the home’s original owner and builder, Napoleon Sureau dit Blondin, and that family’s history of settling in Western Canada during a time of unrest, bigotry and religious conflict.

“Napoleon was my grandfather!” Blondin said, her voice filled with delight over learning about her family’s history and about a house in Saskatoon and cousins that she had no idea about. “It’s just thrilling to have this history of my dad’s family that I had no idea of. It’s just absolutely wonderful to have it. It’s like she’s given me a gift.”

The book, Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging, takes readers on a journey of “how the introduction of rail travel in Canada in the late 1800s drew 400,000 Quebecois west with the promise of a better life, and charts the tension between the Protestant Orange Order and Catholic French speakers that brought in the KKK, who burned crosses on Catholics’ lawns”, according to a Publishers Weekly review.

“Despite the anti-Catholic sentiment, Napoleon’s fortunes rose in the early 20th century, but following crop failure caused by a severe drought in 1919, he was forced to move his family farther west,” said the reviewer. “When a pair of 21st-century Blondin sisters emerge during her research, the author meets the family, including Napoleon’s son, Chuck, who greets Savage ‘like a long-lost cousin’ and provides much of the family history the book recounts.” 

Blondin flew out to Saskatchewan Oct. 3 for Savage’s book launch and visited the home where the family of her father, Donald Blondin, laid down roots.

“This trip has filled me with reflections of how life must have been for my grandparents and “the house that dad built", that is what they called it,” said Blondin. “I met six cousins and chatted for an afternoon in that house with four of those cousins and our gracious host and author, Candace.”

“She toured us through and I imagined that family, including my dad from the age of two to six, looking out on their new town life,” she said. “Each room is connected to the next in a circle where one never enters a room without being able to get out the other side. It leaves me wondering if grandad built it that way to feel like he was still out in the open prairie with no confined spaces closing his view of the world.  What a lovely little home he built.”

Savage bought the home in 1990 and her daughter’s school project on the history of your house prompted a deed search that turned up the original builder as Napoleon Blondin.

“Candace was fascinated by this guy’s name, like who names their kid Napoleon? It really piqued her curiosity and she started digging and doing research,” Blondin said.

“My family were homesteaders out West, they had to clear the land and put on buildings. They were French, and Catholic,” she said. “They came to the West and by the time they got to Saskatchewan, there was a lot of bigotry. The Orangemen (an Irish Protestant fraternal order) were there, and my grandmother stopped talking French because they were being discriminated against.”

“My cousin in Saskatoon remembers her dad saying that grandma said, ‘No more French in this house’, and she quit talking French, that was it. I never knew my grandmother to speak a word of French, yet that was her language,” Blondin recalls.

Blondin’s dad, Donald, died in 1970 and she lost touch with that side of the family. Last September, one of her cousins reached out to tell her about Savage’s book that was in the works and she and her mother connected with the author to share what they knew about the Blondin’s history.

“In the end, Candace researched the Blondins back to 1650s France, and the whole lineage of my grandfather back to 1653,” Blondin said, adding the family immigrated to Montreal in 1683, before heading out west. 

Blondin and Savage began communicating last fall as the book was nearing completion, sharing family history and photos. 

“I’d lost all of that and now I have it,” Blondin said. “This is so serendipitous, I’ve now met a cousin who lives up north near Barrie. She took me to the location where my grandmother was raised. Now, I have that connection with my grandmother’s family and three new cousins that I’ve met.”

“How wonderful it was to meet these cousins again after so many years and to celebrate the launch of Candace’s book, the book of my family history and the settlement of the west,” she said.


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Kim Champion

About the Author: Kim Champion

Kim Champion is a veteran journalist and editor who covers Newmarket and issues that impact York Region.
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