Wanted: French Immigrants

 

It may come as no surprise to those of us studying our ancestors' immigration to the United States that there were ads beckoning certain ethnic groups to cross the ocean to specific locations. Those businesses behind the organization of huge projects, such as the canals or, later, the railroads, placed ads in foreign newspapers to recruit needed workers. Apparently, we can add French immigrants to that list of wanted settlers.

In the case of the French who settled in Indiana, they may have been influenced by a specific publication circulated in the French regions of Franche-Comté—home of the original Besancon—and Lorraine. Commissioned in 1835 by a group of businessmen in Louisville, Kentucky, the circular was entitled, "Guide for French Emigrants to the States of Kentucky and Indiana," according to an article by historian Ralph Violette in the December 1996 edition of the Besancon Indiana Chronicles.  

Louisville, while in Kentucky rather than Indiana, was a city with a distinctive French ambience in the 1800s, making affinity with France a logical outreach target. Still, the issue of how those French immigrants would actually find their way to that central part of the United States of the mid-1800s was another question.

According to the Violette article, French immigrants could have arrived in Indiana by several possible routes. One suggestion was by way of Stark County, Ohio, which already boasted a known French settlement. Another possibility was directly crossing over the state line from Louisville, Kentucky. This, of course, meant arriving in Louisville most likely by the river route up from New Orleans on the Mississippi, then up the Ohio River.

While the New Orleans route points us to research passenger records specifically from that city, that may not have been the route our Blaising family members chose. Most immigrants to Indiana through New Orleans settled in the southern portions of the state, not in the more northern Allen County, where the Blaising family lived. And yet, the possible ports of entry for those immigrants headed first to Stark County, Ohio, would mean searching passenger records for multiple cities.

The Violette article did emphasize the role of Catholic priests in encouraging French immigration to the Fort Wayne area, but did not leave any details about just how those priests and their traveling companions—or those who followed in their footsteps afterwards—might have gotten there. While I can now envision so many more possibilities for how the Blaising family arrived in Allen County, I am still in as much of a loss as to explain the route as I was at the first—all the more reason to head next to naturalization records.