Reminiscing and Reconstructing

 

"Come with me, it will only take a few minutes of your time," beguiled a brief family history on the front page of the Spring 2001 issue of the Besancon Indiana Chronicles, the newsletter of the Besancon Historical Society. That promise led to reminiscing about "a woman like many women you know" from the descendants of the original French settlers of the Besancon community in Allen County, Indiana. 

The writer guides you down a country road, with the church steeple of Saint Louis Catholic Church pointing the way through farmland outside New Haven to a community called Besancon. There, reminiscences about family life center around Gladys Nail Lomont, born in 1903. These tales provide a snapshot of what life was like for children and grandchildren of the immigrant settlers in Indiana from faraway France, the story culminating in Mrs. Lomont's efforts with a committee to register the Besancon community on the National Register of Historic places and reconstruct the identity of a settlement her ancestors once called home through establishment of the Besancon Historical Society.

Reading the historic district application, completed in 1994 and certified in 1995, provides some background on the likely origin of the immigrants peopling the Besancon settlement. Though by 1880, the population of Jefferson Township, where Besancon was located, was seventy percent French (National Register of Historic Places, section 8 page 9), its parish—and now historic district—was later identified as the only remaining one among several French settlements in Indiana still retaining the ambience of a place  "predominantly an agricultural parish whose ancestors came from France." (See section 8, page 9.)

According to researcher Aurele Violette, history professor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, the settlers at Besancon parish originated in eastern France. The professor fingered the specific area of the Franche-Comté, or "free county" of eastern France. An embattled location, this place was occupied throughout history successively by the Gauls, then Germanic tribes, and eventually became the unwilling subject of a tussle between France and Spain. In addition, some of the immigrants to Besancon traveled from French-speaking cantons of Switzerland. But primarily, Dr. Violette noted, "most settlers" had originally belonged to the diocese of Besancon.

That diocese, if you've lost track, would be located at Besançon in France, for which the wandering immigrants made their Indiana settlement the homeland's namesake.

Whether our Theresa Blaising, the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew, came to Indiana with her mother and nine other siblings from that specific region—another author in that same Besancon Indiana Chronicles mentioned immigrants from the neighboring provinces of Alsace and Lorraine—this information helps us understand why anyone migrating from France would decide to choose Indiana. Whether following Catholic priests ousted after the French Revolution due to political pressures, or coming to America during times of our relative economic upturns, the French did heed the news in letters from friends and family who went before them to America, to seek their own betterment in the same path as their fellow countrymen now resident in places like Allen County, Indiana.