INTRODUCTION

Recently, my son, Richard said to me, ” I have a job for you.” Oh?” I said  “Yes” he continued. “Will you make a list of the ten most important ancestors in our family?”, I had to ponder only a brief bit before responding in the affirmative. And then I complicated things by asking “Important to who and what do you mean by important?” If it was those who seem important to me, that would be quite easy. Then again maybe not. Think about it. How do you decide who in your past influenced you the most to become who you are? Who made you who you are and determined how you conduct yourself to do what is right, to live at peace, with yourself and those you love and all that surround you.

When I asked daughter Gwen who she thought were the ten most important she quickly answered “Well, you are one.” (I think she made that answer just to be kind.) But to become serious, who else would be more important in the life of a child than their father?” I can agree with Gwen, that I had an interesting life, right back into childhood on the farm and the time of struggle through “the dirty thirties” then the wartime with living beside the Brada Airport and watching those young pilots in training. Then from early ‘teens, I was the main “farmer” and then I became a schoolteacher, through no first choice of my own. And finally spending so many years with learning to appreciate the history of people, along with events and preservation of historic resources of our country and tried to improve the system to do a better job of all those things it was established to do. I hope that some people will think some of that was important. And of course, if I hadn’t spent my retirement researching family history all of what follows would be unknown to us.

 In my case, after including myself, the next most important person, would be my wife Dorothy and then my children and siblings but then they are not ancestors and that is where this question started. So back to the past. I have found hundreds of ancestors. Which ones are “important”? I asked everyone in the family I encountered in the next several days, “Who would you pick as your most important or interesting ancestor?” It is interesting to me, the replies I received. Some could not come up with an answer at all, many passed by their closest ancestors: their mother and father. I suppose parents are too close to be thought of as ancestors.  Many, surprisingly, came up with the same answer, “One has to be Judge Barker”.

To answer the “Important to who?” question I thought it would help to find the source of what brought Richard to where he asked in the first place. He said he had heard me say I was running out of things to do on this activity I do with family history. But I felt there was something more behind this than him coming up with the idea to give me something to do. Eventually I found that this started when Richard saw his 13-year-old granddaughter and she had expressed some interest in her ancestry. So I added that criteria, what would be interesting to a 13-year-old girl?.

Next, if I was trying to impress the public with where my family had blood connections to well recognized people, I would include in the list a common ancestor with the British Royal family leading to Prince William, Prince Harry, and other royalty of England and France and the Trudeau ancestor connection from us to Prime Ministers Trudeau of Canada and several other well known people. And then if it was those that I thought were important to overall history it would be a different ten people. Therefore, it was necessary to determine – who was this list for because what was of interest to one person may not be of any importance, nor interest, to anyone else. Well, this could go on for way to long for this blog post so taking these factors; the suggestions of others; the interest of a 13-year-old girl, those who had an impact on history and even a few with some fame, into consideration, I, myself will make the choices of who the Ten Most Important people in the Tatro family history are.

Susan and I agreed that the easiest way to tell anyone who might be interested in these ten is to post them to the ByandAboutHAT.com blog. Starting next week these ten will appear.

Marie Noelle Nathalie Landeau 1638-1706	Octavo Barker (1827-1922)
Jean Baptiste Trudeau (1748-1827)	Francoise Sauvagese, “Madame Dumouchel”
Francois Moyse Tetreau-dit-Ducharme 1814-1893	John Howland (1597-1672)
Maria Josephine Tritsmans (1891-1978)	William Chance Attix (1816-unknown)
Jean Magny (about 1647-about 1703)	Etienne Trudeau (1641-1712)

I have enjoyed putting this list together and hope others will enjoy reading it and will develop a better appreciation of history and what our forefathers did to get each one of us where we are today.